The whole of this saga has been cataloged in my journal. I suppose that’s another something I could collect into a singular story. It seems to be odd though to do that because often the writing that happened around the cat stories was of interest or connection. It’s hard to say what’s right or wrong or how we edit these things. Needless to say though, we have a story that has genuinely come to a conclusion and I guess it’s my job to say that conclusion here.
To sum things up, The decision was made to stop feeding the cats. It was the only decision I could bring myself to make. To continue feeding them was to continue some kind of hell that I could not even look at. Perhaps I should have agreed to continue feeding the cats. For their sake, it would have been the decision that they had been lobbying for with great sincerity. Every interaction between us had to do with that food.
The problem was that the cats were not adapting to real life. Even though they had never spent a day of their lives inside a house, they were not hunting. They would eat mice if they presented themselves. And I’m sure their mother brought them one or two. But they never got the idea straight in their head that they had to go look for these things. That meant hunting. But they were not learning to hunt. They learned to wait for kibble.
And then there was my personal problem in that I was both allergic to cat fur and I am extremely susceptible to all of the pandemic diseases that they pick up on there bodies. Literally, their presence in my life was bringing on bouts of horrible diarrhea. I would be doing fine and then suddenly there would be a cat and I would begin shitting. I promise you, this is not the sort of thing that builds a nostalgic bond with another creature. This is the sort of thing that gets you thinking how to get them as far away as possible.
The issue was four kittens. Reggie Jackson, the orange cat but I found living in my woodshed last year and started giving kibble to managed to fulfill her role in life. Of the four kittens, you could see the hierarchy of them based upon how much energy they had to work with. The smallest was obviously not enough for life on Earth. The second weakest was an amazing schemer. She decided that her destiny was living inside. It was obvious and logical that she was no longer built for hunting and simply needed to come inside. On my side of the argument, I was not going to have any cats living in my house. I told some people about her. I tried to find someone who wanted an indoor cat. Nobody agreed and then one day she simply stopped moving. She had found a place to sleep in the wood and just disappeared from life.
The third was beige. That was the color and that was the name. She was pretty strong. Not quite as strong as her big brother tiger. Tiger was definitely number one. But she was alive enough to play and run and jump in the grass. But what she really was was a clever little girl. She noticed immediately the hierarchy of the family. The most important one was Mama. Everybody had to come to Mama for everything. She wanted to be mama. But for now, she agreed to learn everything she could from Mama.
I got to observe this first hand. It came in the form of play. On the day when the cats were finally big enough to start bouncing around in the grass, the mother had her first opportunity to stalk her child. She happily lay low in the grass and waited for the young cat to come near. And then she pounced and happily grabbed her daughter and showed her how to choke the life out of something. There was no intent to kill. She was happily doing this activity as a way of teaching. And it worked. Beige learned.
Soon she was jumping on her brother and sister. She’s the one who taught them how to play. And they were good at it. They were cats. All they did was ambush each other all day. I was in love with this. Even though I didn’t want to be close to the cats, this was life taking place before my eyes. This is nature and instinct right there and it was playing out like a Shakespeare in the park.
The problem was that the program had a flaw. It seems that Mama was not teaching the children to hunt. Mama really didn’t want the children around. They were a nuisance and a drag. Mama had things to do. Mama was a nervous woman. Mama came from families where they smoked a lot of crack or drank themselves stupid everyday. Mama had learned to be one of the people who inhabited this village and just like all of the women, she was in a horrible mood and didn’t want to be bothered by anybody. Unfortunate if we are thinking about nature taking place.
The eventual lesson was that we are cats and this is how we stay in shape but basically we hang around and wait for the kibble. And this is where the problem started. I saw this. I saw the moment they turned the corner. Something was wrong and suddenly I was agreeing to something I did not want. I did not want these cats living in my house or around my house. I wanted them to find their independence so I could let them go with good belief that they might live. If I sound like I’m trying to be a good father, it’s something like that. And it’s that I cannot stand being in close proximity to them.
Things got sketchy for a while. My anger was building. I started to cut back on the food. I stopped putting it in a bowl and just started broadcasting it somewhere. And then I moved it around. And then there was this remarkable day.
I was debating shutting off the food. It was the only thing I could think of. I could yell and scream as much as I wanted and I could make a show as big as the moon. I was either feeding them or I was not and I think the moment I stop, we’re going to have some reactions and hopefully, they start looking for food elsewhere.
It was ironic. I thought I had ordered some cat food from the delivery service. I ran out. It was actually running out that really got me thinking about not feeding them anymore. When the food ended, all I needed to do was not by anymore. If I have none, there is none. Bureaucratic mistake and we all have to live with it. But I thought I had ordered two bags and when they didn’t come, it was because I had actually forgot to order them. It was my mistake and now there really was no food. I could have stopped right there and called it divine will. This is the way things work out and this is the timing that says we did the right thing.
