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Cat Power

Hi there, Scott from 2018 writing here. This is from my old Xanga account. I mostly post these because it makes me laugh at myself. I have no idea why you’d be reading this, but enjoy yourself. -SP

Every morning, my commute to work ends with a jaunt from my train stop straight to the office. Other than an unusually high spa to non-spa ratio along the street, it’s not particularly remarkable compared to any other Lincoln Park avenue. Occasionally I’ll see some headline in a newsstand that causes me to pause for a few moments or worse, do the double-take and suddenly com back to it. One example of this was last week, when the Sun-Times ran the front page headline “FAKE TRAIN COPS TAKE PASSENGER FOR A RIDE.” I saw this and stuck it in the “To Think About Later” portion of my brain, when I realized that I ride the train! Incidentally, it’s a good thing my daily commute takes just a little while as my brain isn’t necessarily sharp first thing in the morning. Realizing the potential danger I could be in, I turned around amidst other pedestrians to read more of that headline.

My head was filled with images of fake transit police absconding with me, forcing me to be an unwilling participant in an all-night frenzy of murder and debauchery. It didn’t occur to me that I’ve never even seen a transit cop on the train before, and so if I did see either the real thing or merely a fake, I’d probably flee the scene in alarm regardless. The story was far more tame than the headline suggested though, relating to merely some major, but entirely financial, fraud rather than a Judgment Night-esque tale of horror. Deviations such as these are usually about as varied as my trip gets.

As I lost myself in thought dreaming of fake cops though, I ended up passing quite a few shops I don’t normally see. There was the cafe with funky color scheme and kitchen the size of a smallish closet. There was the western wear store, which informed me that in the Old West, people wore denim almost to the exclusion of all other materials. Polyester and other fabrics must have been invented in the East I guess, since it looked like life was a veritable denimcopia west of the Mississippi. There was also the mattress store with many sofas, a small cat sleeping on one of them, and a few cardboard displays. I was looking at antiques as I passed by a window two stores down when I thought “Was that a cat I just saw?” So for the second time in as many weeks, I backtracked to the location to investigate.

Sure enough, there was what appeared to be a cat sleeping upon one of the front display mattresses. I watched it for a few moments, seeing it was breathing and thus a real cat rather than some kind of fake for advertising purposes. Apparently my still-sleepy brain thought it plausible that someone would get a very realistic, but fake, cat to place upon their display units. Passing wives would stop their husbands, saying “Wow, look how great that cat is sleeping! We need one of those!” However, if sane people actually thought things like this, then Serta would also manufacture human-sized cardboard boxes, computer monitors, and just the backs of sofas. As I watched, the sleeping cat took a breath, much to my astonishment that these sofa retailers got the real thing for their store.

While I walked on a few moments later, I spent the rest of my morning thinking about that cat. “What a lifestyle that cat must enjoy. Getting to live life amongst a variety of ever-changing and very comfortable places to sleep. That, in addition to Fancy Feast© of course, must be the equivalent of the good life for cats.” More so than dogs or other creatures, cats are pretty serious about their sleeping, and so I can’t imagine a better place to practice’s one’s passion. Of course, knowing cats, they are just as likely to spend 15 minutes kneading an open book just to fall right over onto the crease and into a deep sleep as they are to actually go to a mattress or anything. Still though, I can’t think of anything better if I were a cat. In fact, I can’t think of much better than that being a human either.

Some people say that pets don’t go to Heaven, despite the what popular culture may have to say about that. For every Fahrenheit 9/11 that comes out, someone seems to counter with a Michael Moore Hates America and vice versa from right to left. But Americans all seem to agree that All Dogs Go to Heaven, since there hasn’t been any countering film called God Hates Dogs or something to argue the other side. Regardless, if cats don’t get to enter their own pearly gates, perhaps the really, really good cats get to spend some time in a mattress store.