I woke to the cheerful sound of the cat howling next to my ear. “Surely she’s not REALLY next to my ear…” I thought. I turned my head, and nearly put my nose in the cat’s mouth, as she let go another “Muuurrrrrrrrrawwww!” about an inch away. This cat does not meow. She has two sounds, a frustrated yawp and an adorable little chirp. This fell somewhere about halfway between, but much lower on the adorableness scale.

I sat up. The cat took off through the house. She had food, she had water, she had no interest in anything I could provide, it merely violated her sense of propriety that I was still asleep. James was up! She was up! The little birds were all up! Why wasn’t I up?!

Like Arthur Dent at the beginning of Hitchhiker, a phrase wandered across my brain looking for something to connect to. Unlike Arthur Dent, the phrase was “Man, I like Vin Diesel.” No clue how that got there. (I do rather like Vin Diesel, mind you, cheesy sci-fi geek that I am, but it’s not something I generally think about unless there’s a movie actually on.)

I had a dream about getting lost in the barrio and finding a little cafe staffed by part-time strippers, which had food all named after Shakespeare’s plays. I was escorted out of the barrio by a sort of modern day Zorro who told me kindly that this was not a good place for nervous looking white chicks, and wound up back at a hotel, where an old boyfriend from over a decade ago yelled at me, and I had to sit through a support group meeting for relatives of people killed in the 9/11 bombing, who thought they were shapeshifters.

All in all, perhaps the cat did me a favor…

Edit: And then I went out to the mailbox and there was a nice little royalty check there. So that made everything better.

Leave a Reply