Death from Above

I should start a blog just for stories about my cat, the one whom I dislike strongly*. The one I like isn't that interesting. All he does is climb into my bed and curl up at my knees and fall asleep. Capu, on the other hand, is generally either wiping his nose on something or doing something that is new, strange, and beyond the edge of reason.

Today, for instance, he attempted to execute a particularly impressive guerrilla-style attack on everyone's new least-favourite cat, the large brindled beast who has been trying to take over the front yards of most houses on our street for the past few weeks. Today, Mr. Brindle was in our next door neighbour's yard, ensconced amongst the neatly stacked articles of our neighbour's latest building project, yowling insistently at the back door**.

Now, Capu is not the outdoorsy type by any means. However, he has taken a shine to my boat deck (most likely because he doesn't actually have to interact with nature itself, but can observe it from afar and duck back through my window whenever he pleases***), and today we were both sitting out on the boat deck, admiring the garbage-strewn back alley below when Brindle began his yowling.

Capu immediately slithered through the latticework of the deck and slunk over to the edge of the roof that sits nearly directly over our next-door neighbour's fence. Brindle, who has considerably more than one thread of Unflappable written into his genetic makeup, glanced up at the now bristling, 15-pound cat hovering mere meters above him, and went back to yowling at the door.

Capu was not about to be ignored, and readied himself to pounce. At this point I began to get a bit concerned for the wellbeing of this companion whom I dislike so strongly. As I said, he hasn't spent much time outside, and I sometimes wonder if he's entirely aware of the extent to which gravity will act upon an overweight, out-of-shape cat leaping from the kitchen roof onto a large, brindled cat surrounded by concrete blocks. My stupid cat My brother's stupid cat was about to leap to his doom. Not only that, but I was about to let him do it, too, because he was almost certainly going to take Brindle down with him and, while I do believe in the sanctity of the lives of all creatures etcetera, I also believe in seeing Brindle finally get the shit kicked out of him by someone, even if this beating lasts for approximately 1.2 seconds and the main actor in it is not Capu's brute strength, but the impact-force of gravity.

There we were, me perching on the edge of the boat deck, watching Capu, bristling to twice his normal size and fixing to pounce on that idiot Brindle, who was taking no notice of either of us and was pawing insistently at a stranger's front door, when all at once I saved the day without even meaning to. Perched on the ledge as I was, it was only a matter of time before that accursed gravity got the better of me as well, and I suddenly found myself tipping over the edge of my boat. The ensuing racket of me saving myself from rolling down the edge of a roof (undoubtedly taking out both Capu and Brindle in my final downward plunge) was enough to distract Capu from his attack stance and Brindle from his ineffective cuteness scam.


*Yet theoretically probably secretly love.
**This tactic does quite often work if the cat lives in the house at which it is meowing. However, I have this theory that Mr. B is from a different area of town entirely and only comes over to this end to mess with the local wildlife; I've never seen him enter a house he belongs in (though he's tried to come into ours more than once).
***I believe this situation is similar to that of city dwellers who are willing to go into the wilderness as long as they can take a camper with a flushable toilet and a 52" flat-screen tv with them.