High Times

My name is Jazzie and I am a cat, I am neither old nor am I young but somewhere happily in between. Now, I am not your run of the mill, mouse chasing, dog hating cat. Quite frankly, I dislike everyone but I digress. What is it that makes me special? I not only understand my human, but I talk to him. That’s right, you read that correctly, I speak to my human. This isn’t an everyday occurrence, I can’t afford to spoil the poor creature. No, I only speak to him when he has smoked his human-nip. I can only assume the humans sought to be more like us, so they found their own version of catnip. Endearing creatures, humans.

I didn’t always speak to him, I didn’t have a reason to. I was quite content to let him treat me with an undying reverence while I did absolutely nothing but exist and occasionally torment him in order to entertain myself. However, things took a turn for the worst. My human left his parents to go to college, he wasn’t able to take me with him. I was angry and I was hurt. I couldn’t believe he would leave me with the two humans that thought cold food from a can and hard dog-like kibble were an acceptable food source for me. I refused to eat until they at least heated it up and then I punished them by kicking the grey sand out of my litter box instead of covering up my lady business. Eventually they bought acceptable food and more than enough catnip to be considered a peace offering. I spent my days laying in the window wondering when my human would return. Days became weeks and weeks became months until one rainy day he came back. Him and his father carried his boxes back up to his room.

My human had changed though, he wasn’t smiling anymore. The twinkle in his eyes had gone away. He smelled foreign to me, I didn’t like it. He didn’t smell like me anymore. I remember the next couple of months were hard on him. He got a job working at a gas station, he began to drink when his parents weren’t around and he began to smoke the human-nip. He either slept all day or stayed up gaming all night when he wasn’t working. The only thing that did not change over the course of this dark time was his love for me. He was always more than happy to see me, he enjoyed scratching my ears, giving me treats and telling me what a pretty girl I was. He would often tell me just how much he loved me and that I was his best friend, his only friend.

It was probably another month before I chose to talk to him for the first time. He didn’t have to go to work that day so we slept all day curled on his bed but once the sun had set below the trees the two of us were up, prowling around. His parents were home so he had to sneak out of his room and onto the roof to smoke his herbs. This particular night he had left his window open and I had decided to follow him. At first he had tried to shoo me back into the house, probably afraid that I would fall or run away. Instead of going in I sat myself down next to him, rubbing my head against his thigh and purring until he gave up trying to tell me what to do and went back to inhaling the spicy sweet smoke.

He told me about how his parents had informed him of my antics with the litter box, he laughed and said he had told them they were lucky I didn’t use their shoes or pillows. For whatever reason I spoke, telling him that I knocked his father’s dentures into the trash right before he took it out and then I also took his mother’s keys and dropped them behind the couch. I remember that he stared at me, caught somewhere between shock and amusement. He did the usual human thing by asking if I just spoke and then reiterated into a short sentence as if I hadn’t heard him the first time.

We talked long into the night until the skies began to turn pink and gold with the rising of the sun. The real fun didn’t begin though until he woke up sober the following night. He tried everything he could to get me to talk. Bribed me with treats and other things but I didn’t say a word. I just meowed and acted like a basic house cat. Ugh, that was so beneath me but it was worth it to watch him talk to himself and question whether or not he had dreamt everything. This quickly became my new favorite pastime.

From then on forward everytime he would get stoned, I would start talking. Sometimes I was philosophical and other times I mimicked the cheshire cat from that show he periodically watched. Its been years now and I’m almost certain that he has accepted the fact that he is indeed insane but he’s smiling now and his mood has greatly shifted into a more positive direction. He eventually went back to school and became a veterinarian. The humans have a saying, no harm- no foul, right?

It was just a game after all.