Cat Fight

No, he's mine!

When I'm asked (usually by guys online) if I live alone, I reply, "Yes, but with my two cats."

Who hate each other.

It's autumn and the cat fights in my apartment are out of control. We're in another power struggle transition, and I'm blaming the change of the season and the incipient cooler weather. Gladys isn't happy when it's hot. She's a big furry marshmallow, abjectly over-upholstered, and she gets cranky when warm. Basically, all she does during the summer is stretch out on the bed and sleep, with bouts of sitting up to lick her nether regions bald.

self-mutilation

This summer she licked a low section of her tail down to the short hairs and now her tail looks like a literal cattail. I tell her this is unattractive, but doesn't she listen to me? No. All she does is protest in her rusty hinge voice when I come close, Nooo . . . don't touch me . . . it's too hot. Nooooo . . . I said nooooo . . . .

Mabel, on the other hand, loves me no matter how high the heat index might climb, and so she's had me mostly to herself all summer, curling up against my chest while I'm lying on the loveseat watching TV. It's healing, that purring against your heart.

Now that a cool breeze has entered the apartment, though, Gladys is out and about again, wanting her overstuffed jelly self roughly ruffled and squished, her thick, soft pelt undulating under my fingers.

knead me!

When I get out of the shower, she calls to me from her spot on the bed, wanting once again to be smushed and abused in weirdly fetishistic ways.

This of course makes Mabel narrow her yellow eyes in jealousy until she looks like she's channeling the vitriol of the children of the corn and then they start to claw each other. The ladies have never been friends -- from Day 1 the house reverberated with their poisonous, hissing hatred. I don't take sides if I can help it. In my opinion, they're both bitches and totally at fault in this rift. There have been mean blindsides from both camps, sneaky attacks and vicious smacks.

The nastiest thing Gladys does is wait outside the litterbox while Mabel is doing her business and then whack her when she emerges. I tell her over and over that assaulting someone while they're vulnerable from excretion is against the Geneva Convention, but so far my interfeline peacemaking efforts have come to naught.

Intimidate me with your bulk? I hit you!

The nastiest thing Mabel does to Gladys is hit her in the face at every opportunity. I have pulled many claws out of Gladys's chin.

This escalation of the ongoing War of the Cats won't last too long, I know -- we've been through these skirmish cycles for years now. Soon the real winter cold will come and the radiator will come on and suck all the moisture out of the apartment. Then the fur of both cats will become bristly with static electricity and they will shun me in unison and the jealous domestic violence will subside down to a seething simmer.

This time, will Mabel learn to stop relying on random cruelty and start to share her life with her adoptive sister? This time, will Gladys get off her fat ass and let go of the rules of disengagement that isolate her?

This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me.

This time, will I find the magic method of permanently soothing this disharmonic situation?

Or will I realize that this schism is perhaps a reflection of the divided and warring state of my own psyche, played out in an ongoing external cat drama that represents the dichotomy between my lazy, inertial, mellow, passively-aggressive self and my abrupt internal impetus toward angry, traumatic action?

Or maybe I'll just start getting out more and stop spending so much time living alone with my two cats.