Dear Cat,

You are Bad. You are a Very Bad Bad Cat.

Yes, I know that if I had cleaned the fish bowl a little bit more recently, it wouldn’t have smelled so horridly vile when you knocked it down off of the piano, and maybe if I hadn’t put it up so high to begin with it wouldn’t have made such a mess when it landed, but I am not here to blame myself. I am here to blame you.

Imagine that you have fleas. Imagine that thousands of teeny tiny little fleas are running around all over your skin, and you are trying to pick them out with your teeth one by one. The problem is, every time you think you have one it wriggles out of your grasp and burrows down even deeper into your fur. That was what it was like when I was trying to pick up the jillions of little green fish rocks that spilled out of the bowl. I was down on my hands and knees (my hands and knees!) first scooping, then raking, then tediously picking the fish rocks up one at a time with my face a mere inches away from the nasty pool of fish poo water that was soaking my carpet. And I don’t want you to think that just because I didn’t throw up, it means the smell wasn’t that bad. Believe me, I thought about throwing up. I seriously considered throwing up. But it was only out of pure, unadulterated self-preservation that I decided the only thing that could make it all worse would be to clean up fish poo water, one jillion tiny green rocks, and puke.

The best part of the whole situation was when the carpet cleaner stopped working halfway through the clean-up, so that instead of sucking up all the poo water it basically just spread it around a lot. And you just sat there on the stairs, watching this whole thing like it was some sort of grand show I was putting on for your amusement. I understand that really, you have nothing better to do with your time than plot ways to make me go crazy. This is why you scratched up our leather couch during its first week home, and why you always wait until the exact moment I fall asleep at night to jump on my chest and scare the living crap out of me. Is this like, a birth order thing? The other cat is the older one, the “good” one if you must, so you have decided to be the “bad” one? You’re really doing a great job of fulfilling that role. But even though I know you’re just bored, that doesn’t make it ok. After the humiliation of sifting through poo water to find every last little green rock, my heart feels as sad and vaguely floppy as a fish lying on the carpet, three feet away from its bowl.

I’m hurting inside. And the only thing that can make this better is if you hunt down and eat every spider that scuttles through this house from here on out. So stick close by when I go to the bathroom. They like to surprise me when I’m on the pot and can’t jump up to catch them without peeing all over myself.

Sincerely,

Me