Thursday, January 10, 2013


HOW TO SWING A CAT - from the archives

While getting the kids to the table for supper I noticed that Haru the cat was inside the house playing with something over in the corner, behind the trunk. I scooped him up with my right hand, having a dish in my left, and held the squirming beast in place with my left forearm as best I could while trying to open the door to put him outside so we could eat in peace but the cat was playful, grabbing my left forearm painfully with his claws, so I went OW! OW! OW!, grabbed him with my right hand, pulled him away from my left arm and held him out at a distance to my right, when I felt that he must have unusually long arms because he was still clawing my left forearm, then I looked and saw that it wasn't the cat clawing my arm, it was a large hissing beetle the cat had been playing with that had fastened itself to the cat's hair in the righteous fury it was now taking out on my innocent left forearm, and I was going OW! OW! OW! but now had both hands full and couldn't put the cat down or it would run upstairs and hide unreachably under the bed or worse, nor could I get at the beetle, who by now was hissing pissed off pinching for all it was worth the tender skin of my as I say innocent left forearm and I was still going OW! OW! OW! and now Keech was going WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? to me jumping around that way, at which point in the overall desperation I started swatting at the beetle with the cat I happened to have conveniently at hand, swinging the cat in wider and wider arcs (note to cat swingers: it's hard to get pinpoint accuracy and solid impact from a cat; if you hold it by the scruff it tends to flop around when you swing it less than top speed at anything as small as even a large beetle, so you lose control on the first few swings, whereas swinging it by the hind legs or tail creates too great an arc so forget about accuracy; if you're swinging with any sense of urgency, you should ideally have a short stiff cat and a large target), trying for the very first time in my life to hit a beetle with a cat's head, though this fact was unobserved by me at the time, as I was still going OW! OW! OW! while the beetle went HISS! HISS! HISS! and Keech went WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? and the cat went YOW! YOW! YOW! What is this guy trying to do with me? till finally I got the vectors together and swung the cat (thank god we have a living room big enough to swing one in) so that his head hit the beetle and knocked it off my forearm. Altogether a memorable YOWling, HISSing, OW-ing, WHAT-ing family bug adventure of another kind. The bite was not venomous, just a fierce pinch, and so to dinner, cat and beetle not invited.

3 comments:

annie said...

Oh, Robert, the tears from laughter are streaming down my face. I am sorry about the pain of what must have been a horrifying few minutes, but the video in my head as I read is better than the Marx Bros. And that is no doubt the best sentence on the world wide web.

Mage said...

Ph, my, but will he ever speak to you again.

Tabor said...

Does the cat hide under the bed when he sees you? Beetles in winter?