I had a random thought this morning: my cat is kind of an asshole. Here he is:
Yes, I know this is a bad picture to reinforce my cat as an asshole. Stay with me here.
Tara and I have had a cat for just over a full year now. Harold, our resident feline, has gotten quite used to his routine. The routine of a cat, which includes (but is not limited to) tapping on our door at 5:30AM every morning until we feed him, whining incessantly after his breakfast like we didn't actually feed him, sleeping for the majority of the day, semi-stealthily swiping at our food while we're cooking dinner, and staying up all night deciding whether or not to knock things off of the walls and shelves. Occasionally he'll do extra things, like chew on a cord or a vegetable that I used to be able to leave out because I forgot those days were over. Extra things like lay on the keyboard of this computer, right now as I'm trying to type on it. Oh, look at that, he just messed up the brightness and I have to restart my fucking laptop.You know, cat stuff. It's a busy schedule and I don't know how he fits it all in.
I feel like a lot of people have this kind of issue with their own cats. Cats seem to give a lot less of a damn in general about what you want them to do. Cats don't do a number of things dogs do. Petting a dog is a lot easier to keep going. Dogs love that attention. You try petting a cat for more than 2 minutes straight? The vast majority of them get a bit sick of it, as I imagine I would in their position. You can play all sorts of things with dogs, like fetch. Your cat, though? They'll look at you like you're an asshole if you throw their toy more than once, and good luck getting them to bring it back to you. Some cats like to follow around a laser pointer, and that can be fun for a while. I just feel like there's a disdainful look that follows, like they have to remember each time that it wasn't some pest to capture, it was literally just you, messing with them deliberately. Cats are not quite as prone to training and obedience as a dog might be, and that's fine. Not many people take their cats out for a walk. I say not many, because this is definitely another point of contention on the internet, as seen here: Is it weird to walk your cat?
Cats don't really do things like rollover, or speak, or play dead. Or rather, they do every one of those things, but not once when you actually ask them to. It's always at the most inopportune time that your cat probably wants to bring you something you are trying to throw away, or lays down in the middle of something you had arranged just the way you were hoping to keep it, or tries to have a conversation with you at the best possible time of day, 2:37AM on a Tuesday morning. Honestly, there was only one expectation I had from my cat, other than using his litter box correctly (which he's done) and the occasional kitty snuggles (which we're working on still).
The only thing I hoped to get from having a cat was to never have to worry about mice in our apartment. That's it. It seemed like a completely reasonable request to me. So, low and behold, one day last year I was working from home at my previous job, and I was actually on the phone with Tara when I see something out of the corner of my eye creep out from behind the TV stand, near the living room window. And I look over, and it's a mouse. Very small, with relatively large ears, moving somewhat cautiously across the carpet toward the couches. And it goes under the very couch that Harold is laying across, not asleep but very relaxed, almost bored looking. And I watched him as he saw the mouse go under the couch, and then he just put his head back down and went back to sleep.
I just sat there staring at the cat for a minute or two, incredulous. I mean, YOU HAD ONE JOB. And you didn't even try to chase the mouse? You didn't even create the idea in the mouse's head that "maybe I shouldn't go near the cat that's right there, because that might end well"! And look, I'm not saying I thought it was going to be exactly like the Tom and Jerry cartoons, but I also expected there to be some sort of tension, something to watch here. I didn't think my cat was going to look at the mouse and be like, "Oh, that's just Marvin, he's fine. We've worked it out, there's no reason to worry about him or his friends." I was so disappointed that I had to get glue traps to get the mouse, who did kind of look like a Marvin to me.
It was a moment that reaffirmed what I already should have known but forgot that I knew: Life is not a god damn movie.
It's not a cartoon, it's not theatrical, it doesn't have to have the three acts and a resolution. There's no comic relief, the bad guy doesn't get his/her comeuppance, the will they-won't they couple doesn't always end up together (or they do, for a while, and then they don't afterward). Shit, sometimes the movie just doesn't end. It just keeps going, which makes it unbearable, even when things are going well. Like, picture your favorite movie, and picture that it was 8 hours long to watch the whole thing. Not as great of a movie anymore, is it? Yeah, thought so.
