IF MY CAT HAD A DIVERS LICENSE, one glance at her picture and you’d know she’s who she says she is, this 2½-year-old runty female with black hair and yellow eyes. But what would leave unsuspecting cops and clerks and you and me in the dark about her are the things the license omits, the dark compulsive callings, the darker drives, the wholly unexpected lodger found within, kneeling at a fiendish altar. My cat, though I rhythmically feed her, no, glut her to where she pounds herself lazy-eyed, more like strip mining than eating, remains a predator of birds, rodents, and insects, and you don’t need forensics to see that she delights in both the terror and agony of her victims. This I can’t handle. I detest it, and I stand by it being no less detestable simply because her killer instinct is argued by authorities as being so bloody ethology textbook natural. I’m ignoring natural, same as the sow I saw on the Internet that’s raising two Bengal tigers that cuddle up with her in her sty. I’d prefer to be thought of as a visionary in this respect, like Isaiah, as in “and the leopard shall lie down with the kid,” but no one’s buying my biblical status. Rather, I’m considered a cat-bashing, belligerent meanie with a nature problem, one who would usurp the crown of creation and in its stead produce a universe where the puckish approach to any argument is always taken, the upstart, the bad guy. But am I really so out there and unfair? Wasn’t the natural instinct of the shark in Spielberg’s film Jaws also ignored by cheering audiences when it got blown up before it could scarf down yet another cast member; this otherwise poor, maligned carcharodon carcharias that was simply dealt the genetic code of a devour-inator, the same instinct cats are lavishly afforded in their defense? So the shark, purposefully feeding in the wild without alternative food source, and never once engaging in the sadistic feline ritual of toying with its prey, ends up classified as a monster in a horror flick, whereas the pet cat on the dole with its appetites supported by an entire industry, returns home from a killing spree deserving of pampered pardons? I don’t get it, and so I’m holding a space for the new natural where if puss-puss truly wants to be deemed “domesticated” then she takes the evolutionary stairwell a step up towards the penthouse, cuts out the carnage that’s displayed like dim sum where my bare feet walk, and makes do strictly on the board that comes with the room. Hey, I could even suspend judgment on cannibals as being of a different culture, but not if they also avail themselves to Carl’s Jr. And there it is, the complaint for which there’s no department, the campaign that knows no trail, only my amazement as to how I plummeted from neutral observer, meaning polite listener to people stuck in these types of tar pit dilemmas, to actively treading tar in a pit of my own. I can either choose to empower myself by taking fair responsibility for this outcome, or to continue forfeiting even more brain cells blaming life. I choose life...
Posted on: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 18:00:46 +0000