My Pain Is So Significant

If you know me IRL, it’s no secret that I don’t like cats. I’m allergic to them, but real talk, I think they’re gross and a little scary.

I know that I’m in the minority, especially in Brooklyn and especially, especially on the internet.  I do understand and respect that people love their cats the way I love dogs.  I do not wish any harm to come to any cat anywhere, and I do not in any way endeavour to change peoples minds about their beloved pets, but having recently been linked to this video

by @Annsganistan, I felt it was time to share my feelinz.

This lady has a far more severe phobia than I do. Dislike and disgust are more my bag than irrational terror. That said, that cat they show first at :09 and then throughout the video? Fucking scary. Yeah. And when she freaks out about the cat paw at 1:58, I said out loud “Girl, I KNOW.” I hate that paw-under-the-door thing so much!

Aside from my allergies, I’m pretty much fine with them being around I just don’t LIKE them. Full disclosure: when I was about seven years old, I went with my mom to the home of a friend of hers, a woman whose family owned two cats.  While my mom and this lady were hanging out, I was looking at the books on their bookshelves. The two cats were around me, sniffing a new person as they would, when suddenly, incited by absolutely NOTHING, they EACH opened their mouths and clamped on to one of my forearms dragging their teeth along my tender, delicate child-flesh leaving twin red parallel lines. Both of them. At the same time.

They drew no blood, just simultaneously scraaaaaaaped the hell out of my skin and then wandered off, probably to pee in a box that would just sit there all day.  

Did this one experience ruin me for cats forever? Probably, but, hey.  There are a whole host of other reasons to seriously dislike cats and find them distasteful and even offensive. Here:

The noises they make. For real real, I think their mewling and hissing is as unappealing a sound that a pet could make,  and their cries when they are in heat are literally the most repellent sounds I have ever had the misfortune to hear in the small yard behind my apartment building.

They smell bad. FACT. If you have a cat, I can tell the minute I walk into your house. the odor leaves no mystery to, to say nothing of the shedding. 

The shedding. “Nice dress.” “Oh thanks, too bad it’s covered with cat hair, haha!”  Yeah hahahahaha that’s disgusting. So if someone goes home with you, they are basically signing themselves up for a night rolling around in that.

The licking. People are always like “cats are clean because they bathe themselves”. I fail to see what’s clean about licking one’s own filth and then swallowing it along with a mass of hair, creating a disgusting ball that will inevitably be hacked up onto the carpet just as soon as you have company.  Also their tongue feels like wet sandpaper. CUTE!

Litterbox. They go to the bathroom inside, in a box. Seriously?  Sure, dogs might have the occasional accident every now and then, but generally speaking outside is where it  all goes down. Having a cat essentially means having an animal outhouse inside your apartment. 

They really don’t give a shit.  Like at all.  You could die and they would just snack on your corpse.  Maybe I’m a glutton for attention, but if I want something surly and disinterested who stalks about the house in a state of perpetual ennui and is only nice to me when it wants something, I’ll have children. Heyo!

Their food. Look, smell, packaging: all bad. Also, what’s with those commercials trying to get us to believe that chopped up God know’s what belongs in a cut crystal dish for our precious diva of a housepet? Fuck you, those commercials. Is that cat King Mongkut of Siam or Gwyneth Paltrow?  No? Then it doesn’t really need it’s feast to be fancy.

Illness.  Let me first say, at the risk of sounding insensitive, that I, too have lost a pet (Oliver, you are missed) and know it to be devastating. That being said, I have noticed that rather then simply getting sick and dying, cats all seem to get really gross-sick, a sort of sickness requiring ointments and needles and catheters and all manner of other easily soiled instruments. Unpleasant.

Pouncing.  While I respect, admire and even envy the feline’s ability to soundlessly jump upon it’s prey, leap across the room or ascend nearly effortlessly to the top of a tall bookshelf, I find it unnerving, even horrifying to see it at one moment across the room and then find it only seconds later perched on the back of the sofa right behind my head. 

Retractable claws. I still cant quite believe these.  They seem like something out of a fucking Rob Zombie horror movie, but, no, it’s just one more terrifying feature of this four-legged demon pet. 

While I defy you, defy you, to contradict me on any of these counts, I concede that cat lovers are possessed of something stronger than cynicism: real love. They are simply people whose affection and devotion is such that these issues I have here named are a barely noticeable blip on the radar screen of loving their animals. As in the profoundly offensive lesbian-conversion film Chasing Amy, what’s-her-name-with-the-voice teachers old lantern-jawed Affleck that love means putting an individual ahead of their actions; not counting the things ABOUT someone’s past behavior against who they ARE. Cat-owners and beer-bloated idiots from Red Bank teach us that whether the object of one’s affection is getting double teamed by high-school jocks, or shitting in a box like it owns the place, when it comes to true love, there are no deal breakers.