But of course I didn’t do that and I ordered two more bags. I ordered the bags when I was alone. When I was alone, all I wanted was for the world to be happy. What I wanted was to be able to put some extra food out for Independent cats. I figured it was a tiny little something along the way. If you are an American, it’s a fast food stop. A guilty pleasure. And again, maybe this would be a cleverness on my part because if I am on the hunting trail for independent cats to visit, they can come into my house and hunt it for mice. They would probably find it a good hunt. That’s all I wanted. Not a live in. Just a good hunter using my interior as a killing grounds. That’s all I ever wanted from the cat.
This all came to a head on Sunday. My ex partner came for a visit. It was a food moment. I was having food delusions. I was thinking I wanted to eat something so badly. I told this to my ex partner and we agreed to do a one-time special deal. And no, not particularly vegan. Yes! I broke vegan because there was something inside me, something in my DNA that needed something.
So now there was a woman at the house and the gate was open. My ex partner told me that one of the cats was there. At first is she thought it was Tiger but then she agreed it was Reggie Jackson. I reiterated that we don’t feed the cats anymore. She told me that Reggie found the bag with food and tapped it with her paw telling my ex partner that she knew we had some food. My ex partner asked me if maybe she should give her a little. My answer was that we don’t feed them anymore.
It’s an interesting thing to talk about how much communication I have had with these cats. It is obvious when they put on a show that they want something. They are very good at charades. They are very good at letting me know exactly what they want. And of course they tell you that they’re going to do what they’re going to do and they’re not really interested in any negative answers. They are carnivores. They are the only important thing. Nothing else matters but what they want and they don’t care who they bother to get it.
But when thinking about what happened next, perhaps Reggie was not begging for herself. In my heart, I know her as a selfish beast. I don’t believe in benevolence. But if it was a part of her life, it might have been but she was begging for some food for her child. It seems that with a woman visiting and cooking and all the excitement of maybe something nice happening from my house for a change, beige stealthily went into the house found a place to hide. She was extremely thin, she had not eaten anything in days. She never wants tried to hunt and nobody brought her any mice. She was going to come in the house. It was her destiny and today was the day.
Nobody went into the pantry on Sunday. There was a lot of food. It was a really nice party and we even had some champagne. I felt interesting eating this food. It was enough to make me see what people would consider strength from eating animals for protein. I also felt something like a clarity of vision. But it was not clarity of mind. In fact it was the diminishment of mind. I was just left rather physical and all of the usual synaptic activity I normally experience wasn’t there. I was just existing in a sense of beingness. I was literally a lump of meat staring at the ceiling. Every other moment spent in this weird life of mine at least was attached to something in my imagination. Suddenly there was no imagination. I was just lying on my pallet bed.
The next day however I was done. I started thinking about whether I wanted to go this direction as my normal diet. My ex partner definitely wanted this. I started thinking it was a mistake. Even the amount of sodium I was taking in was ridiculous for my life. I didn’t need this. I didn’t need it and I didn’t want it. And worse, it was playing with my digestive system horribly.
I went into the pantry to get more toilet paper and that’s when I saw beige. She had found a place to hide but had not figured that there wouldn’t be any food in there. If we had had a miscommunication with her mother, there’s nothing that could have been done about it. I don’t know what I would have done if I had seen her alive but emaciated like that. We could have fed her with anything we were eating. It was fish and dairy. She could have eaten everything we were eating that day. But that never happened.
I picked her up and brought my digging tool with me and found a place under the cherry plum tree where she and her brother used to love to hang out in the summer time. I left out that they were waiting for food. I don’t want to be cruel about this. Later on in the day, her mother came by screaming that she wanted something. Maybe she wanted to find out if her daughter was okay. I screamed at her. I told her to get the hell out. Why couldn’t she have taught that girl to hunt? Why couldn’t she have taken that girl with her and taught her to hunt?
Am I excessively cruel? Maybe I am. But then I remember talking to people who worked with the cows at the factory. I don’t want this factory to be but it does exist. And they told me about using a 2×4 to bash the cows to make them agree to let their children go. You might think this horribly inhumane but the point is it’s a meat factory, not kindergarten or a family home. We do have these traits that we share. We can communicate. But it’s all in the perception of what something is and what our relationship to it is supposed to be.
If we had found her alive in the pantry in the middle of a party, I imagine my ex partner would have brought her in. And I would have screamed about getting the cat out of the house but she wouldn’t have listened to me. She would have mathered it and fed the cat a lot. It would have just been something that happened at a party just like things happen at parties all the time.
Now there are no cats hanging around. I don’t have any looking for space in my wood pile next to the door. I don’t have any of them using my front step for a toilet. There’s no one scratching it my front door to be let in. There’s no one screaming at night begging for attention. There are some mice in the house. I do everything I can not to give them anything to eat but we definitely have mice. I think it’s cheaper to fight the mice myself.
