Cat nap

Turkish is a creature of ritual. Every morning when I drag ass out of the sack he leaps from the couch and joins me in the bathroom, where he launches into a clockwise series of bows and stretches, getting back rubs twice a lap.

After a few go-rounds, he curls up in the sink or on the carpet; if he picks the latter, one is permitted to scratch his chin and belly without the need for disinfectants and stitches afterward.

After a few minutes of what for the Turk’ is fairly lovey-dovey behavior he suddenly remembers who he really is — Mighty Whitey, the Blue-Eyed Bully of Bibleburg, Turkenstein, The Turkinator, et al. — and he commences stalking about the house from door to door, demanding his freedom in a keening sound like helium leaking from a balloon, or maybe Glenn Beck with his teensy nuts in a vise.

Let him out and my schedule is in his large, massively clawed paws. The sonofabitch is harder to catch than bin Laden, and should I manage to lay hands on him, there will be blood. Not his. The good news is, once he’s fined me a pint or two, he has no objection to taking a bracing nap in a window, or perhaps our bed, under the ceiling fan.

Every now and then Turk’ wants the lap, generally while I’m working, and if I don’t give it up he sets about turning the office carpet into confetti. Once aboard, he becomes a critic — not of my writing, but of my typing, which interrupts his carnivorous dreams. He also enjoys supervising my situps from a perch atop my navel.

Come bedtime, Turk’ briefly becomes cuddly again, until Herself plucks him off the bed to take him downstairs for the night. A guy going to the gas chamber complains less, and he’s not gonna be coming back tomorrow.

Maybe that’s why he’s so cheery in the mornings. “Hey, cool, you didn’t take me to the pound again! Dude, scratch my belly!”