Greg: Pets, Poop, and the Illusion of Obsession

We have a cat. And a rabbit. And two dogs. And here's the thing. I'm NOT a pet person at all. My childhood is littered with an unbroken string of pet fails, and my adulthood has been no different. My wife and kids, however, seem to love pets, and every year, I'm powerless to stop the juggernaut of pet yearnings once they set in. But I don't like pets. I'm no good at keeping them. Actually, NONE of us seem to be any good at keeping them. I've kept careful records, and if all the pets we've owned in the last four years were still alive, we'd currently have 10 cats, 4 dogs, 2 mice, a guinea pig, and a lizard named Steven.

So the facts speak for themselves. Pets are just a liability. The mortality rate is too high, and to be really frank, their poop stresses me out.

Take the cat for example. We just had to get a new cat, despite the fact that the last FOUR cats we owned all met untimely demises from playing in traffic--one of them I ran over myself..but not on purpose! We named this new cat Tigger after the lovable Winnie-the-Pooh character who's always bouncing around trying to figure out what Tiggers do best. Well it turns out that what Tigger's do best is poop.

Seriously. Let's examine the whole cat thing and try to make some sense out of it. Here's an animal who has razor-sharp claws at the ends of all four feet and uses them liberally to shred anything from my new couch to my daughter's face (I mean it...she looks like Al Pacino right now). It also starts dropping wheelbarrows full of hair all over the house every season, which floats in the air waiting to drop into your cereal bowl just as you pour the milk. The cat's skin conceals some sort of mysterious toxin which means half our friends can never visit us without going into anaphylactic shock. The cat also poops in our spare bedroom closet. In...the...closet. Are you taking notes? Let's summarize. Deadly claws...floating hairs...poisonous skin...poop in closet. And after totaling that all up, we decide that we WANT this!? We LIKE it! We CHOOSE to have this creature in the house!!

To put it another way, just think what would happen if I started ripping my kid's faces, poisoning my sister-in-law, and pooping in the closet! You wouldn't cuddle me at the end of the day! You'd call the police! I'd be in jail!

Yet at my house, the cat is just one of four nasty creatures that live and poop all over our property. Shannon said a couple days ago that I seem to be obsessed with poop. "It seems like every time you open your mouth, you're talking about poop again," she said, "What's your deal? I thought poop stressed you out."

It does. I thought about this long and hard, and I realized that it must be a coping mechanism. Talking about it is the only way I can function within the hostile environment into which I've been thrust. At any given moment we're surrounded by the stuff. We've cordoned off whole sections of our house just to contain it. The cat fills up the closet. The rabbit owns the screened porch (which now looks just like a Cocoa Puffs factory) and the dogs have transformed our entire, lovely backyard into a 75 x 100 foot toilet. There are literally MOUNDS of the stuff everywhere...to say nothing about my youngest daughter who still carries it around in her pants like some fashion accessory.

Now I ask you, am I the one with the problem? Is this really an obsession or just some ancestor of medieval torture? Help me out here. I can't be the only one who thinks this isn't normal!