Warm out here...

Did summer hit the Southland early? It's over 90 degrees in freaking Long Beach...in May...

Anyway, I have some posts that I'm hatching, like always, but one in particular I call "The Clowning". It revolves around the discussion of the blog-post as a literary piece and has to do with an old friend "clowning" me, basically cracking jokes at my expense, mostly because, I could tell, he didn't respect the artform of the blog-post. If you don't respect or recognize the form, you're certainly not going to respect the creation method. It's a point-of-view I don't hear often, and it helps give you a dose of reality.

The jokes made it seem like he'd checked the blog (but I doubt it) and found a post about our cat, Tuxedo. I was telling this old pal that I tried not to write posts as trivial as the ones he was making jokes about, but an impression was made on me.

With that being said, this post will be a trivial piece about our cat.

My mom and mother-in-law both send presents at the Decemberween holiday festival for the cat, and sometimes he likes them, others not so much.

Once, though, one of the toy-gifts was a tiny rectangular pouch like a pillow with a catnip filling. This one Tux is into. Seriously.

It got to the point where I went and hid it because he spent what seemed like an inordinate amount of time rubbing himself on it and then passing out next to it.

For months, maybe even more than a year, this little pouch was hidden away on one of our bookshelves. I came across this weekend and tossed it down to Tux, whose eyes lit up like it was a chicken wing. He pounced and started rubbing himself on it.

Later on, after he was passed out next to the pillow, I picked it up and put it high up on the bookshelf. "Don't do that," Corrie laughed, "don't take his toy away." I tossed it back down to him.

He woke up later on, rubbed all over the pillow, and passed back out. That repeated itself for the remainder of the weekend.

Late Sunday night I put the pillow back up high, and Corrie laughed again, "Honey...why do you do that?"

"Because he's a fiend! Look at him, he can't control himself with this stuff. Moderation...if it's good for us it should be good for him..." We laughed at that for a second, but she agreed that it was probably best to go easy on the catnip.

I even saw him, when awake, beginning to scale the shelf to get to the mini-pillow.

But that got me thinking: What exactly is more constructive for him to be doing during the day besides being a dope fiend?