1. Pick up a dreaming cat

You can pick up a sleeping cat, although I would not advise picking up a sleeping cat of mine without memorizing the manual first, specifically the parts which advise you that Hobey will double in weight and length if lifted while wreathed in Zs, and is not liable for any back injury which may result, and that Little Joe will clamp himself to the nearest breast like an eighteen-pound kangaroo-baby brooch, forcing said breast to join the circus to make her fortune as The One-Eyed Creature That Survived A Fish-Fork Attack.

To pick up a dreaming cat is, alas, an even more dangerous matter. In my defense, I needed to remove the feline in question from the bed in order to change the sheets, and I had waited most of the day for him to relocate so that I could do so, but after dinnertime had come and gone, Cold Case had come and gone…what? Someone has to watch that show. And speaking of that, if one of the other seven people who watches Close To Home is reading this? How psyched are we that Cress “D’Shawn Hardell” Williams is back on a series? Love that guy! Hoping the show will contrive some ridiculous excuse to put him back in those Harlem Globetrotter star-spangled shorts he wore in the calendar episode of 90210, because that shit was so foxy, actual foxes were like, “…Damn.” Also loving Kind Of Mean, Ergo Extra Hot JAG as the new DA, and every scene he’s in with Annabeth, the “lady, sweeps is coming, and come that fine day, you and I are going to get it on” subtext is totally beating up the text and taking its milk money, and Annabeth is making The Cow Eyes Of On The One Hand, I’m Still In Mourning For Lindsey From Angel, But On The Other Hand, You Really Filled Out A Navy Uniform Back In The Day, And You’re Standing Closer To Me Than You Need To, Strictly Speaking, So…What Was I Saying?, and Maureen is all, “Some of us are trying capital cases and don’t have time for your His Girl Friday bullshit so could you two just kiss already so we can get back to work?” …I know, I know, shut up.

Anyway: it wass getting late, I wanted to put fresh sheets on, and I didn’t notice until I already had my hands under him that the Hobe was twitching and curling his lip to indicate that he was not merely snoozing, but dreaming, so I offered him a patently insincere “sorry, cat” and prepared to transfer him to the floor.

But the “sorry” had only begun, my friends. I can only speculate as the contents of the dream, but it must have involved an epic rumble between my middle-aged domesticated feline and an entire herd of long-extinct colossal creatures — sabre-toothed tigers, mastodons — and he didn’t wake up entirely when I first picked him up, so, mistaking me for a hippogryph, or perhaps the Aetos Kaukasios that fed on the liver of Prometheus, Hobey flattened his ears, opened every eyelid except that creepy nictitating one, shot his limbs and tail out starfish-style, and emitted a sound the likes of which I hope never to hear again. It was like holding the engine of a 747: “FFFRRRRRREEEEEEEHHHHHHH.”

My entire life flashed before my eyes, with several scenes from Don’t Look Now and Gremlins edited in for extra yiiiiiikes!, and I shrieked like a schoolgirl in a haunted house and dropped the cat and backed out of the bedroom on tiptoe. Little Joe had come down the hallway from the living room to investigate the commotion, and while I waited for the coast to clear, Joe sat on my foot.

Little Joe: …Mee?
Sarah: Long story. …You know the opening sequence of Saw II?

Hobey marched out into the hallway, addressed a hiss to me that fluttered my hair and sent Little Joe scampering into the bathroom, and marched out to the kitchen to have a snack. He had failed to unfluff himself and looked like a tiny orange stegosaurus as a result. It sounds cute, but I assure you: terrifying.

And I will never pick up a dreaming cat again.

2. Open the door of the microwave immediately after baking a potato within

You poke holes in three red potatoes, you put them into the microwave, you press the Baked Potatoes button, and you don’t think anything of it. You certainly don’t think anything of hearing the beeeeeeeep and opening the door right up to retrieve said potatoes.

What you might not know is that the red potato is a mercurial and misunderstood creature which believes that negative attention is better than no attention, and that in this way, it attempts to exert some control over a chaotic and random world, not recognizing its own self-destructiveness as both resulting from and contributing to its anxiety.

It is necessary to anthropomorphize the red potato, in defiance of dignity and common sense, in order to understand why, after the heat source was removed and in spite of the fact that you diligently aerated all four sides of it, the red potato waited for you to open the microwave and then scared the shit out of you by observing in a bitter tone of voice, “[Splaff!]” and blowing itself up like a Pinto.

The other red potatoes: We blame ourselves.
Sarah: Oh, now, there’s nothing you could have done differently.

And I will never rush to retrieve a baked potato from the microwave oven again.

3. Visit a costume store on a Saturday in October

It’s not like I expected that field trip to go smoothly by any means, but this went well beyond “hectic” and “annoying” and into “complete breakdown of social controls.” I mean, I changed my Halloween-party costume at the eleventh hour, so I had nobody to blame but myself, but…seriously? I needed vampire teeth. That’s it! No fancy latex, no weaponry, no ears, no makeup. Vampire teeth.

I went to Target first, which is another entry entirely, because I have seen footage of looting that looked more organized and welcoming than the second floor of the Atlantic Center Tarzhay, but that actually worked in my favor, because it served as a warm-up for the main event at Party City — whose staff I’d like to take a moment to recognize for their forbearance in not killing anyone, starting with themselves. A whole shelf of motion-activated talking skulls, when the store is full of people milling around? I would lose it in five minutes.

Talking skulls, milling, more stuff dropped on the floor than on the shelves, and Party City placed the vampire teeth way at the back, which meant I had to cut back and forth through the costume-pick-up line like six times to get to the display, and three different dads gave me the “I will fight you right now, girl or no girl” chin pop and snapped, “Line starts back there,” so I started repeating a mantra: “Not cutting, ‘scuse me, not cutting, ‘scuse me, just trying to get back there, not cutting, ‘scuse me.” I reached the teeth at last but then I had to cut back through the line so I could get to the end of the line to pay, and I guess I muttered “Jesus fucking Christ” out loud instead of to myself, because the other woman trapped back there with me said, “Seriously.” At least, I think she said that; whatever she said, she said through a mouthful of Pop Rocks, which made me wonder how long she’d been there, exactly.

End of the paying line, which is two aisles long, and I contemplated just shoplifting the teeth and taking my chances because, even if I had to go in the back and wait for them to swear out a complaint, it would still go faster than waiting in that line, and I would not have to physically restrain myself from kidnapping a child named Destiny out of the crepe paper aisle and raising her like she’s my own, because I do not know much about parenting, but it’s my feeling that either you can give your kid a stripper name, or you can bitch and snarl at her constantly for touching stuff and not staying close to you and asking for candy when she’s not really doing anything that bad, comparatively, and you could have prevented any and all of her minor misdeeds by getting off your damn phone for five minutes and holding her hand in the second place, but she’s, like, four, and it’s a Halloween store. Let her act like a kid for fifteen minutes before she grows up and marries Ron Jeremy, jeez.

…Or maybe, just maybe, she’ll marry the kid who was festooning his dad with rubber snakes and narrating a movie trailer to go along with it. “In a world where we are standing in line at the party store…one man…will make a difference. Snakes on a Dad.” That kid is obviously awesome; I think they would make a cute couple, him and Destiny.

Because nothing will ever top Snakes on a Dad as far as silver linings go, I will never go to a store even tangentially related to Halloween on a Saturday in October again.

(Do you know how much a twelve-pack of vampire teeth costs? Eighty cents including tax. EIGHTY CENTS. The clerk and I looked at each other like, “…Not!” and then she told me to shoplift them next time. Duly noted.)

October 23, 2006

Share!