Right now I’m going through one of those rare periods when I just don’t have anyone in particular I can call a real misery in my life. To my ego, I guess this must be a problem, because it seems to be able to find a real issue now with the cat. Yes, sweet little Pumpkin, seen in this photo playing with a decoration from the Xmas tree last December, has become my current bane. How on earth iz zis possiiiible, you ask? Simple. You take a cat which is now sleeping more during the day because it’s hot, and then you try to undertake a rather basic activity like “sleeping” (yes, I know it sounds weird, but I do try to sleep at night), and, voilà, at two-thirty in the morning for the past three days, he thinks it’s time for us to get up.
So he strolls into the bedroom, announcing his royal presence with a series of loud meowls (not the soft gentle kind, but the piercing, “Yo, guys, I’m up! What’s shakin’? kind), and hops onto the bed. Were he to install himself delicately between our legs and doze off again, all would be well. But this is not in his manner. He prefers to purr at the decibel level of an outboard motor (okay, maybe a slight exaggeration, but it seems this way when you’re asleep, or half-asleep now), and nuzzle our faces. Cute, right? When we don’t respond, he swats our noses with his paw. Still cute? We ignore him. He takes things to the next level. He jumps up on my shoulder and sits there perched on my triceps, vibrating my body with his purring. I now take action and return his swatting with a swipe of the hand.
In one quick motion he has landed back on the covers, there to settle in for the rest of the night. Hmm. Wishful thinking. You can sense him now taking stock. He knows he has a choice, he can follow his right-mind and fall asleep, leaving us with still a few hours of restorative sleep. But, no, it is to his evil wrong-mind that he looks for counsel. He jumps down, stalks the space next to the bed, and launches himself onto my tiny bedside table. Aside from the lamp that teeters on its edge, there’s the glass of water to contend with, not to mention pens, telephone, a book, all sorts of fascinating things to stroll on and over and explore in this vast domain of three square feet. This’ll grab his attention, he whispers to himself. And it does. The cat (no longer ‘sweet Pumpkins’) is summarily picked up by the scruff of his neck and deposited on the floor.
After attempting the same manoeuvre three times (this is not an exaggeration), he looks for another plan. The bedroom is obviously the problem, and so he sets about strategizing his escape from this harsh prison. The window is open, he smells the fresh air. But he is not so stupid. Having been taken in by apparently open windows before (yes, he slid down the closed window Garfield-style), he concludes it is wiser to take a more prudent approach. Ah! There is the electric radiator under the window – excellent! He extends his claws and sets them into the pin-point holes of the radiator’s grill, and begins his ascent to freedom. As best I can, I ignore the grating sound of the claws on metal, and wait till the cat reaches the windowsill, knowing quite well what is about to transpire.
“Into the wild blue nightime yonder!” the cat yelps with glee, having scaled the radiator mountain successfully and discovered the window open. And that’s when true despair sets in. The shutter is closed. The meowling is spontaneous, terrifying, … ominous. It presages suicide, or at least severe depression. His – no, MINE!
The cat is grabbed (ever-so-tenderly) and expedited outside the bedroom door, which is then definitively closed. After his failed nocturnal adventures, Pumpkin settles down on his bed in the living room to recover from emotional exhaustion. But several hours later, some totally insane internal alarm clock sets off and at five-thirty (again, every night now for three days) he wakes up and makes his way down the corridor toward the bedroom. Faced with the closed door, the disappointment is palpable, it pervades the air, and without any conscious choice (?), a wailing sound issues from his tiny lungs. The sound is like a flood that knows no obstacle, and soon it is flowing under, around, over and through the heavy wood door that separates the intimate, private (and relatively tiny) space reserved for the cat’s masters from the vast animal-dominated space that is the rest of the house. Again, without any intention of disturbing us (I’m sure), his automatic reaction it to attempt to break down the door, which he does by scratching at it with his claws. That will surely reduce the inch and a half of pine wood to saw-dust, he figures. Logical cat-thinking.
By this time I am not the only one being ever-so-slightly upset by this feline tyrant. Patricia suddenly rises, opens the bedroom door, grabs the cat, makes her way to the front door of the house, unlocks it, and drops the source of noise and scratching and sleeplessness outside. The door is closed, Pat returns to bed. And we try to catch up on a rather poor night’s sleep.
The cat, it has to be said, has won.
Hmm. Now, I might be tempted to think that I was bothered by the cat, but is that truly so? Let’s try to look at this differently… No, let’s not.
