Lovecraftian Horror

Well, Thanksgiving has come and gone and A's roommates got all the leftovers because I'm too lame to get myself 1/8 of a mile down the road to her house to reclaim my creamed onions. This is not surprising and anyway, it makes for a fine excuse for the Chinese takeout we had for dinner last night while we watched Spirited Away, which is one of my favorite movies of all time and which the QOB adored as well. I always feel like I've won some kind of weird contest when I find a movie the QOB and I both really like.

That's all fine. What isn't fine, alas, is Pebble. Pebble, and I say this in a hushed voice, looking around nervously for members of the other gender, is in heat. It's all my fault. I kept thinking she was going to grow more - she's about the tiniest cat I've ever had, half the size of a normal cat - and thus she wasn't really growing up so I had plenty of time to get her fixed. Ha ha ha. She's growing up all right, or, I guess, she's grown up and for the last four days she's been making our house a living hell.

I knew it was bad a couple of days ago when I found myself in the bathroom at 5 am, flushing the toilet over and over to distract her. Pebble adores the toilet, you see, and she would not shut up and, well, there I was. I'm not alone, actually; the QOB confessed to doing exactly the same thing. Yes, we all stand in the bathroom late at night and flush the toilet repeatedly to amuse the cat. This is pathetic. Pathetic, I say, but if I stepped away from the handle she would start in with the piteous, hideous wailing. I haven't gotten a full night's sleep for days. She's been wailing since Tuesday and then, today, she went full blown into the whole wiggling thing. We are actually, despite our reputations, a staid and Victorian household for the most part, and Pebble's lascivious misery is just, well, too much for us. "Haggard," said young M in tones of deep disquiet, and, yes, haggard it is.

So I have locked poor Pebble downstairs in the guest room with a clean litterbox and food and water and a big cozy bed covered with blankets and some cat toys and this clear act of animal cruelty of course makes me feel like some kind of evil 19th century chatelaine of a home for immoral young women or something. Then I come upstairs and feel like I'm at the very end of a Lovecraft story reading "And still, she could hear the unearthly eldritch screams as they echoed up from the very bowels of the earth." Which they are, since the guest room is pretty much totally in the bowels of the earth. Either way, from grim specter of enforced morality to unwitting looser of one of the Elder gods, I feel guilty. And fucked, like I will never sleep again. I really want to have a dream that doesn't end with some kind of narrative revolving around screaming. Really.

At least this neighborhood seems to be free of intact male cats or maybe they've also been fooled by the tininess of Pebble. So far, there's no chorus outside and I'm devoutly hoping one doesn't appear, because that would be true eldritch horror. It would set the dogs off and thus really end any hope I ever had of making friends with my neighbors: I'd have to resign myself to the torches and the pitchforks and the cauldrons of oil again, damn. I only hope this ends soon and I can zip her immediately off to the vet. I've never had a girl cat before and now I remember why - yeah, okay, actually it was my father's sexist and definite claim that male animals are just more fun. Look what happens when you try to be all equal, sheesh. It's not that I don't sympathize - I truly do; there aren't any tomcats wandering around my windows either - but she's miserable and so are we all.