This Is My Brain off Coffee

Hey, do you ever wonder if your cat is actually a highly sophisticated robot spy device?

Then again, I don’t know if you would really call Slappy White “highly sophisticated.” Also, robots probably smell better. Still, you kind of have to wonder. Why does he always insist on being in the bathroom while I take a shower? It makes me a little uncomfortable, but I have to make sure I let him in before I start, or he’ll scratch all the paint off the door. Then he jumps up onto the sink and watches me intently through the curtain. Afterwards as I’m putting in my contacts and brushing my teeth, he sometimes reaches out a paw, sinks his claws into my towel, and tries to pull it off. Why would a cat do this?

Or perhaps he was a dirty old man in his last life, and just retains some of those tendencies. This theory has good and bad points. On the plus side, this would be consistent with much of his other behavior. And it’s always nice to believe that death is not the end. On the minus side, what if you had to come back as a dung beetle, or a marketing executive?

Whereas if Slappy were a remote-controlled spy robot, that could also explain the purposeful bustling noises coming from underneath the bathroom floor every morning, which I’ve been attributing to Dave the raccoon.

I’ve seen Dave down there, or at least I’ve seen him go in. One evening as I was pulling into my driveway after a visit to Grady and Margie’s, I noticed one of the cats lumbering, in typical, disdainfully leisurely fashion, out of the way. But then I realized what I was seeing was much too big to be a cat. As he neared the house and my headlights shone full on him, Dave turned and gave me a reproachful glance, then pulled the crawlspace hatch open, with his little raccoon hand, and went inside.

You couldn’t pay me enough to crawl into there. But then, I think Dave is counting on that.

So when I take a shower in the morning, there’s nothing but a quarter inch of cast iron between the soles of my feet and the cold crawlspace air, and Dave – or someone, or something, that sounds very busy down there. What could be going on?!

I think it’s a spy, operating the remote control that makes Slappy White force his way into the bathroom and try to get my towel off. Anything is possible!

Or else Dave is also a robot. I’ve never gotten close enough to smell him.