Of cats and drugs.
A Morris Buckwheat update.
Morris chillin’
Just the other day, I stumbled upon a Note from
saying:The more time I spend on social media, the more I realize how many cranky people hang out on social media. I'm looking for cheerful people. Positive vibes. Uplifting ideas and inspiring insights. I know it's out there. It must be. If that's you, please drop me a line so I can follow your feed. Thank you!
To which I replied:
Andy! you will only get joy, butterflies and bunny rabbits from me. ;)
And he was as kind and trustful as to not just follow me but to blindly subscribe to my newsletter, “Mirth as Medicine”. So now I am under pressure to deliver. If you don't know who Andy Adams is, take a look at his publication on photography; it's pretty cool. Here is an example.
The main problem here is that, as much as I am all about joy, I have no clue about butterflies and bunny rabbits. However, since I am a resourceful person, I have decided to write about cats and drugs instead.
Some of you know a bit about our cat, Morris Buckwheat. He is a very independent cat who disapproves of everything and largely ignores family life. He has a very nice hammock where he sleeps most of his naps. This hammock is in the living room. When we sit in the living room all together to watch a film, he climbs down and continues his nap in the laundry room. Yeah, that’s Morris.
Over Christmas, we did not want to put him through a 7-hour trip (two flights and one 3-hour layover in Zurich) since we were visiting family abroad. We left him with some very kind friends who had taken him in once before and gotten along just fine. Our friends have one child (8 years old), and they are Swedish. We have three children (8, 6 and 3) and are an Italian-Spanish family. So, I am assuming the comparison of the decibel levels in their house pales next to ours. Morris stayed with them for 10 days, and after that, when we picked him up, C and I noticed he was displaying some aggressive behaviour we had not seen before. He would randomly walk up to one of us and scratch our foot, or he scratched P’s face when P bent over to pat him on the head. My diagnosis is that the poor beast wanted to go back to our friend’s house where no one shouts, no one drags him by the tail, and life is stress-free.
Right before school started after the Christmas break, I stayed home alone with the three children for a couple of days, and C went to work. Gruelling days they were, but I am proud of the amount of stuff we did. I resisted the temptation of parking them in front of some toys and took them ice-skating and sledging, taking advantage of the little bit it had snowed and that it was -10°C. Nothing says “love” like freezing your butt for the sake of your offspring’s enjoyment.
By the end of day two, when C came home from work, my motherly love reserves were running low. To top it off, in our sledging adventures, I had pulled a neck muscle, and the pain was creeping up to my head. As far as pain goes, I hate headaches more than anything in the world because I cannot ignore them by concentrating on something else. You throw nausea into the mix, and you get a faithful picture of my idea of purgatory. So I did what any self-respecting citizen would do and took all the pills I could get my hands on. This time, it was just regular ibuprofen and some valium I had left over from when my mum visited and strained her back. Nothing says “healthy household” like having left-over benzodiazepines here and there.
After swallowing my pills, I left the children with C and went to the pet shop to buy stuff Morris needed. At this point, I should also mention that I am kind of a lightweight. It just takes two beers for me to hit “the zone”. You know, that place where “bombs are falling outside, but it’s really cosy in here”. My point is that I had not calculated that taking a valium would have me in “the zone” in a record time. Going shopping in “the zone” was not a good move. Or maybe it was a grand move? I went to get some lining bags for Morris’s sandbox, and I came back with 100€ worth of stuff. As I walked down the aisles of the pet shop, I kept thinking, “What a treasure trove!”. Surely I had never been here before? Everything there was shiny, beautiful and purposeful. Like a clockwork mouse to sharpen Morris’ hunting skills, which, by the way, lasted two minutes in the hands of my children. Or another one of those scratching poles for him to ignore because the sofa is the thing he likes to scratch. Or another leash because maybe this is the leash that he would like to go on a walk with (let’s not comment on my children’s determination to walk the cat). Or a polyester play tunnel for him to walk in and out because there are not enough corners in my small apartment. Nothing says “home decor” like a hideous green and blue polyester tube lying in the middle of the hallway. It is the type of embellishment everyone will admire when they walk into our humble abode while murmuring, “I like what you’ve done with the place”. E got stuck inside it the first day because my three-year-old’s spirit animal is a rabbit.
Among the many treasures, I also bought a calming collar. According to the instructions, it’s this plastic loop you put around the cat’s neck, adjust it to fit, and it diffuses valerian around your pet’s aura for six weeks. Soothing, huh? In my valium trance, I knew this was exactly what Morris needed.
I came home, and C looked at me and my bags, puzzled.
“What did you buy?”
“Just you wait till you see this,” I said with a broad smile. “You are going to think I am a genius”.
I put the collar on Morris, and the rest is history. That cat was high for the next three days. Or should I say low if the effect was “mellow and relaxed”? He spent the three days lying down, just changing positions from time to time on the couch, possibly to avoid a pressure sore. I was tempted to give him a heparin injection to avoid blood clots. E even snogged him, and he just stood there and took it like a champ. He curled his tail around my leg a couple of times (an unequivocal sign of true love among cats, according to the Encyclopedia of Sign Language for Cats), and he hung around the same room we were all in. He eventually came out of the stupor, but the instructions do say the effects will last up to 6 weeks, so he is still bordering “the zone”.
In any case, I immediately bought two more collars to have a reserve. I put them next to the spare benzos we have at home. It seems like the appropriate storage place. Nothing says “organisation” like keeping all your narcotics in the same place.
C was so impressed with the results he asked me if they sold these collars for humans. I told him he would look weird walking into his office with one of those.
“No, babe.” He clarified, “I meant it for our children”.
This is so funny, Ana, within the pain and frustration, all highly relatable! Our late cat transformed from timid and aloof into a loving, socialising dog-wannabe once we changed her food to a Calm kibble version. Our current kitten goes mushy and confident when we use a pheromone spray or catnip toy, so no longer can I be cynical about the benefits of some drugs...!
lolol