Posted by kluster on September 30, 2009
Bill Cotter’s novel Fever Chart (McSweeney’s), and
Annie La Ganga’s memoir, Stoners and Self Appointed Saints (Red Hen Press).
Of the many places Annie and I stayed while on our severely budgeted national book-signing-and-reading tour, I noted that only a few of them were not occupied by at least one cat. One of those places was a motel, a form of shelter from which cats and other domestics have been, by tradition and without prejudice, wholly banned. So it doesn’t count. And another place, a couch-surf stop in Salt Lake City, Utah, served merely as a snack bar for a neighbor’s cat. We never so much as glimpsed this animal, whose only witness was a half-noshed bowl of dry vittles on the front porch. So that doesn’t count either.
A moment of simple calculation reveals a startling figure: 82%. That is the percentage of households we visited with at least one cat. Why does this startle? Because the national percentage of becatted households is <34%,* that’s why. More than double.
Wherefore this wildly off-key statistic? Is there something about an itinerant stranger’s sleeping on one’s couch that impels one to acquire a cat? If so, what? A need for protection? No, cats don’t sic or tackle or eat strangers (unless the cats are big, like from a jungle or zoo). As company? No. Nary a cat nuzzled with me while I was stretched out on a couch. Even ones I caught and placed in my lap for a snooze promptly bolted in alarm, like I was adding them to a stew or something.
Maybe the reasons for the anomalous cat/host ratio are entirely obscure and unknowable, possibly having to do with planetary syzygies or moody poltergeists.** Who can say? And who really cares, except me? Hardly the most essay-worthy aspect of our trip. I mean, we met a psychiatrist who channels an entity named Reginald. Reginald knows the future.
Now that’s blogworthy. Next time!
Bill Cotter
Austin, Texas
*So sayeth the Humane Society.
**Or magnets. One of our hosts, Denitza, a Bulgarian therapist, Ph.D. candidate, and owner a playful, charming feline named Pisana, had a world-class kitchen-appliance collection, the crown jewel of which was a device whose purpose, accomplished by means of a system of 15-gauss electromagnetic fields, was to “restructure” water molecules from their unhealthful, amorphous spit-gob shape (their form when shooting out of a common household tap) back into a hale, revitalizing snowflake shape---their form before Man messed with them. And another of our hosts, the estimable Sialia R. of Santa Fe, New Mexico, a restorer of Japanese scrolls and painter of medieval miniatures, ALSO owned specialized magnets. Tiny discs---no larger than an oat---but so powerful that two of them can slap together with such force that, if one’s finger (or---ye gods forbid it!---some other fleshy bit) is caught between them, one might think one has been nipped by a lobster.
bill cotter, annie la ganga, book tour