Wasting my life one day at a time...

The number of cats in my neighborhood officially reached a dangerous level a while ago, evidenced by a bizarre incident I was lucky enough to witness.

But before this remarkable tale is recounted, I have to make one thing clear: I don’t hate cats. Don’t confuse not hating something with liking something, because I’m far from being a cat lover. I just can’t completely hate something that has such cute babies, and cat-hating men are almost a cliché, and I refuse to be a cliché. Sure, cats wander the streets at night, and they get in fights with each other, and they spread disease, and they poo all over the place, but so do humans, and we seem to be doing okay as a species.

The cause of the recent feline invasion can be pegged squarely on one couple who live a few doors down the street from me, the Hunters. It’s almost ironic that a family with the last name of Hunter can be so sympathetic to animals. Mr. Hunter is a gray-haired 60-something loser who used to be an obstetrician in Phoenix until he was busted on insurance fraud, lost his license to practice, and was forced to leave the state to escape notoriety. His wife is little more than a trophy, a slender blonde in her thirties who obviously married him because of his career and wealth, before he was busted, of course. The wife has a bumper sticker on her car that says something like “I’m married to a gyno, and he knows what he’s doing down there!” Pretty sick, huh.

They started out with two original cats which quickly had babies, spawning more cats, which fornicated and had babies with each other. Now there are probably twenty cats down there, living incestuous lives, having sex in public, and meowing like crazy. It’s almost a rarity when you don’t hit one driving down the street because the stupid things are so inbred they can barely walk straight.

But enough background information. On with the story! One night I was driving home, and as I turned up my street I noticed a biker (on a bicycle, not a Harley) streaking down the hill, coming toward me. He was going really fast, probably faster than my twenty-five miles per hour, and as I watched him approach, something happened that ranks as the second weirdest thing I’ve ever seen, right behind the time I saw a kid get his foot sucked into an escalator at the LAX airport (ask me about that story later).

As I was passing by the Hunter’s home, my lights silhouetted the furry body of one of those retarded cats in the middle of the road. The cat freaked out when it saw me coming toward it and started running to the other side of the street. But remember, the biker! I saw it happen, and strangely, the scene almost seemed to progress in slow motion. The biker hit the cat, the bike’s back tire lifted off the ground launching the bike into the air, and the biker was ejected from his seat and flew about fifteen feet until he landed in a crumpled heap on the asphalt. I slammed on my brakes to go see if he was dead, because I was almost sure he was. Before I’d even parked the car, the biker was up walking around, talking to himself in a stoned voice wondering (in his words) what the f__k he’d hit, before picking up his bike and taking off without a word to me. I never found out what happened to the cat, but I’m pretty sure it survived since there weren’t any lifeless little bodies in the road.

What are the odds that a slim bike tire would strike a small cat at the precise moment it was fleeing from the awesome crunching power of my car? And what are the odds that both the cat and the biker would remain relatively uninjured following their collision? And what are the odds I would be there to witness the whole thing, illuminated brilliantly in my headlights? The guy has an awesome story to tell, got a nice little ride through the air, and rode away unscathed even though he wasn’t wearing a helmet. I almost wish I could have traded places with him.