Future Cat
I just got a new cat. By new, I mean a very young cat. By very young cat, I mean a kitten. I look upon this new cat as I would my future son. I have very high expectations of this cat, and I can only hope my future son lives up to my expectations of my new cat.
Looking over my past notes (during a cat-deprived period of my life), I am forced to reevaluate my cat standards in this new city-dwelling era of my life, based on the best cat I’ve ever owned…
“I want to get a Maine Coon cat and raise it from infancy to be the coolest, calmest cat imaginable. It will be modeled after Max, the old Russian Blue. Max had lived a tough 9 years before she came into my possession. If you tried to pet her she would arch her back submissively almost all the way to the ground as if expecting the violent downward slash of a broomstick (as if all cat abuse played out in the classic Disney manner, with a nondescript hand reaching out of a doorway, shooing the always unwanted feline nuisance away with the business end of a broom). Max always did it with a smile and would not run away as if scared. It was simply in the process of shedding its expectations from its last, more abusive owner/cat relationship. I could tell it had faith in humanity and eventually learned that it, because of the deprivation of affection or its own sole desires, desperately craved physical attention. If you scratched its chin, belly, or the base of its back, it visibly melted with waves of orgasmic purring. Throw in a soft comforter that it could kneed and exaltations of “good kitty,” and it was in heaven, losing all lower brain functions and essentially becoming a malleable ball of living fur and bone that you could do whatever you wanted with. Simply seeing someone like me who it knew I loved, put it in a good mood and that is the kind of cat I’d like to mold once again: a cat that will put its trust in me, follow me on my treks into the woods, and back and defend me from other cats, to the death like it knows it must. My future cat, in its peaceful old age, will have years of violent experience, numerous scars, and will have suffered and triumphed over many broken bones, quite possibly even the loss of one eye. A cat with laser-like focus that will stalk and hunt without mercy and without a wavering thought-the tunnel-vision of murder. A cat succumbing in every way to its evil tendencies.”
I remember vividly that cat, Max, a unique being among many species, eternally happy till its last stench-of-death-filled breath in my hallway one winter evening. Now that I look down at this kitten sleepily drooping off my thigh, whom I named Loki last night, I think the shades of Max will emerge again. I maintain that cats are evil, always, and are always in a state of preparing for “going for the throat when you least expect it,” but I see myself ushering in a new era of Catual enjoyment, albeit in a city setting. He won’t be wandering the neighborhoods marking his territory with blood-soaked warnings to potential feline foes, like the NH-dwelling me once fantasized about, but ideally, we’ll forge an apartment-based, Cato-Closeauesque relationship, packing visceral excitement into a 25 x 20 ft space. Loki, you are no longer my future cat, but my present kitty.
