11.13.1994

When Senor Random moved into B Street with us he brought his two cats, Emur and Shamus. We didn’t have any problem at all with pets and it was cool having some cats around instead of possums. Shamus is real fucked up though. He got hit by a car about two years ago and was lucky to have lived. The car that hit him crushed his skull somewhat so his fangs are always popped out of his mouth. He lost an eye too. It’s weird because the eye socket is all grown in with fur and you can put your finger in there and wiggle it around. Senor Random demonstrated this for me one night. Gave me the creeps. Shamus didn’t seem to freak out like I would have expected. Anyway since Shamus is screwed up he doesn’t clean himself much and frequently appears from the basement covered in dust and cobwebs. I think he likes to run around in the foundation under the house and he comes back upstairs all filthified. When I pet him drool leaks out of his mouth off his two fangs. He can’t help it and it’s kinda nasty. I don’t pet him much.

A couple of times when I’ve come home late at night Shamus has completely tweaked me out. We usually leave one light on in the kitchen at night and the front door to the house opens up to the main livingroom. If the kitchen doors are open you can see all the way out to the utility room in the back of the house. The lights are never on back there and it’s really dark. Shamus seems to like to sit on the floor on the far end of the kitchen, just inside the pitch black doorway. Since his fur is jet black it’s as if he was invisible. However the light catches his one eye and it glows bright green about a foot from the floor. Coming home late at night, tired, and maybe drunk I’m not exactly alert. Then I see this hovering green eye with nothing there and I can get pretty damn freaked out fast. Shamus has almost stopped my heart by suddenly showing up and staring at me. That damned one eye of his… the first time it happened I jumped about four feet backwards. Startled the shit out of me.

Emur is about the sweetest little cat you could ever hope to have. She’s a little light tan shorthair that’s a slightly on the skittery side but warms up to you fast when you start to scratch and pet her. Senor 23 and I have noticed something really strange about this one though. Sometimes Emur will start to howl in the house for no apparent reason, then squat, and pee the floor. It’s been a total mystery as to why the cat does that. Well, it was a mystery until one particular evening that is. One night Senor 23 and I were drinking beers and playing video games in his room and Emur was with us visiting. We were being silly and for some reason I forget why we were saying the word ‘Seed’ in a wacky tone of voice. I’d say it like “SeeeEEEeeeD” with an emphasis on the E. Emur promptly began howling and pissed the floor. Then she tried to get out of Senor 23’s room by leaping head first into his window blinds and got caught in them. She was hanging in them a couple feet from the carpet and started thrashing around to break free. Craziest thing I’ve ever seen a cat do just because I said a word all stupid sounding. So, we figure some sounds or tone of voice freaks the cat out. Since then we’ve pretty much been able to make her pee the floor on command by saying SeeeeEEEEeeeeD out loud. Who woulda figured.

On Monday this week I flea-bombed my room. I was being eaten alive by hordes of fleas courtesy of Emur and Shamus. At night as I slept in my bed the fleas were chewing me up from my knees all the way down to my feet. It was getting so bad I seriously considered getting a couple of Hartz 3-in-1 flea collars and putting them on both my ankles. Thanks to the flea-bomb my life is now more pleasant. As I sat at work on Monday I was day dreaming that all those little pests were being gassed in my room and slowly dying in agony. Revenge was mine that day.

We lost our pirate cable reception recently. The drunk lady in the side apartment here decided to call the cable TV company to complain that her reception was bad. Well, the cable company was extra interested that her cable reception suddenly was poor because no one at this address was a paying customer. The cable company sent out a sneaky recon team of cable police and they discovered our super-secret cable splice job that was done at the block’s junction box years ago. One of the B Street guys had done a professional covert job breaking into the box, splicing in cable, hiding it in there, and then he ran it all the way up into our house which was a long distance. He buried it the entire way and just to make sure it would be difficult to trace he covered the first few feet underneath bricks that he planted a few feet down. It was a superior job. The cable guys figured us out though and the jig was up. They were so angry that they chopped up all of the cable, smashed a gold plated attenuator and splitter box that belonged to Senor 23, and then they threw it all on the drunk lady’s doorsteps. I’m so glad she called to report her bad cable quality. Now we’re all screwed.

~ by factorypeasant on November 9, 2004.