This One's For Cats

So I've got this old-old online diary. Not to be confused with my, um, new-old online diary. It's not all archived here, because a lot of it was crap on a stick. Sometimes there wasn't even a stick. So basically just a pile of crap.

At one point in the early 2000s I would leap for my memo pad whenever life turned comical, and so we have, ladies and gentlemen, some fairly verbatim conversational gold spattered throughout those archives. Gold, I tell ya. I'm no fiction writer, I can't make this shit up. To wit, I give you "me and my mother on the phone."


All you need to know about this is:

A) I love all animals, even the ones you don't like such as snakes and lizards and froggies, and yes I am serious and yes I could easily cuddle up to a reptile or amphibian and he/she would be my good, true friend. But I really really love cats.

B) So does my mother. Only with her it's dogs.

This was September 23rd, 2001, and I had just asked her to hold on for a minute, then I came back to the phone.

"What'd you do?" she asked.

"Had to give the cat water," I replied.

"Didn't you just give the cat water?" 

"Different cat." 

"Is that the cat that sits in front of the water bowl looking at you until you refresh the water? Who's that, Elvis?"

"No, Elvis is the one that lays down in front of the bowl until you change the water, only if you touch the bowl while he's there, he'll leave. So you have to fill a NEW bowl and then switch it with the bowl he's laying in front of."

"So who'd you just give water to?"

"Donovan."

"Donovan can't drink the same water you just gave Elvis?"

"No, Donovan will only drink from the bathroom sink."

"I thought Casey is the one who drinks from the sink."

"Casey WILL drink from the sink, but that's usually when he's been washing his paws in the water bowl and he realizes he just dirtied it up. But Donovan will ONLY drink from the sink, maybe because he's tired of Casey's feet in his water bowl. Oh wait, he's done-- I have to turn off the faucet."

(pause)

"I'm back," I said.

"You're getting worse than me with my dogs."

Incidentally, the title "This One's For Cats" is a lyric from Irritating Rainbow's 2002 LP called "The Painful Place." Love this band. If you dig the sublime and ridiculous like Twink, Devo, They Might Be Giants and that sort of fun pop, then download some Irritating Rainbow!  This is them, from a later album, which they recorded entirely in a car.