I watched a lot of cartoons as a kid. Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, PBS, I was all over the board with the stuff coming on TV. And I watched all the movies that were animated too, which probably drove my parents crazy over time because my younger brother and sister in turn also obsessed about anything and everything cartoons for the same years of their lives. And we watched a lot of the movies too. Especially all the classic Disney movies. You remember old school Disney? I'm talking the Lion King, Aladdin, Cinderella, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Little Mermaid. Those movies gave kids watching them a lot back in those days, including an appreciation for breaking into song from conversation. I used to think people actually started singing in life around places like the grocery store and the DMV. I thought that the old grouchy teacher just needed to have her prince charming show up, finally. I legitimately thought when the bad guy fell off of a cliff, he just kept falling forever and we never had to see them smack into the ground (even when I was watching Die Hard, you still never see Hans at the end actually hit the ground. You just hear it.)
Disney gave me unrealistic expectations for the world and everything in it just working out the way it's supposed to. Just in general, happy endings are supposed to happen for everyone good, the bad guys always gets it in the end, the right people all fall in love, the story line gets fully resolved and everyone is satisfied with the end and the lessons learned along the way. So basically, Disney had me walking around completely unprepared for the life on this planet. Disney created this bright-eyed optimistic child that would need to be crushed over and over and over again throughout his adolescence and early adulthood.
For example, I was unprepared for dating. Particularly for the reality that I was not anyone's knight in shining armor. You see, Disney always makes movies about some young hot shot who has everything going for him but has one glaring flaw. Or maybe a bunch of flaws even, but they still have something about them that's so good it redeems all the bad stuff and makes them capable of being great. Aladdin was a diamond in the rough. Simba was a king in the making that had to come back and reclaim his throne. Even Quasimodo had to emerge from the shadows to save Esmeralda and take down Frollo. That's right, I watched Disney movies enough to know all the bad guys by name. Deal with it.
What can I say about myself, though? I was a scrub for a while. I had no money, I had shitty clothes, I lived in a broke ass house downtown, probably drank too much, probably partied too much, I thought I was smarter than I was, like most 20 year olds, and just was not comfortable in my own skin at the time. I was trying really hard to be cool and damn it, that's a bad way to go about being cool. It wasn't just me, though, I had an interesting group around me and had not been exposed to the kind of women I was now trying to woo and, no, you know what, there's no excuses here, it didn't go well and I didn't get to have some chance encounter with a rich oligarch that turned me around. I didn't meet a mute mermaid that had traded in her magical voice for legs just so she could come holler at me. It didn't go like that. It really didn't go anywhere for a while there, but I'll get back to that.
I'll tell you something else that didn't just randomly happen. Jobs. Jobs did not just fall out of the sky in some amazing happenstance. I didn't find my dream job in the wanted section, and they didn't seek me out of some run-in at the local bar where they liked something I said without knowing anything about me. I didn't get the internship where I could show I was the diamond in the rough or some Savant with a heart of gold and all the right ambitions and experiences. I got out of college and was broke. Broke like working at a gas station broke. Broke like taking part in research studies for former athletes so new students can see what a hamstring looks like after several tears over 5 years. Broke like giving blood plasma and then going to the bar next door afterwards with the money earned because you want to economize but also you want to get shitfaced for cheap too. It was not the days of champagne living with Bud light pockets. It was Bud Light living with Natty Ice pockets. I'm glad I could afford pockets.
I'll never forget this one morning in that house, in downtown Madison. It was the morning after one of our more informal get-togethers that involved cheap beer, ganja, loud reggae, 3AM spontaneous concerts among roommates, NFL Blitz on N64, getting neighbors pissed off, someone pissing off of the roof, possibly someone slipping on of the piss and falling off the roof, you know, a normal Thursday kind of night. And I wake up around 7 or so that Friday morning, I can hear the trash getting rumbled around in the alley, which is not far from my window. And it goes for 10 minutes straight before I decide to get out of my bed and figure out what the hell is going on. I'm picturing one of the roommates or one of our close friends has lost something that happens to be valuable. Maybe even something like a lottery ticket or a family heirloom worth millions, who knows? I can dream, right?
No one is awake outside of my room, and no one is moving around in their own rooms. The lights are off, the TV is on but it's just a blue screen which means the video games that were being played ended long ago. The place is a mess, like usual, but nothing suggests that the rustling outside is anyone connected with our household. So now I'm really curious. So I put on my robe and some slippers, being the class act that I am in this hovel with 4 bedrooms and kind of a bathroom, and I walk to the door and I open it, quietly. The rustling through the garbage has not stopped.
