If Only He Could Get Rid of Hairballs Like This...

    Sure, I could have gotten a dog.  I probably would have had a lot of fun with a normal labrador or border collie.  But why?  Why should a guy like me have normal pets in his world? 

    As it stands, I have one cat that is completely deaf, somewhat blind, and when she chases squirrels across the yard, her back-end moves a little faster than her front-end.  This usually ends with her winding up in a twisted, furry wreck of seriously confused cat. 

    As for this other semi-cat, he seems to be more dog than cat.  He'll eat anything that hits the floor --scraps of food, raw potatoes, fingers, anything.  I say "Go out now?"  And he throws himself at the door, chattering like mad and wagging his tail to the point of knocking me off my feet.  Everyday, I give him a nice, big bowl of fresh water, and he turns his nose up at it and runs straight to the bathroom to drink from the "eternal fountain." 

    Even worse, now that spring has finally sprung here in Wisconsin, Dog-Cat practically wets himself with the notion of going outside.  And, once he's released into the world, he bounds down the front steps, leaps into the air, extends his claws and pastes himself to the streetside telephone-pole like some sort of bizarre, gravity-defying, velcro pet. 

    Then, after having spent his energy on that little display of animal acrobatics, he then climbs up and sleeps on top of my Jeep.  Not bad, right?  Wrong.

     Cat-Dog has a tendency of sleeping flat on his back with all four legs sticking up in the air.  So, now it looks like I hit a cat while driving, and I am too stupid to realize that rather than roll under the car, the unfortunate beast had rolled up and came to rest on the roof where kitty-rigormortis had set in.

    I should have gotten a fish.  A normal fish.  Heck!  The salesman at the pet shop could even tell me, "This here fish once shot a man a Reno, just to watch him die," and it might still bring a much-needed sense of normalcy to my world.