Year of the Deuce

Posted by John

Ringing in the New Year brings with it some very bizarre traditions, not the least of which is the New Year’s Resolution.

Resolutions are really just benchmarks for guilt and disappointment. You resolve to join a gym then when you go only once you just feel guilt and disappointment every month when you write the check for your membership fees. You resolve to go on a diet then you just feel guilty and disappointed every time you eat a Chipotle burrito. You resolve to get divorced then she takes half your money and you feel guilty and disappointed for being poor and lonely. In this light, the New Year’s Resolution just sounds like a bad idea.

I’m not one to make resolutions but if I were I think I’d resolve to do things worse than the year before so I’m not disappointed if/when I actually do. For instance, I might resolve to drink more and sit around on my ass being lazy. If that’s what ends up happening then I’ll probably have a very relaxing and/or drunk year, absent of any guilt or disappointment, which actually sounds like a really good year. If I fail in my resolution and instead drink less and adopt a more active lifestyle, then at least I’ll feel good about myself and again, no guilt or disappointment. It’s a win-win.

I think my cat is a fan of the New Year’s Resolutions too but he only has one and he just renews it every year – “Make my owner’s lives more miserable than the year before.”

He got off to a glorious start when we returned from our Christmas holiday to find not one but two steaming piles of cat shit on the bathmat. The house has wood floors literally from wall to wall with only a small bathmat in the bathroom and a doormat at the front door. That’s it. He just so happened to drop deuce deuces on one of those small rugs, and the white one at that. Good show old chap. He has a shitting accuracy equivalent to a predator drone in South Waziristan.

He followed that up a few nights later by trying to shit on our comforter right in front of me. I was quick to react though, saving it from any permanent damage. Unfortunately it was at the sacrifice of the first things I could get my hands on – one of my small tool boxes. I was positively seething as I had to crouch behind the sonofabitch and watch him fill up one of my perfectly fine toolboxes with a huge load of shit.

Then last night I came home just in time to find him perched on top of one of our suitcases unloading a massive deposit. The thing is, he absolutely loves that suitcase. We leave it setting out all the time because he loves to play on it, sleep on it, hump his mice on it, you name it. I don’t know if it’s the material of the suitcase he loves so much or the smell something like that picks up from the outside world during its travels. Whatever it is, he loves that thing to death. So why on earth would you shit on your most favorite thing in the world? It’s beyond explanation.

What do you do with a suitcase that has a pile of cat diarrhea on it? Do you clean it up? Put a little Resolve on that? Maybe some club soda? What? I’ll tell you what you do – you take it straight to the dumpster. There is no amount of cleaning that can be performed that will clear my mind of the thought that there was a huge pile of cat shit on my suitcase as I’m wheeling it through the concourse at the airport. It just has to go into the trash.

I want to give the cat the benefit of the doubt that he isn’t just a maniacal little sonofabitch; that he may actually be sick and this is his way of showing it. But he shows absolutely no other signs of illness and appears to strut around the house after one of these episodes like he doesn’t have a care in the world; like he just enjoys shitting on our possessions from time to time. I don’t get it.

After the suitcase performance last night I suppose it was inevitable that he’d try to top himself in some way so it wasn’t surprising to hear him yowling from the living room shortly after, like he was the ringleader of a circus getting everyone fired up for the majesty of what was about to unfold before them. The wife was in the kitchen while I was in the bedroom and neither of us hesitated to jump into action. I immediately went to the litter box, yanked it out of the hall closet and ripped the lid off while the wife scooped him up to throw him inside of it. She didn’t make it. I can tell you now from experience there is nothing more hilarious while simultaneously terrifying than the sight of your wife holding your cat in the air by its front paws while diarrhea is spraying out of it’s ass like a goddamn garden hose onto the floor. Even funnier/more terrifying was the fact that while this was happening the wife was still trying to get the cat to the litter box so when the dust finally settled the scene looked like this: the wife still holding the cat by his front arms, dangling over the litter box, nary a drop of poop left in his body, and a line of cat shit arcing all the way from the living room to the hall closet, stopping 12” shy of the actual litter box. The look on the wife’s face was one of sheer horror; the look on my face was one of absolute disbelief; the look on the cat’s face, still dangling in the air, was one of, “WHAT THE DEUCE JUST HAPPENED!?! One second I’m trying to squeeze out a fart and next thing I know I’m being vaulted through the air like a goddamn feline trapeze artist with shit pouring out of my ass like I’m crop dusting the house with diarrhea! What the hell is going on here???”

The cleanup from such an accident looks a lot like that of the Exxon Valdez oil spill – lots of paper towel pontoons to contain the waste and plenty of Dawn dish soap to clean up the fur of the animals caught in the disaster.

So what do you do with a cat that shits wherever the wind takes him? You call the vet and get a dose of kitty Flagyl, which is basically like a sphincter cork. That’ll show him. I came home from work today to find him positively furious, staring at me with eyes full of rage like he was thinking, “What the fuck did you do with my suitcase? Where is it? Did you throw it away? Huh? Did you?”

I stared back as if to say, “Listen, shithead, you’re the one that crapped all over it; what did you want me to do?”

“What did I want you to do? You’re my goddamn owner; I’m a goddamn cat; you’re supposed to clean up my shit wherever it is and my life is supposed to go on uninterrupted. Oh boy, I’m mad as a hornet right now and I’m going to show you that you have messed with the wrong SOB, muchacho! Watch this; I’m just going to squat down over your favorite shoes right here and just… uhh… squeeze a little bit… errrr… and drop a nice… grrr… steaming,,, ergh… deu-… Hey! What in the hell is going on here?!? Why the fuck can I not take a shit right now??? I used to be able to do this on command. Did you do this to me??? Is this your doing??? Oh, if it is, so help me God, when this wears off I will unleash a fury and vengeance upon this household the likes of which has never been seen! You thought this was going to be the Year of the Tiger? Ha! I scoff at your silly zodiac signs. No, no… heretofore 2010 will be known as the Year of the Deuce! Did you hear me? Year of the Deuce I tell you!!! Hahahahahaha!!!”