a good cat is hard to find

what we can learn and unlearn from my cat, Costello, and other thoughts

It was familiar at first: he started to make a “myewww” sound from the base of his throat, springing over my prostrate hips as I lay there on my side. He maneuvered to the headboard and chased his tail on the wooden 2-inch-wide tight-wire above my head, batting down percussive thuds onto the backside of the headboard. Each thwack coming in 3’s or 4’s before he would catch his tail, rotate around, only to lose it again.

My eyes opened briefly to see the dark bedroom. They sleepily closed again as I turned toward the edge of the bed, deciding to get a few more precious minutes of sleep. Shut up, I remember thinking. Just please shut the fuck up.

And my cat, Costello, did, I think, shut the fuck up because I found myself falling back asleep rather quickly. I dreamt of nothing. The darkness of the room brought me down deeper and deeper into that sweet slumber of nothingness.

OW, fuck, fuck, fuck. With my head resting toward the edge of the bed, my warbling, haunted, orange, little shit sprung up once more. On gaining the advantage of the bed, his claw came out in order to clamber up the height, as he always does when climbing anything (including my leg whenever I wear pants) - yet in doing so, one of his claws sunk itself into a small piece of skin in-between my nostrils: it’s that little piece right below the tip of the nose. It wasn’t for a long time. Only the hair of a second. And I knew instantly that Costello felt much remorse because he immediately made himself disappear in the room without a sound.

Now I’m awake, kicking my legs under the covers in a fair bit of pain and a great heaping load of surprise. In the dim room, I look down on the bedsheet below me and see a dark rectangular spot. I feel with my fingers to where the beast punctured me, checking for blood in a panic. I look down at the spot once more, realizing that the spot on the bed, in the darkness of the room, was just my iPhone.

The next fifteen minutes are a bit of a blur. I go to the bathroom and see that I am bleeding but not that much. I worry about having a big scar on my nose so I dig around the medicine cabinet and the hall closet before finding some antibacterial ointment. I lumber into the kitchen and press the coffee pot to begin brewing (usually I have this set automatically but it wasn’t set to start until 5:30am). While feeding two slices of whole grain toast into the toaster for my breakfast, I hear below me a soft, meager, and dreamy “brrrruuuaaaa.”

“You’re a complete ass. A bad boy,” I say to him, his eyes looking up at me wistfully. “brrau,” he says again. He had forgotten everything that transpired. Perhaps it was me who was supposed to apologize to him. Or maybe, as I dabbed a kleenex at the bloody spot on my nose, he was able to forgive himself and move on, I thought.

This is not the first time I’ve seen myself through the perspective of my cat. To the few self-flagellating enough, this is a central theme to a lecture by Derrida - The Animal That Therefore I Am. But I’m not treading down that path, entirely.

Instead, I want to fast-forward a bit into my day as it progressed - and it progressed not-too-notably. What I do remember about it is not some event but a sensation: this hum of disorganization charging through me like an erratic bass line for the remainder of the day.

I don’t have a particular brand of ADD. It’s pretty classic. If something derails me (or insinuates a derailment, or creates a digression, or I am convinced that I’m in a digression), my day takes on a sort of patchwork quality - like a fruit basket hastily put together with the detritus of whatever was left on the factory floor. It may seem like it works and fits together like any other fruit basket, but to someone with a keen eye (usually it’s just me observing myself), it is clear that each part is cobbled together with no pattern or sense.

When a cat punctures your nose before waking up - it sets the tone for the day. I dropped the ointment onto the bathroom floor. I forgot to grab a towel before I got into the shower. I left my phone in the bathroom as I was sitting down for my breakfast. It’s funny to mention all of this trivial shit because I’m sure that I make a handful of these little errors all the time. But on days that start with the sharp claws of digression, I’ll end up carrying that baggage for the rest of the day: disoriented, always-dabbing-at-the-little-cut-on-my-nose, never totally recovering from the morning’s miasma.

Never failing to put any obstacle behind him, Costello simply brauuuu’d a mea culpa toward me and moved on to his next thing: how to get his human to feed him and rub on his little noggin. And this is really what I want to learn and harness and be better at: in moments where we are overwhelmed and derailed by obstacles that are small but oh-so-consuming, how do we let them go and treat ourselves to a little leniency? How do we not let the gathering of obstacles become the bassline on our paths? - It’s what I see as Costello’s most enviable trait. I hope one day I can forgive myself in the ways that my cat forgives himself: almost immediately and with some mercy.