“First you take a cat treat, then the cat treat takes a cat treat, then the cat treat takes you.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Our Deano has a monkey on his back.
Here he is at 5:40 in the morning, gazing plaintively at me and trying to summon me to the cabinet where the cat treats reside. Behind him, on the other side of the kitchen island, Slane eats both bowls of cat food I've just scooped, including the one meant for Dean. There was a time when Dean would jostle a little to defend his smelly wet cat food, but no more. There is only one priority in his life, and it's cat treats.
This all started innocently enough. We wanted to have something special for the two of them, as a reward or an enticement when we needed them to come inside or allow us to put them in the cat carrier. For Slane the experience of munching on a couple cat treats seemed pleasurable, but he wouldn't go out of his way for it. Dean, on the other hand, became a cat obsessed, feverishly wolfing down the treats that I scattered on the floor, and not looking up from his task until the last one was gone.
Now it's all he lives for. Every time I come within twenty feet of the kitchen he races past me and takes his place below the treat cabinet. If I've not made it down there in a while, he comes into the home office and cries. He seems to be wasting away, living only on the couple handfuls of Temptations or Friskies Party Mix I drop on the floor each day. Once an overly friendly cat, now he sulks around the house moodily, resentful that his enabler, me, seems to be rationing the one thing that brings some strange joy into his life. I used to be the Cat Daddy; now I'm just his pusher.
One wonders what goes on in that walnut-sized brain of his. Is it possible for a cat to have an addictive personality? Like I said, Slane could take the treats or leave them. They seem to have swallowed poor Deano, displacing every activity that doesn't involve begging for cat treats.
I thought about taking him to AA, but he's not an alcoholic. And he's a cat.
What to do about this? I mean, if I totally cut him off he'll think he's being punished somehow. But continuing to toss him treats seems only to make it worse. Maybe I need to sit down and have a serious talk with Dean, man-to-cat, and let him know P and I love him and want him to get better. Of course, as soon as I finish my intervention speech he'll run to the cabinet, clueless, and sit there whining until I drop a couple kibbles on the floor.
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It's the third of July, when in years past I would post my favorite Faulkner quote that transports the reader to the place in Pennsylvania where one can still stand at what's considered the high water mark of the Confederacy. Political winds change, however, and posting that quote on social media would mark me as something I'm not, so I'll do it here instead:
“It's all now you see. Yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world's roaring rim.”
From Faulkner's hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, the University Greys, comprised entirely of young men who'd been students at Ole Miss, suffered 100% casualties that day while advancing further than any other unit during Pickett's Charge. Now it all seems a waste, or even a crime.