Instant Dharma
To say that my neighborhood, Seminole Heights, has its fair share of stray cats is like saying South Beach has its fair share of plastic surgery patients. In the past six months, I’ve noticed this black and white cat. Ever since my landlord was nice enough to tear the fencing off the bottom of my house, it has been squatting there. It’s an okay cat, I guess, for a hapless, brainless, fleabag quadruped that routinely pisses underneath my office. I pet it the other day. Briefly.
Anyway, I think its name is Dharma. At least I think that’s what the girl who lives in the apartment next to me calls it. I heard her calling it from her front door this morning a couple times. I was still on my first cup of coffee, so I wasn’t exactly dressed to tell her that I thought Dharma at that moment was collecting flies in my side yard. See, first thing every morning while I’m waiting for the hot water to come through the shower, I look out the kitchen window and make coffee. This morning I noticed the cat lying rather still with maybe two dozen flies going at its eyeballs. I had just woken up. That’s just way too early in the day to assume something is dead. Maybe it was just resting.
I was hoping the dunce would notice it when she got in her car for work. She parks right next to where the thing croaked. No dice. So, three hours later, I get back from buying groceries, and the fucker’s still there. I contemplated the following in this order:
1 – tossing the thing on her doorstep. She fed the fucking thing, which is why it died on my property. Let her and her idiot squatter boyfriend deal with it.
2 – the garbage men were coming any minute. I was literally about to toss it in the can, but then I realized I’d have to touch it. That’s when I went for option 3.
3 – borrow the neighbor’s shovel and cram it in a hole.
I even put the dirt back in the hole when I was done.
Some of you may be thinking I’m insensitive. I disagree. Insensitive on a good day would have been going to Home Depot to buy the supplies for that trebuchet I’ve always wanted and catapulting the thing at Hillsborough High down the street. That’s like a quarter mile. Quite the physics project, I think. Insensitive on a bad day would have been option 1 above.
No. I like to think I’m apathetic and reasonable. It’s not like it was something worth getting worked up about, like a dog or a plant or something. I’d feel bad about that. But if you feed a stray cat in this neighborhood and get emotionally attached to it, well that’s just stupid. Not to mention she has a habit of feeding/sheltering anything looking for a home that she comes in contact with. (Feel free to go back through my journals about aforementioned boyfriend and the notorious skank “modelâ€.) She has the social graces of a Komodo dragon anyway. Let her think the thing took a walk. That’s plenty sensitive.
Besides, maybe this whole thing will have a happy ending. It’s Good Friday. Maybe it’ll come crawling out of its hole Sunday, like some warped born-again Stephen King story. Sure, I know what some of you are thinking: but spprs, this is clearly a Buddhist cat. And to that, I say Jesus was clearly a Jewish guy and look what happened to him.