There is a homeless cat that shares time between our and our neighbor’s patio. He seems friendly and loves belly rubs, but since the outskirts of Laura passed over our home this morning, he’s been sitting at our back door, staring in for hours.

There may not be any Micmac burial grounds around here (I don’t think), but that’s some Pet Sematary-looking shit right there.

Should I call animal control? The police? A priest?

If you don’t hear from me next week, please call the authorities and tell them that the suspect is an adult male (?) black cat with a wounded left eye.

In case you’re wondering why I still consider myself a reluctant cat owner:

Fucking cat.

To most, a cat owner is often stereotyped as being asocial or a solitudinarian. To these shallow cretins, people with cats are as pestiferous as the agoraphobic, online gamers, and those with an addiction to porn so severe it makes God ashamed for inventing sex organs. But 87% of you who are reading this know the truth: cat owners can be just as social as any average person; therefore, they bear just as much responsibility for preventing the spread of COVID-19 through social distancing as you.

But cat owners have an advantage, a built in defense against socialization that 74.6% of households lack: the combination of a lap and an entitled cat.

Because of my cavus feet, I sat in a narrow waiting room of my ortho’s office this morning. I became anxious for the nurse to announce my name because the space embodied frowzy. The fluorescents in the ceiling cast a sickly, greenish tint onto the cheap, beadboard-panel walls. The dull, laminate floor tiles conveyed a history of abuse, marred by years of scuffs and scratches. The worn and frayed cushioning of the benches recalled a color palette from the Brady-era, indicating decades of negligence in upgrading the lobby furniture. There’s no telling how many stranger farts those passé cushions absorbed over the decades, and this troubled me.

To distract my attention, I pondered a recently-viewed episode of a documentary series about how our brain paints a picture of reality based on learned sensory clues such as shadows, light, and depth. What I found fascinating, though, is how the mind can be tricked into overlooking something right before your eyes until it is pointed out to you such as a spelling error or a stain or a series of poor life choices that result in a lengthy era of multiple cat adoptions.

His foster name was Joshua. Not very clever, but I suppose if you were tasked with naming half a dozen new cats a day like the good people at Memphis Pets Alive, your well of memorable names would run dry, too. If it were up to me, I’d open a random page of the dictionary, close my eyes, and point. Some potential adopters may disapprove, but let’s be honest; you’d never forget a name like Froth, Pusillanimity, Nudie, or Hepaticocholangiogastrostomy.