6:00 p.m. Wednesday evening update
There was a nuance to this story. It had to do with the illness growing too great and I lost my ability to walk to the back side of my property. This walk was inherent in my ability to say I am capable of managing my business. This was the first time since I’ve been here that I couldn’t. And this is what changed everything.
While it is absolutely true that what I wanted was for the kittens to become as independent as possible as quickly as possible. The issue of whether or not they were hunting seemed to be more and more theoretical than necessary. They began playing normally. They stalked each other as a way of working out and getting stronger. And they were supposed to be getting stronger and stronger. But there was a problem. Where was the problem?
I think it was the bloody diet. It was that stupid food I was giving them. If I’m looking back now, the answer to the question would have been simply to buy some cat food or some meat and give them a little bit to work on. I should have done this but I didn’t want to do this because I really didn’t want meat on my property. And when you doing this very seriously, when you really believe that this is important, I didn’t really see any way to do this other than to buy this packaged food. Bad choice? Absolutely. It’s drugs. It’s garbage. It’s like candy.
But then again, I wasn’t taking over the job of caring and feeding The kittens. I just gave some kibble to their mom to be nice or thinking that I was being nice. That was all I was thinking was that I could put a little addition on the girls normal diet and she might think favorably of hunting my house from time to time. That was all.
But all she wanted was the food. There was nothing else in her day that made any sense or was any easier. Everything but my food was misery and my food was completely satisfying.
She wanted to come in the house and I did not want her in the house. We argued. I didn’t even know if she was a she or he. But then I found out. I knew that she had males following her so I genuinely assumed I saw her correctly as a her. But then there she was giving birth under my window. I wasn’t even that fast to respond. I was already into the phase of please leave me alone. It was only when there were those tiny little cries that I thought to take a look.
I could have said wow. That’s interesting. I could have let her do what she does however she does it without any interference whatsoever. Just a bowl of food and she has to take care of her kittens based on her own knowledge. And then if I was really thinking, I saw that she was hunting. She would leave the kids alone everyday to go find something. That wasn’t my food that was live food. She was a good cat. She understood how to be. Even here, if I had stopped feeding them, she would have started bringing mice back to the children. If we had done this, the children would have known milk and mice as food and everything would have been just fine. All of you playing that they did would make sense and eventually they would begin their careers as tunnel vision murderers.
But it was worse when I tried feeding them in the front of my house. They were living in the wood pile and bringing their disease with them. I was becoming sicker by the day. And they were pissing and shitting in the dirt right under my steps. All of this waiting for my goddamn food.
I quit feeding them in front of the house. I quit feeding them in a bowl. I started broadcasting their food but still they didn’t get it. I cut the amount of food I fed them and they just got skinnier. I caught a mouse and gave it to the boy and eating live food had him on fire. But only come into the house and live with me. He could catch my mice if I wanted. He could catch my mice but not any other mice. He just wanted to live with me and I did not want any cats in my goddamn house. I physically could not tolerate their presence anymore.
Well we know what happened in this story and so what is done is done. And today I had a ton of garbage. It goes along with my current state of health. We are a bit away from the completely natural diet I was hoping for. There is a lot of packaging and extra packaging necessary to get everything done. And then there is how to deal with the problems I am currently facing. So amongst the garbage were the last two bags of kibble. The amount of rat shit underneath those bags was incredible. All the animals were living off those bags of kitty kibble. And according to my ex partner, when Reggie came to the door to visit or to beg us to feed her last daughter or herself, she tapped on the bag telling us that she knew it was there. She probably knew from the mouse piss and shit.
The shit has been vacuumed up and the bags were placed in the back of the garbage truck along with several out there bags of unfortunately naturally undigestible things. I have a lot of things for the land fill unfortunately. It needed to happen. Sorry.
But my ex partner is upset. She was really hoping we were not going to continue this vegan nonsense. She was hoping that we were going to become meat eaters and that I would even agree to drink some champagne with her. I understand. Her days of doing me are long gone and the price to pay for being me is now too much for her to pay. It is what happens when people agree that they’re just bloody alcoholics looking for a break at the end of the day. They don’t really want to think more about things than that. I understand this. I really understand this. The local oligarch one time told me his disdain for people like this who only wanted enough money in their pocket to get drunk and eat some sausage at the end of the day. He was talking about the uneducated working class at the time. Now it’s everybody everywhere.
I’m happier vegan. All the pluses and minuses. I don’t like meat food. Yeah, I took a day and I had a cheat meal. It was a party that went on long enough to teach me what I needed to know. I don’t want this stuff in my life and I don’t like what it does to me when it’s in my body.
And I guess that means, if my hearing is correct, I have managed to lock up all of the food tightly and there is nothing for the mice to eat right now and that’s why I’m so quiet in my house. I’m so I’m sorry to cat lovers but game, set and match to human beings who understand that we are vegans. Carnivores are something else entirely.
