We Forcefed My Cat the Red Pill and Now He Won't Shut Up About the Matrix

This is me blabbing about something or another at the Waffle House over by our apartment. I'm really not making a face; this is a legitimate photo of me talking to another person. This was taken this past weekend. Sunday, I think. At the moment this picture was taken, I thought my wife, PC, was done taking pictures. She was not. She nearly dissolved into a fog of pure laughter when she saw this image appear in our digital camera's viewfinder. It is a pretty funny picture. I was just trolling through the photos we already have stored on our computer and this one looked good for Thursday's post. So here you go.

Here's something else that's been preying on my nerves of late. This 'something else' happens to be covered in hair, walks on four legs, and eliminates waste in a little sand-lined box in our other bathroom. He is Venkman, my cat. I don't know what female cats are called, but, like dogs, they should be called bitches, because my cat is a son of a bitch. Especially of late. Here's why.

PC took him for a walk the other day for a business school assignment called 'breaking the norm'. They were supposed to break any one of society's many unwritten rules. So she walked Venkman, our indoor cat, around our apartment complex because one of those unwritten rules is: people aren't supposed to walk cats. Well, the experiment went all right; she got some weird looks and funny reactions she can write a paper about. But there's been some post-experiment fallout we hadn't foreseen.

Unlike PC, Venkman was an unwitting participant in this experiment. The result for PC is a grade. The result for Venkman is a strong and overpowering yearning to be back outside again, back into a magical land of adventure filled with bugs that walk and buzz, lots of exotic plants and edible grasses as well as, sometimes, strange humans. An exciting place, indeed. Unfortunately, Venkman is not a cat to yearn in silence. He's been expressing his yearning these past couple of days, through soulful meowing. Over and over again. Loud. All day. He meows when he is near me, he meows when he is in the other room. And, no joke, he is meowing right the eff now. The only thing that would make him stop meowing, (other than the sweet embrace of death), would be for me to put on his blue harness, click a leash on him, and take him for another walk. The thing about this idea, though, is that I wouldn't be doing it to appear slightly insane for the purpose of a class; if I did take him for a walk, it would be because I was actually insane. Thus, Venkman stays inside and suffers. I love the little bastard, but he's not going outside. On the bright side, since I started writing this, he's shut up.