Posted by on Jun 7, 2016 | 6 comments

Now you know where I live, here is a Day in the Life of Me:

I sleep on my down comforter with mama, specifically, because she knows that sleeping with cats is tantamount to slipping into that hot pool they used to have in La La Land, or snuggling with her honey (papa) when it’s really cold outside or tucking her feet up on the couch with a really beautiful fire slowly burning away the winter blues and a nice glass of red vino, but of course, there is another reason.

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Neither one of them is here so I just took over, haha.

Papa does NOT want me on him when he sleeps although on mama is fine. I mean mama is fine for ME to sleep on. They had a kitty once called Stella and she wasn’t yet…er…adjusted, and she was howling all over the place and driving everyone nuts, especially papa. They tried everything and this s pretty gross—patting her in the right places so she’d think she was getting laid, but did they have any miniscule idea then about where kitties feel good or even if they do (and would it do any good anyway??) and she kept mewling and howling and going nuts, leaping and jumping all over the furniture and on papa’s head when he slept and finally.

Scenario:

Middle of the night. Bed on a second floor with low open balcony to living room. Papa sound asleep and Stella taking a grand leap onto papa’s unsuspecting head and whammo. Papa reacted and pushed to get her off and over the balcony she went with a shriek (because cats can really shriek when pushed from high places into the void), but absolutely no harm done. She landed—guess what—on all fours, in a catllike manner and saved the rep of cats everywhere. Mama was just a little upset because in those days, papa really did not completely understand the world of kitties, but he was in a new love, and he knew mama adored us kitties more than anything (except him), and so he tolerated a little kitty hanky-panky every now and then. But tossing Stella off the balcony was the last toss he made.

On that very day, they went straight to the vet and rearranged her interior and she became a docile but playful, conniving yet thoughtful, rambunctious but cuddly pet. I’m not sure I like the word ‘pet’ either. It sort of implies a no-brained, lazy ball of fur that’s there only to caress and rub on without a thought of interaction, enlightening conversation or comparing of attitudes toward the world at large. And what the heck does that mean? At large? The world IS large, it’s not AT large. I’ve tried, without success, to eliminate all clichés from my ever-growing language, but isn’t a cliché a cliché because it’s such an appropriate way of saying something and lots of people agreed that it worked for them and so why not for others and voilá: a cliché was born. That means just about everything you’d want it to mean in French: fix something and voilá; find something lost and voilá; see someone across a crowded room who is looking for you and yell ‘voilá‘ and they come running. It’s a sort of ‘eureka’ without having really found much of anything like the math guy, but it works. So I’m not altogether prejudiced against the cliché, it’s just that I like to enliven my lingo and stretch my brain cells by looking for another path to travel.

Besides, kitties are the worst cliches around.

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I mean, is this a claw-cleaning-cliché or what?