Fluffy And The Three Stooges

This could be suffering
This could be pleasure
I’m unaware of any difference
My head is aging
My balls are aching
But I’m not looking for deliverance

So far as I know, Fluffy the cat does not have access to the internet.

I’ve posted that I don’t know—don’t really want to know—what Fluffy gets up to at night. [After Dark] It’s a wild world, but I don’t really think she gets out, goes to Kinkos and reads through this blog.

That having been said, I don’t think Fluffy knows I went public with my suspicions she is trying to kill me. [Oh-Oh. If Cats Could Fly... (The Poem)]

And that having been said, I am nonetheless concerned because she seems to be stepping up her attacks.

*

Fluffy is a long-haired cat and one of the consequences of living with a long-haired cat is that you have to vacuum a lot. I mean, a lot.

A couple of weeks ago I grabbed the vacuum from the utility room.

Now, the sound of the vacuum motor scares Fluffy so as soon as she hears the machine rattling as it comes out of the utility room she runs and hides. Fluffy is very good at hiding. Sometimes she hides in one of the bedrooms, sometimes behind the microwave, sometimes behind books or junk on one of the bookshelves. And she often just sort of disappears and then sort of reappears when the vacuuming is done.

So, I grabbed the vacuum from the utility room and by the time I rolled it into the living room and plugged it in, Fluffy was nowhere to be seen. She was hiding.

So, I vacuumed the living room, the hallway, the two south bedrooms and then got to my bedroom.

First I vacuumed the area next to the entertainment center where I exercise in the morning. Then I got to the area around my bed.

As I pushed the roaring vacuum toward my bed, Fluffy came shooting out from under the bed. She had been hiding there.

That’s when I put on a Three Stooges episode all by myself.

As Fluffy ran out from under the bed, I tried to push the vacuum cleaner to the side so that there would be no chance of me hitting Fluffy. At the same time, I tried to move both of my feet out of the way to give Fluffy a clear path to the door. When I put down my right foot, it landed on the cord of the vacuum cleaner that I was trying to push aside. The force of me pushing the vacuum cleaner was just strong enough to knock me off balance when the cord jerked under my foot. But I had already started moving my left foot so there I was tipping over and neither of my feet was firmly on the ground.

So I fell.

But I didn’t fall all the way to the soft—and by then reasonably clean—carpet.

The hard wooden bedpost at the foot of my bed stopped me from falling all the way to the soft carpet.

And the hard wooden bedpost caught my fall by catching my body between my right leg and my left leg.

Yeah. It was just like being a young boy on a bicycle and falling off the seat onto the crossbar.

I know that sound doesn’t carry through outer space, but I strongly suspect that the astronauts on the International Space Station heard me scream.

Fluffy, of course, by that time was gone, hiding somewhere else.

First I laid around for a while on the soft—and reasonably clean—carpet, banging my head against the floor. Then I got up and limped through the rest of my vacuuming routine. Then I took a long shower, alternating the water between very hot and very cold.

By the next morning, when I looked at myself in the mirror, it looked like, you know, Little Einstein was standing next to one of those giant Halloween pumpkins people grow.

I could barely sit down for a few days. It was kind of like trying to balance on a cantaloupe that wasn’t quite directly underneath me, a cantaloupe that was armed with knives and hat pins to stick in me if I put too much weight on it.

Over time, the swelling has gone down. But it hasn’t—still!—gone away completely.

Every time Fluffy looks at me I think she’s snickering.

As if I didn’t have enough going on in my life right now, I have to deal with this going on, you know, down there . . .

In the morning when I weigh myself naked and pass the mirror it looks like, you know, Little Einstein is carrying a briefcase in his right hand and an overnight suitcase in his left.

A few months ago Fluffy had blood work done. The vet told me she was generally healthy and none of the blood tests showed any specific problem. But he warned me that by cat standards Fluffy was very old. She’ll be twenty years old pretty soon. The vet warned me that I should prepare myself for Fluffy being a senior citizen cat. He said that even while there is no specific health issue with her body, the blood tests showed that she is an old cat.

I think Fluffy knows that she’s an old cat.

I think Fluffy is plotting to take me with her, you know, when she goes . . .