This last Monday I took my folks to the airport for their trip to Hawaii. Yeah, I’ve heard it from just about everyone now: “Tell your parents they suck, dude.” Why, because they were smart enough to fly south for the winter? If only a week, at least… Anyway, I loaded them up with memory for their camera and Cheez-Its for their flight and sent them on their way.

That meant I was driving my mother’s Porsche for the last couple of days, because I was too lazy to make the trip back out to their house to pick up my trusty old Wrangler. It’s amazing how lazy one can get about things like that when he is driving a sports car. Either way, I took the wife and kid out to Red Lobster last night for a feast of seafood (OMG those lobster tails and crab legs holy god they were awesome…) and then made the trip out to Silent Hill to swap out the cars. I gassed up the Porsche (I tend to put my foot in it a little too often and turn what should be a one-gallon trip into a five-gallon adventure) and parked it neatly between the lines in the garage. After my wife hopped out and moved all the shit out of the way.

The garage was a wreck, and my dad’s pickup was missing. Strange, his ’69 Camaro was still there. Why would someone steal the truck and leave that? But the slot in the garage where my mother parks (the extra-wide one with the bumpers and tennis ball stoppers) was cluttered with a bunch of shit that’s normally hanging on the walls and up on the shelves. So someone had ransacked the place. I then get inside and am greeted by the yapping dog and two hungry cats my mother keeps around. I kicked some food into their bowls, scooped up the shit from the litter pads and went to checking on the rest of the house. Something was clearly amiss though. The back door into the garage had been standing open. I made my wife stand waiting in the garage with my daughter while I checked out the house.

Dryer’s open. There’s clothing all over the couches in the living room. Clothing and trash all over the master bathroom floor. Master bed is unkempt and sheets are twisted. Empty packs of cigarettes all over the coffee table in the living room. Open, broken umbrella in the atrium. Lights on all over the place. Lamp knocked over, gates knocked down in the dining room. Bowls half-full of congealing, unidentifiable food standing on the kitchen counter. But no one is there. Then I saw it in the entry hall: the cat crate, standing open and empty by the front door. This could only mean one thing: my sister has been here. That would explain the mess, I suppose.

Well there’s an empty cat crate here, there must be another cat or three running around somewhere. So now I’m looking for five cats. My sister has three and my mother has two. Two of my sister’s are just little mewers. Baby kittens. All of this is weird to me, because my Pop had told my sister specifically, and in no uncertain words, “Don’t bring your damn cats over here.” He’s not an asshole. But her cats are. They eat all the food, they screw up the litter box – which means my mother’s cats won’t go in the litter box due to territorial shit… It just turns everything into a circus.

So I bring in the wife and kid and start looking for the extra three cats. Okay, here’s one. He’s chewing a hole in my dad’s house shoe. Oh, here’s where my mother’s cats have been shitting, because the litter box is out of bounds. Nice. Nine piles of cat shit. Oh, and here’s one of the kittens. Hey little kitty! How’s it – what the hell? Man, you’re stiff as a board! I picked it up and it sort of just stayed in that same position, sticking straight out from my hand. Hmm. Guess he didn’t make it. I tossed him in the trash can and went about looking for the Final Cat. Well I checked the whole house and didn’t see her anywhere. Then my wife finally points out, “Oh, did you check that bathroom? The door is shut, but there’s light coming through the bottom.” Oh hell. What will I find in there?

Oh, there’s the other kitty! Hi sweet kitty! Oh, how precious, she’s sleeping with her head on her little front feet. It’s so cute. Wow, she’s stiff too. What? what the hell, is she dead too? I uh… Uh, yeah. Okay, so I nudged her with my foot. Hard as a rock. Well I had better scoop her up and dispose of her too, but – ah, well I’ll leave this one for my sister since it’s stuck to the tile. Literally. Like its entire front side had become one with the ceramic upon which it lay. I heard it peeling away as I tried to move it, and decided it would be too much of a cleanup job for me right now. I have to get my kid home and into bed. And the car is warming up out front.

So I guess that’s where cats go to become good cats. I wonder if I go back in a couple of days if some of the others will have improved as well? We shall see, friends.