I said to someone recently—I can’t remember who—that I had a corollary to Godwin’s Law. Call it, I dunno, Jer’s Corollary. It is:
As a conversation among any group of writers continues, the likelihood of the topic turning towards cats approaches 100%.
Over the past weekend, I was involved in about half a dozen pet-related conversations, and dogs or other types were mentioned in only one of those. Cats do seem to hold the majority among the writers that I know.
That said, I’m now going to relate a hopefully funny anecdote about one of my cats.
We have two, nearly identical to most viewers, named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Roz and Gil for short. They’re both very peculiar animals, and absolutely huge. Not necessarily fat, as Gil is a coiled spring of anxious muscle, but they’re over 15 pounds each last I checked.
It’s Gil that has become (even more) strongly weird in the past few months. He like—no, demands—to be dripped upon.
The minute you turn off the shower, he races into the bathroom and sits on the rug right outside the tub. You have no choice but to stand over him as you get out. And inevitably you drip upon him. All he does is lay there, fur flinching a bit with each droplet. If you move away, he moves to get beneath you again. We’ve taken to just wringing out our hair and wiping water droplets off us onto him. He luxuriates in it. There is really no question that this is exactly what he wants us to do.
He’s always had this weird fixation with the green towel rug in our bathroom. Whenever he wants to be petted, he will meow at you and lead you to this rug. He flops down heavily and rolls onto his side on it, squirming as if to say, “get busy, pal.” And he purrs so loudly it echoes off the tile and linoleum.
He will sometimes jump up onto the lip of the tub while you shower and give a sharp meow, as if to say “come on, finish up, I want my turn.” He has never mustered up the courage to get into the shower with me, but I always have this feeling that he wishes he could. Better first-hand water than second-hand drippings, I suspect.
Given this odd behavior, I can only assume that my dimwitted cat has concluded through some strange cat-logic that he is not a cat, but is in fact a bathroom rug. We’re thinking of getting him a rubber underside for Christmas to complete the transformation.
