I woke at about four o’clock this morning and was at a complete loss to explain the reason for it. I hadn’t had a dream about a bear chasing and eating me, I didn’t have a cramp in my calf strong enough to bend steel, I hadn’t tried to swallow my tongue while snoring. With an hour to go until the alarm clock started having a bleeping fit, I had no idea what had brought me wide-awake … until I heard the sound of a cat moistly cleaning itself. It sounded as if it were inches from my ear.
I sat up in bed. It was inches from my ear! At some time during the night, one of our cats had wormed its way between us and all the way up to a point between our shoulder blades.
Both the cats like to sleep on our bed during the winter months, then go find cooler places to sleep during the warmer seasons. We don’t mind except in a few cases, like when they try to sleep on top of us. That earns either one of them a quick ejection from their comfy spot to the end of the bed or onto the floor. Nobody and nothing gets to sleep on top of me.
And both the cats have tried to mosey on up to the pillow more than once. B thinks that’s kind of cute, but I’m a little funny about having a cat on my pillow. It’s not that I’m worried about them sucking my soul out through my nose. It’s that I don’t want cat hair on my pillow, and keeping cats off it seems to be the easiest and most sure way to guarantee that. Plus, whenever they’re walking on my pillow I’m reminded that, no matter how much time they spend licking their own toes clean, they use the same dainty toes to walk on kitty litter, and that’s something I don’t want to put my head on. Ever.
And I don’t want to wake up at four o’clock in the morning to the sound of a cat licking itself. It’s a great time-saver they’re self-cleaning, and I say this as a guy with enough experience washing dogs that I will pay someone else to do it if I ever have one again. That doesn’t mean I like being in the same room with a cat that’s cleaning itself. It’s such a noisy process. And I don’t want to think about what they’re licking.
So the cat that woke me up this morning – judging from his size and weight, I think it was Bonkers – was rudely grappled and shoved more than halfway down the length of the bed to a less warm spot just behind my knees. And then I rolled myself up in the quilts and tried to go back to sleep, unsuccessfully. Why do we keep cats again?
This Is Drivel 