A Real Dog-and-Pony Show

I never really ranked my children, at least not in a manner in which it could be recorded into the public record. Sure, day to day you might make a mental note that one of them exhibited some kind of social utility contra the other two because they, say, emptied the dishwasher without being asked or didn't visually remind you of the uncle who said you should "not be such a bitch" that time he hit you in the face with a baseball when you were eight. In fairness to Uncle Fastball, the expectation on both our parts was that I would be catching the thrown ball, and my comprehensive lack of baseball-catching experience to that point made the outcome more or less inevitable in retrospect, but at that age, all experiences are new and the lack of comparative context makes them all potentially emotionally fraught. So bad luck to you, kid who looks like one of the many dipshit Boomers I'm related to. It's not that I love you any less, it's just that I inherently don't trust you for reasons that pre-date your conception by two full decades. You really should have considered that before you turned out looking like you do.

In the end, of course, you love them all equally. It's just that "equally" doesn't mean "at the same constant rate in the exact same divisible proportion at all times," it's more like "I don't really care for that one much today, but I trust it will balance itself out." This is easier to anticipate once some kind of event is approaching that you can use to validate your affection for any of them in whatever measure, like a parent-teacher conference or a sports-team tryout. Don't jump to conclusions, it's not all "you must achieve in order for me to love you more." Just in the case of the sports-team tryouts: is it a sport I hate? When do the games happen? How far am I going to have to drive to get you to them and what will the parking situation be once I get there? If they come home distraught from being cut from the team, they get a big long hug anyway, sometimes out of comfort, sometimes out of discreet gratitude/relief. Basketball is like four games a week, you guys. Sometimes having lumbering children with below-average depth perception can really pay off.

You don't have to be as careful with pets in this regard. For starters, they generally do not speak English, so you can talk about how much you prefer one over another right in front of them with very little fear of longterm emotional damage. With human kids, just one little slip-up and they will just go on and on and on about it in family therapy, Thanksgiving, at the wedding reception for your third marriage, wherever. Sure, sometimes a pet will shit in your bed, but they take their slights otherwise unremarked-upon to the grave.

I bring this up because a couple of weeks ago I got a cat. There's absolutely nothing wrong with her, very sweet, adorable, playful, fine. It's just... well, the reason I--a heretofore avowed dog person--got a cat was because my oldest son who lived here until the spring of this year had gotten a cat of his own two years ago. And that cat, dang, from the second it showed up, it was like it had always lived here. Hold out a hand on first meeting in order to establish some kind of familiarity and she'd blow right past it and jump in your lap. All corners of the house (even some you forgot were there) explored, every surface jumped upon, every receptacle sat in. A brave, social and sociable creature, in direct defiance to every predetermined notion I had about felines as pets.

I'm not a total idiot, so I didn't think every cat was going to be that easy. But while I could have breakfast with my oldest human child who had moved out with the cat or stay in touch in a myriad of different 21st century ways, his cat, as far as I know, didn't have a cell phone plan or a laptop to get Discord on or anything. So save for a few visits to his place to watch some sporting thing or another, his cat had become definitively His Cat and I found myself in a four bedroom house by myself, missing out.

Selling pets is no longer legal in California, so the Petsmart locally has partnered with a rescue organization* to feature some of their adoptable cats in the store. It's the same place my son got his cat from, but it's not like I was going there for some kind of brand consistency for another cat, I'm not entirely delusional. They're mammals with drives and personalities all their own. We're still decades away from stamping out bespoke cats at a cat factory powered by Windows Copilot or whatever. A Windows cat sounds not great, but as long as Elon Musk doesn't get his hands on it, we'll be ok. It'll keep the number of people murdered by cats down to a minimum at least.

My cat is... well, a typical cat. It doesn't help that I don't really trust things that immediately like me (why yes, I do have a therapist, thank you for asking), so choosing the one in the Petsmart the recoiled at my touch was probably an early indicator of how things would go. Just to be clear: I don't like her less than my son's SuperCat, it's just that up until about an hour ago, she'd never even sat on the same piece of furniture as me, let alone on my lap. Every unexpected sound--including the prodigious bone creaks and pops from my 50-year-old human joints--sends her sprinting. She spent the first two full days voluntarily in a bathtub. This is exactly what it feels like to own a regular cat, entirely vibes-based creatures who decided WAY before they ever met you exactly how they would treat you. Because the vibes are all cat-centric, both projecting and receiving, and all you can do is guess at the right combination of gestures or postures that will convince them they aren't about to be murdered or, worse, picked up. Seriously, she drew blood the first and only time I tried that.

So as vibes go, all of that said, I must be putting out something she's picking up because as I type this (and this is true) she is asleep on the leg rest of the recliner I am occupying while typing this, a new world record for proximity for us. I already feel guilty for the future event where I close this laptop, which she will interpret as a gunshot and go flying across the room. Like I said, the vibes are hers to set. I just buy the kitty litter and deliver the treats and whatever little else I'm allowed. So far it's going exactly to plan, I'm just not sure whose.

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*So you adopt them, but there's an "adoption fee," which I guess goes to offset the costs of running an animal rescue, I get it. But the more desirable kittens were $125 while the adult cats were only $50, so I dunno, at what point something conceptually becomes a sale vs. adoption is I guess a question for the fat cats (ha) up in Sacramento to parse.