I look through the crack of the door, and there's this guy going through our trash in the alley. Quite diligently. And he seems to be looking for aluminum cans in particular, but really he was pulling other things out too, like an empty Tide detergent container and I feel like he snagged a used toothbrush (or whatever looked like a toothbrush).
I mean, the dude didn't look that much different than a regular ass college kid like any of us. He looked a bit older than me, I thought, slightly overweight, had a hoodie and sweats on with the weather being slightly colder than ideal for that attire. He was not necessarily homeless. I mean he could have just been some grad student who had been at the library until 4am, except for what he was doing when he and I met. And again, I'm just waking up, so I still feel like I'm missing something, or I'm not recognizing a longtime friend of one of the roommates or regular visitors, since a ton of people were always coming to that apartment. But no, as I watched for a few more moments, he had been putting all aluminum cans in one bag, and the more random stuff on another side. And he kind of half notices me and doesn't even say anything, doesn't acknowledge that I'm there until I said the only thing I could think to say in that moment, which was,
"Dude...can I help you find something?"
I'm not sure what I was actually offering here. I could tell he was looking for cans, especially when he found a used 18 pack box that was filled with used cans, and he set the whole thing aside with the rest of his discoveries. But I still wasn't in "Get the hell out of here" mode, but more "what is the meaning of this while I stand here in my robe and slippers on a weekday morning with a splitting hangover" mode. Or maybe it was that I thought he had been over previously and was looking for a lost item in the garbage. If my thinking was more in depth, then I forgot that part of it by now.
I'll never forget what he said, once he truly turned and looked back at me, standing there looking at him incredulously.
"Nope, I got everything I need. I've been here before you, and I'll be here after you." Then he turned back around, condensed his collection, and started off down the back of the alley, away from me. He wasn't startled by me, and he didn't seem in any rush to walk off when he was done. And I just sat there until I couldn't see him anymore, kind of just to make sure he'd gone. I was just a bit stunned by what he said.
I didn't know how to reconcile that idea. Everything he needed? Had he figured out something I hadn't? Was I still missing some huge piece of the explanation here? Or was this exactly what I thought I was looking at, and this guy needs me to say something more than what I did? And what was the second part, about him being here before and after I leave? Was he a ghost, was he some sort immortal that subsisted on collected beer cans to get by? And what did his appearance mean? Was this my moment to be a savior? Or rather, was he my savior, coming to show me a better way? Again, I was mostly broke, and though I was working at this time, it was not surprising that I had slept in on a weekday after a late, boozy evening. Should I have offered to take him in and give him some breakfast and hear about his life story? At the very least, I know we had more cans upstairs, it could have been a big haul for him if he needed some help. What could have changed in the world if I had at least gotten to learn his name and where he was from?
Real talk though, he might have stabbed the shit out of me the moment we got any closer. He may have killed me and all of my roommates and used everything in our house to buy and smoke crack. He may have conned us into setting up a Ponzi scheme for him and he got rich and we were still broke as all hell. Or maybe he was alright, but his parents would have turned out to have been evil geniuses that had cursed him and everyone that every tried to help him, and we would get caught up in their scheme as collateral damage. Maybe the CIA and the NSA were both looking for this guy because of some chemical compound he created that will end the need for fossil fuels overnight, and they were watching our house on the off chance that he made contact with us.
But see? That's not how it went, because, again, life is not a god damn movie.
This was not some turning point that made me want to live a better life. It stuck with me for a while, but it's not like I was transformed in that moment. I know for sure we didn't start drinking any less at that house, and I was still a slob for a few more years, even though I soon after met the woman who would eventually become my wife, and she actually would help all of us in that house get our shit moving in the right direction. But this guy, in the morning rummaging in a dumpster? This didn't have the same significance that it might have in something on Netflix.
I never saw the guy again, nor did I hear rumbling down there and think to go look to see if it was him. That apartment building isn't there anymore, so I don't think he's still collecting cans in the same spot. But as I do with so many other things, I keep playing out all the scenarios of who he was and how he must be now. Maybe, just maybe, he was just a guy. Just a man who was down on his luck and was willing to salvage cans and knew where he could get some. And I was a guy who noticed him doing it, who will always wonder if I could have done something more than I did. Because that's the world we actually live in.
Bye now.
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