NaNoWriMo - 3

I find short stories much more fun to write than long winded novels. I get too caught up in the world building of a novel and keep trying to jump around to individual character stories, and start to lose focus on the actual storyline I was initially working on.


3- My cat is trying to kill me.

I think my cat is trying to kill me. Not in a cloak and dagger, hired hit-man kind of way, mind you. I just think he intends to push me to my limits by way of sleep deprivation in the hopes that I will die and no longer be able to keep him off the kitchen table, “where the food is”. I doubt he’s been able to devise that without me the food may very well stop appearing on that most lofty of plateaus; cats aren’t very good at syntax after all.

It’s probably why cats can never figure out that the red dot they both fear and lust for comes from a small device in my hand. If they could put two and two together they’d notice I was always pointing at the thing as it darts around the house before impossibly disappearing through the wall but without syntax cats seem to have a very “one minded” way of existing.

Not that I’m knocking thinking that way at all mind you. Having a slightly more advanced frontal lobe and an opposable thumb seems like a nice advantage until you really ask yourself if you have a better life than your cat. There are millionaires sleeping with supermodels that would saw off their own thumbs and lobotomize themselves if they knew with absolute certainty that they could spend their rest of their lives in a state as blissful as the average housecat.

But I digress. My cat is trying to kill me. That one track mind of his seems to coming in real handy when he wants to keep me awake; a quick nudge there, a randomly timed meow near my ear, the old leap onto my chest manoeuvre. You’d think locking him out of the room would fix all of that but you’d be wrong. No he just claws at the bottom of my door incessantly if I do that, leaving bits and pieces of it all over the carpet in the hallway.

I could always go for the nuclear option and kick him out of the house but that only starts the, oh so lovely, crying into the night. Anytime I’ve ever locked him out he has spent the entire evening and early morn exuding what I can only describe as a cacophony of meows from outside my apartment window. No… all kicking him out does is extend the misery to my neighbours whom I can only assume hate my guts by now (who talks to their neighbours in this day and age?).

So here I am, working on an average of about 1 to 2 hours total sleep a night. I don’t think I’ve enter REM sleep once in the past week. I read somewhere that it’s not necessarily dangerous to your health if you don’t get REM sleep but I can’t help thinking I’m missing out on something. I mean there must be SOME reason we all do it in the first place, right?

I wonder if that’s a reasonable line of thinking. If the old, “well everyone’s doing it” line you used to use on your parents has some foothold in evolutionary theory that helps explain our behaviour. I wonder if ALL of our behaviour can be explained with evolutionary theory. That would certainly be one way to put the kibosh on the whole free will thing wouldn’t it?

How would I explain my cat’s behaviour then? Oh right, food. The little bastard wants food… well that and he wants me to watch him eat it. I know, I know. What kind of sick twisted rearing process did it take to condition my cat to only eat when someone is there to pet and encourage him along like some pathetic cheerleader during his meal?

It’s all her fault really. My ex-girlfriend would dote on my cat as the surrogate son we’re all too busy being selfishly young and free to have. That wouldn’t be too much of problem mind you if she was still around to continue the doting. Alas, like all good things it came to an end. She wasn’t getting enough sleep before work (big surprise there) and it began taking its toll on her. She’d come home crankier each week and well before you know it, one fight led to another and it’s all “maybe we’d be better off if we went our separate ways” and “I like you but living together just isn’t working”.

In other words, the cat and all its peculiar proclivities are mine and mine alone to manage. The joke is I love cats. Been a cat person my whole life, would even go so far as to describe myself as something of a stray. I don’t care how much you love something though, lose enough sleep and you’ll leave the love of your life bleeding in a gutter just to get some shuteye. Case in point my ex-girlfriend... she didn’t literally leave me bleeding on the side of the road but the metaphor is apropos; broken bleeding hearts and all that.

It’s not her fault really, it’s just that evolution built in some kind of “get some sleep now or you’ll die” switch into us. I know I’ve felt that way before but thankfully I’ve never had to decide between saving a bleeding loved one or finally getting to bed. Mind you it would make for one hell of a story if I ever did find myself having to make such a momentous choice but I just don’t ever see it happening.

