9/11

This morning about a quarter after six I pissed on the cat.

If you and your prostate are not the comrades in arms you once were, sleeping through till a quarter after six is a kind of victory, except that if you have, in fact, been forced to ease your bladder in the middle of the night, then how warm and cozy the bed is at six, your body devoid of urgency.

You eye the clock, burrow further into the blankets and fall back into glorious REM sleep and a fine dream that coming so close to actually getting up, you will remember and can tell your wife about in an amusing way unless it has something to do with her sister, the blonde one.

But stumbling out of bed at a quarter after six more or less ruins the few remaining shreds of night because you wake up -- if not all the way up, high enough.

Damn you, prostate, with your thickened walls.

Back to the cat. The cat seems to like its water recently freshened. My wife changes the water in the cat bowl, and it seems to like that. The flushing of the toilet seems to produce similar satisfaction, a moment of pleasure you could plug into a Coors commercial. So when I visit the toilet, the cat loiters on the low ledge nearby, loiters and watches and awaits the flush and the swirl until this morning at a quarter after six when it walked prematurely across the bowl -- strolled, you might say; it's an anxious cat but not this morning -- and thus was pissed upon, which it accepted with the equanimity of a drunken Irishman walking home through a fine Spring rain.

It didn't care, it didn't care at all. What happened to fastidious? Can a cat have a midlife crisis? Later my wife noticed the cat was damp and asked if it was raining....

I was so sleepy I had more or less left things to sort themselves out.

We freshened the cat up with a damp washcloth. It's okay now. I mean actually, it's was never not okay, apparently.

I'm sure there's a moral to this -- A watched cat is never spoiled? You can lead a cat to water but you can't make it think? -- but I can't come up with a really good one. Don't ask the cat. It's licking itself in a rude way.