The fact of the matter is that I was bothered by the cat, but only because something inside me, no matter how invisible, was actually already slightly unbalanced. All it took was one little innocent kitty-kat to throw me over the edge into frustration and despair. If my mind had been located in that perfect (feline-free!) place of peace and reality, nothing Pumpkin could have done would have upset me. Nothing he did was upsetting me. I was upsetting me, by forgetting to laugh at the whole thing. By thinking something was happening – something was happening outside of me that was unjustly imposing itself on my rest and peacefulness. My peace, again, was being taken away by something that had nothing to do with me (I get off the hook). Of course it’s a lot easier to see all this in the morning, but while it’s happening it’s a little more difficult.
Even more disturbing to me was seeing how I puffed and quietly moaned during the night so that Pat would notice my agitation. I wanted her to see I wasn’t enjoying myself, since I had been suggesting for some time that we train the cat not to come into the bedroom (by keeping the door closed). I knew “I was right” (can’t you just hear the sickly self-righteousness in those words?), and the fact that she got fed up and put the cat out meant I had triumphed. Victory! And always victory means I had managed to prove (yet again) that I was the innocent victim of an unjust and cruel God who had cast me out of his kingdom to suffer at the hands of fools (and cats).
Sheesh!
congratulations, dear Bernard. Now if you will keep the puffing and moaning up, Pat might just take you by the scruff too and cast you out in the dark.
*
Oh my that sounds craazyyly irritating. I had the same experience with a neigbor-teenager whos room was adjacent to mine, justa smile wall between us, and he started to play popmusic about 5 o’clock and had a very LOUD bass which made the wall resonnate. What made it most horrible for me, was that I slept very little bedoe and now I was expecting to be tortured again – and I was – and something in me took it veery personal and wanted to kill the guy.
It took me years to see what I played out there, and to see how frilled my nerves were bc of almost no sleep.
AND I had a good therapist at that time, my Buddhist-psychologist, and I could use that desperation to get in touch with stuff that I had stuffed and minimized. Maybe this disturbance reminds you of something too, as it did me – aside that you obviosly are a victim of a cruel God and a Pumpkin.
Aside from that, I love to read you, bernard. You absolutely should write a book.
shhesh look at that reversed Freudian slip – a smile wall (:
Thanks Bernard, wonderful post. I don´t know if currently there is a worldly cat´s craziness, but my sweet cookie (my cat), did exactly the same for the last few nights. I awoke really tired today, and of course, in that moment she was the guilty one.
The last two paragraphs are really a gem. Thanks for describing so nicely and humorously the whole process of our mind. No doubt our ego is very clever and it deceives us, but now we count with juicy information that restores to our awareness what in reality we are doing, and that`s forgiveness. I loved this: “Victory! And always victory means I had managed to prove (yet again) that I was the innocent victim of an unjust and cruel God who has cast me out of his kingdom to suffer at the hands of fools (cats).”
Lots of hugs and love, Lisi
Great read this morning…I feel your pain and then I too see the sickly manipulation of the ego patting itself on the back when the payoff (self righteousness) presented itself. That took courage to shine a big bright light on. You are fearless Mr. Major. Thank you for sharing. I do have one question:
Where is Athos in the story?
I would like a follow up interview; I suspect the dog might have something to teach us being the quiet observer.
p.s. A big hug to my fellow Villagers…I haven’t had the time to visit lately but I do say my prayers each day to send much love and peace your way.
Bernard, re Annie’s nr.4 re Pumpkin:
could you not just ask her (mentally, I mean – mentally -) why she is doing that right now? and maybe ask Athos if he has a good advise to you? (I mean it)
Athos’ position on Pumpkin: Athos has a rather ambivalent view of this pervasive newcomer to the household. You see, the cat immediately made himself at home chez nous, and now occupies Athos’ blanket whenever he so feels like it. Poor Athos, literally seven times his size, is shoved over when the cat arrives, and has to defend himself from a little too much cat-friendliness at times. Athos typically sleeps on a blanket in the bedroom – that is until the cat strolls in at which point he immediately gets up and lies down on the bare floor. So when Pumpkin got summarily picked up and dumped outside that fateful night, I don’t think he lost a lot of sleep. In fact, if dogs could really smile, I think he was grinning from ear to ear. And Patricia had a good word with the cat in the morning. The next night we didn’t wait to see if he had understood – we just kept the door closed all night. His meowling stopped at one point, as well as the scratching, and he left us in peace till the morning. One small step for master, one huge step for masterkind.