Does anyone know how to shut a cat up?

Funny, real funny. I can't do that.

Because of Colleen and the de-manning of cows debauchle and Jared and his hunting of Bambi I'm sure PETA regularly checks all of our Reporter blogs.

Seriously, my 13-year-old cat

never

shuts

up.

Every stinking one of his waking moments is spent caterwauling, in the real sense of the word.

It's not a nice "meow." That I wouldn't mind.

Quasar "YOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWLS" on the top of his lungs, incessantly, which sometimes isn't loud enough for his own pleasure so he goes in the basement where it echoes and really belts it out.

He's no slouch in the cat world. He hails from a breed called Birman or Sacred Cat of Burma, named Quasar because each birth-year for registered Birmans is assigned a letter of the alphabet. 1993 was "Q."

One year he was awarded the prestigious grand champion win at the Fond du Lac County fair, and thankfully, unlike other grand champions, this was not followed by slaughtering him and entering him in a carcass show.

In retrospect...............


I hate to yell at Quasar because he has such a "Heart of Gold" but I'd finally had enough at 5 a.m. this morning when he was bemoaning some cat fact on the top of his lungs outside my bedroom, emphasizing his point by slipping little paws underneath the crack in the door and pounding his head against it.

(Please don't even suggest I sleep with him. He's also an incessant licker, his raspy little tongue a weapon on the defenseless lips and eyelids of those lost in dreamland)

I leaped out of bed, threw open the door like a banshee*, clapping my hands and hissing through my teeth "Shut up, shut up, shut up!"

You guessed it. Bad karma happened and I tripped and fell, sprawled in the pre-dawn hour across the living room floor.

Thankfully, I did not crack my head open, but for a minute I did hear a host of t.s. elliot's literary felines laughing their asses off.


Cesar, I'm begging you, can't you whisper cats too?




* Banshee: Afemale spirit in Gaelic folklore whose wailing warns a family that one of them will soon die