Untrusty Rusty

 You don’t know what might come walking in when you leave a window open. Raccoons. Possums. Bugs (on their little bug feet). Not to mention the cold air, and as I write this I’m wearing my winter coat and sitting next to a heater. No, in our case, it’s cats. And they’re not ours. Currently there are two stray cats that are coming in to eat (and maybe others that we don’t know about) because the dry cat food sits on the counter by the open kitchen window. You could say we are running our own drive thru (but we’re not making any money). One of the cats is a cute orange and white we call Creamsicle. I call him Creamy for short. He won’t let us touch him and he’s very sneaky with his eating habits, making sure no one is in the kitchen and stealthily grabbing chunks of chicken that we leave on the window sill for him. I dream that one day he’ll realize we’re not going to hurt him and make himself at home.

The other cat has definitely made himself at home. That’s Rusty. He belongs to somebody, hence the name tag on his collar, but I think he ran away from home (his owner is actually my old roommate Tommy. He drinks a lot, and I don’t blame the cat for running away. I did). After Rusty gets a good belly full of food he slinks to the living room to scratch his scratchy post, the leg of a wooden table that John made (I write my blog posts on it and since it’s attached to my desk it’s like im in a cubicle. Ha, where’s my office job?). After that he might drink some water and then wait around for cat nip (the little drug addict (forget the magic carpet ride, it’s all about a nip trip)).

But lately he’s been sort of…an asshole (the domestic short hair kind). He attacked Blackie and we had to kick him out and ban him from the house for a couple days. It’s probably because they’re both un neutered males, but it doesn’t matter: you can’t mess with our cat in his own home. But Rusty would come in anyway cause we’d hear his metal collar clinking against the food bowl and we’d have to yell at him to go (I don’t enjoy being mean to cats but it was kinda funny). So he gets his house privilege back and what does he do? He bites John!  John was cutting up some steak for Rusty in the middle of the night and the cat jumps on the counter and sinks his teeth into his hand. Yeah. This cat. John had a knife in his hand and Rusty almost got stabbed (John would never hurt a cat btw, it was just a reflex. But imagine the headline: Cat Gets Stabbed in Riverside Park). We still don’t understand why he did that (is he scared of knives or just enjoys literally biting the hand that feeds him?), but John has already forgiven him (partly because he has a special place in his heart for felines, but more importantly because he ain’t scared of no biting cat. Bring it on). So that’s two strikes, not to mention he’s probably spraying in the house because we have woken up to the smell of cat pee.

So I gave him a new nickname: Trusty Rusty, because you can’t trust him. It’s ironic. But since John is more literal than I am, he says it should be Untrusty Rusty. Works for me. Sometimes I call him Rusty Bucket; I could call him Rusty Blade, too (that was the name Eric Carr wanted to use when he joined KISS). Anyways, it rhymes, and it’s better than Asshole.