Love Hotel

I'm sorry to hear this.

I called my dad today and just found out that my sister's creepy cat (she's got a creepy one and a cute one) died over the weekend.

The vet had shaved the cat, and apparently this was really stressful. The cat was older than the humane society said, and the shaving is said to have induced a stroke.

My sister is pretty broken up about it. For all of the creepiness, the cat was really quite cool.

Bad day for pet-friends. I am hugging you with my brain.

So, you're saying that in some instances, shaving a cat can prove fatal? Good to know.

The vet said the stroke probably would have happened eventually anyway, like within the next six months, but the shaving definately sped it along.

Death by shaving. *shudder*

One of Molly's cats had to be put down a couple of years ago and I told her this story in her comments section that was meant to be kind of funny and hopeful and reassuring and evidently it really wasn't. Other people asked me what I could possibly have been thinking, telling her a story like that at a such a time. Molly deleted the comment and sent me a scathing e-mail. It was one of those days.

After that, I promised myself I wouldn't respond to pet-death stories anymore.

Molly may have a different relationship to death than I do. She definitely has a different relationship to you than I do. So tell me stories Norton. All your little funny nasty-wasty stories. :-)

Well. It wasn't so much a "hey, this cat died in a shaving accident" kind of story; I think it went "hey, this cat who looked a lot like yours had the same illness and it got part of its head blown off by someone doing something stupid and careless and then it ran around the yard screaming in pain and terror until it died."

My relationship with death is fine, thanks, but I'm a little less facile with the animal-cruelty stories. You might want to nail down the definition of "funny nasty-wasty" unless you're cool with reading about some actual and deliberate nasty-wasty happening to sick animals, too.

I in no way suggested your relationship with death was not fine. Simply that it may be different than mine. May.

And yes I do find some animal cruelty stories funny and am cool with them. But I can't know unless I hear the story.

I also like rotten.com and stuff like that. I've got a little creepy violence porn in my soul.

Actually the more I think about it... My relationship to death is decidedly not fine. Too much of it all the time. Makes on a little um... numb.

I think the "porn" part of the violence porn implies some kind of consent. Not like people consent to having violent things happen to them, of course -- but for me, comedy (especially black comedy) requires... some understanding of the situation, maybe? Does that make sense? I can't go to that place when it's children or animals being hurt, because they lack any awareness of what's happening to them or why.

And, of course, a certain aesthetic sensibility is needed to elevate an event to comedy or porn. Shaving = death? Incongruous. Funny. Shooting in the head = death? More obvious. Not quite so literary. Accidentally shot in the head by the cat you shaved? Back to funny again. That CSI show (Safety Cowboy calls it "swab porn") is fascinating; a malingering death from cancer, not so much.

So now that I've gone completely pedantic on your ass and gotten that out of my system... I wanted to say I'm sorry about your dog friend. Poor old dog.

I tell my cats, "I'm sure going to miss you when you're dead," because unless something completely rotten happens to me, they're going first, and I need some time to get used to it. (I'm glad they don't understand English, though.)

Pendantic, Perhaps. Interesting, Definitely. I like the idea of getting shot in the head by the cat you just shaved. Hehehehe.

Okay, so, for one thing, it's not an animal cruelty story. Animal cruelty is where the animal is suffering and this one definitely wasn't because, except for a few odd scraps of schmutz, its brain was completely vaporized by the bullet. I mean, the way Kris always told me this story his head was just emptied out like an ashtray.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The short version of the story is that many years ago my friend Kris's cat had feline leukemia. At the time Kris lived in Arizona and she was very poor and the vet wanted $25 to put the cat to sleep. Which was roughly the equivalent of $150 in today's money. So Kris decided to do the deed herself.

There's a little backstory about why she had a gun, which adds flavor, but this is the short version.

Kris took her cat, Blackberry, out into the desert with a tin of chicken livers. Held Blackberry in her lap and petted him and fed him chicken livers until he was purring and happy and she tucked the barrel of her .357 up under his chin and continued to pet him—then she moved her hand clear and blew the top of his head completely off.

So the thing about it—and evidently I didn't make this clear to Molly in my last telling—is that cats are a little bit like chickens. They don't need their brains in order to run around. So Blackberry got this kind of surprised look, which Kris interpreted at the time as a look of accusation and betrayal, and then started running in circles making the horrifying "siren of the damned" noise that only a damaged cat can make and which most people have had the misfortune to experience at one point or another. And he's just running in circles making this horrifying yowling screech.

Kris, meanwhile, has completely lost her shit. All she wants is for the noise to *stop*. So she jumps to her feet, spreads her legs, takes a two-handed shooting stance and starts methodically pumping rounds, one after another, into the—essentially—animate corpse of her cat.

So you have to take a minute and step back to appreciate the imagery here: it's 1972. A young hippie girl, about 5'2", with little round glasses and long dark braids, wearing a one of those hippie mumus and a pair of rainbow tights with sandals, is standing in the desert holding a stainless steel Colt Python with a 6" barrel, crying and sobbing and taking methodical aimed shots at this black cat that's running in circles and making the Cat Noise. And the cat's just running on electricity at this point so the shots aren't really doing anything, except that every time she hits it the body jigs up in the air like it's just been thwacked with a golf club, lands, and keeps going. And we're talking about a .357 magnum here, so the reports are like the beat of a kettle drum.

BOOM—reeaawwwwwwwwwwww—BOOM—reeaaaowwwwwwwww—BOOM…

And kind of on and on like that until the cat finally just runs out of gas and collapses and poor Kris is standing there clicking away on empty cylinders like the victim de jour in a zombie move.

And that's the story. Which, even though I've been hearing it and telling it my whole life, still never fails to bring a smile to my face on a dark day.

Oh My GOD. Joshua, again, I think I've said this about eight times this year. I want to have ten thousand of your babies. Aaaaahhhh!

A note from a random electron in the big cloud...

Its 6:00am in the morning. You have me crying from the laughter. This story is not funny. Its beyond funny.

On my darkest day, I would enjoy this one...