My, oh my, it’s been a rough couple of weeks. I’m so busy at my job and my life that I literally feel like my apartment is just a place that I use to sleep at. It’s like the place is becoming the triple-A 1 star rating “Tice Inn”. I walk through the dirty hallway, I fumble for the right key and I let myself into a two-room place that smells weird upon entry. I have a small kitchenette (luckily with a real refrigerator instead of one of those half-assed dorm room fridges that some provide) and a bathroom that unfortunately doesn’t provide the luxury of daily clean towels, but makes up for it with a dirty tub and mysterious ring around the toilet bowl.

The neighboring rooms at my complex seem to have the same type of occupants. When I’m walking in late, so are other tenants. We exchange pleasantries and then say cliché things like, “another day…ha ha” and then we retire to our rooms. It’s like we’re all traveling salesmen without the suitcases or prostitutes. Hmm…that gives me an idea… (Flips through yellow pages)…never mind.

So I come in, throw my keys on the nearest flat surface and turn on the TV. Like the hotels, I soon realize that there’s nothing on and that most of the channels don’t work or want me to pay the low (?) price of $10.99 to watch anything. So I head to bed instead.

Now it’s not made when I get in there, but the comforter DOES smell funky so I guess that part is like a hotel. I also toss and turn trying to get comfortable most of the night. The one plus of sleeping here is at least I know that I am the only person that has slept on this bed and don’t have to fight to remove mental images of a leper covered in scabs relaxing on it the night before.

So yeah, I’m rarely here. This is why I’m always confused when someone gives me the advice that I would be much happier with a pet in my life. I’m not exactly an animal expert, but it seems like pets would prefer not to have to be alone all day in an apartment with a half a can of peaches in the fridge offering its only source of food.

“Oh”, they say, “You should get a cat. They don’t need much attention and are really good at taking care of themselves!”

Bull crap.

I say this because I had a cat once and I absolutely hated the three months that we cohabitated.

Now, I don’t want to paint the wrong picture-I love animals. They are cute, funny and some of them even taste good. I just had a hard time liking THIS animal.

I got him at one of those adopt-a-pet drives where they don’t care who takes an animal as long as they TAKE them. It’s like a traveling carnival; they set up in an unusual place (this one being an elementary school cafeteria), they try to get rid of everything before moving and then they’re not there when you try to take back your dead goldfish for a refund.
So I get him there and bring him home. He immediately poops. “Aw”, I think, “He’s already comfortable enough here to take a dump on my sofa.” Little was I to know that he was just showing me a preview of his unusually busy colon.

To say that this cat dropped a deuce a little more often than most animals was an understatement. This cat seemed to be running to his litter box ALL OF THE TIME. I could hear him from the next room too, it’s amazing how a cat can grunt and scream out exclamations as, “Oh God! Kill me now!” when you really didn’t even know that they knew how to talk in the first place.

This cat also had a little bit of a fetish that I like to call, “sit in my poop after taking said poop”. He would run through the apartment with an “ahem”, dirty tail and leave tracks all over the place. I would walk in from a day at work and feel like I had stepped in to one of those, “Family Circus” cartoons where they show the little dotted tracks of where Billy had been before relaying his unfunny punch line.

“Let’s see, he started from the litter box through the living room across my bed up across the television screen somehow and ended up sitting on my newly washed plates…well…going to have to throw those away.”

And GOD, the place smelled. I tried all sorts of air fresheners to no avail-hell-I actually had a Lysol can melt in my hands while trying to expunge the apartment of its smell. You know how Wal-Mart promises to take any returns, no questions asked? They should actually say, “We won’t take melted cans of Lysol back, but will look at you weird.”

So I started getting busy and was facing the same situation then that I face now-I never seemed to be able to make it home. I know that this isn’t exactly a great thing to do to a pet, but I had to leave my little cat home alone a lot. I thought I was doing the right thing, I would leave a list of emergency numbers by the phone and a twenty dollar bill on the table in case he wanted to go eat something, but it just didn’t work out.

I was a bad parent.

So we had a long talk one night when I was actually at home. He expressed his concern with me never being at home to hang out with him and I expressed my displeasure with waking up in the morning and having what I believe is called a, “Cleveland Steamer” on my chest. It was a good heart-felt discussion that led us both to realize that maybe our relationship of pet/owner was just not going to work out.

So he moved out. Actually, I put an ad in the paper for a free kitten (I left out the certain e-coli risk factor) and a nice family picked him up, promising to take good care of him.

It was nice to have someone waiting with a poop stained tail when I came home, but was also nice not to have said tail smeared across my lap once I sat down on the couch for the evening. I hope he’s doing well-I send kitten support payments of toilet paper every now and then-but overall I realized that I am not the best candidate for owning a pet.

So thank you for the suggestion, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to decline for now. Maybe someday, but not now. But hey, I have an offer for you. If you’re ever down in Southern Indiana, how about taking a load off at the Tice Inn? The amenities are great, and there’s even an almost full can of peaches for when you wake up!

Copyright © 2006 Ray Tice
Please do not remove the copyright from this work.

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