Come to think of it, my ex actually had to make that choice in a way and I can’t really fault her for going the way that she did. I know I’ve missed so much sleep I spend my dreary eyed waking hours looking for ways to break up with myself. So I can’t really fault her for finding the exit door. My apartment is after all a purgatory managed by a slightly overweight tabby with a strange eating disorder.

I wish the damn thing would just learn to eat on its own. I don’t mind feeding him but if I walk away from the bowl he just carries on as if there’s no food to begin with; all poke, prod and meow. I’ve thought about getting rid of him of course. I’ve spent long hours day dreaming of every imaginable way one could get rid of a cat. I’ve pictured the long drive out to a meadow somewhere outside of town; we could have a picnic. I’d stroke his fur into our last meal together before driving off into the sunset leaving him to survive in the woodland to the best of his ability.

I’ve also pictured some of the slightly more urbane ways of getting rid of the bugger. I’ve driven past Chinese restaurants and wondered, “Would they be in the market for a slightly overweight kitty?” It’s an old cliché, a terrible rumour to think that Chinese restaurants cook cats I know but the rumour had to have started for some reason, right? Who am I to throw out decades of slander without at least considering the possibility that the General Tso’s chicken you love so much had four paws and purred like a finely tuned engine every time you rubbed behind its ears.

Alas, for all my imagining the kitty stays. Not because I don’t want him dead or because I think it’s wrong or even unlikely that my Chinese neighbours have been tackling the stray cat problem in our city while turning a small profit (4 dollars for Steamed Chicken and Broccoli? How did you NOT find that on the street?). No the cat stays because it he went then I’d be all alone; just me and my thoughts. As unbearable as this marathon of sleep deprivation has been it’s probably still the upside of 16+ hours a day of self-analysis and criticism. Shit when I think about it the sleep deprivation is probably the only thing keeping me from doing that already.

I’m pushing 30, living in a shitty studio apartment I can only afford to live in because I’m paying for it with student loans that I will in all likelihood never pay back given that we are in the worst job market of our countries history and I’m 3 years into my liberal arts degree. I mean I love school and all but there’s no way anyone is going to tell me time spent answering questions in that little bubble of a world we call academia is ever going to get me ahead in life somehow. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll meet someone who will get me a job someday (which I will in all likelihood hate anyway) but that’s about the most value I can expect to get out of this overpriced, under planned and poorly designed education I’m working on.

It’s not the school faculty’s fault either mind you. The world got up and moved on without them somehow. Society traded in the idea that education was the path to success for sailing the seas of fame in the hopes that you too can be the next no talent, uneducated lout to make it big by being on a reality TV show or something else equally mind numbingly mundane. I read in a news article that “The Situation” made five million dollars last year… that’s a five with six zeros after it for setting new standards in how to be a douche bag on national television.

Whoever is cutting that check is getting ripped off though because I know at least a few hundred guys who would have done that job for a few weeks supply of hair gel and a monthly pass to the tanning salon. I guess in the end my only satisfaction from that whole scenario is imagining the poor schlub in accounting that has to cut the checks for people like that. He’s got an education bought and paid for, pulling in 24k a year while “Snooki” probably makes his annual income in a single public appearance.

Aww who am I kidding, how can I pity that fucker in accounting when I don’t even have a job? I’m legitimately terminally unemployable, mind you. I have a problem with authority figures, I dislike any “structure” (especially the kind that forces me to be places early in the morning) and I haven’t gone more than 72 hours without getting stones in 5 years. So unless I plan on building my own business sometime soon I can forget even so much as getting an internship in the customer service department of some scam company selling shit no one wants so I have to listen to their irate clientele explain to me how it, “looked different on TV”.

But I digress, for now it’s just me and the cat with murderous intent. I don’t know what I’ll do but I’ve got to do something eventually. A few more weeks of this and I’ll kill myself just to spite my creditors and avoid the big letdown after graduation when I get my degree but quickly find out no one cares. You’ve got to have experience to get a job in this market but then again you need a job to get experience. It’s kind of nice how they’ve catch-22’d a whole generation isn’t it? Oh well… perhaps I’ll get a dog...