Falling back

Welcome to “standard” time.

It’s the time of year when I start thinking of bedtime as a delivery system to that first cup of coffee in the morning.

This is also the time of year when Miss Mia Sopaipilla starts yowling outside the bedroom door at stupid-thirty, singing me out of the bed so she can get into it. Miss Mia doesn’t know from clocks, daylight saving or standard time. And she wouldn’t care if she did.

“Sounds like a personal problem to me,” she’d say. “Now get out of my bed.”

On Sundays I strip the bed of sheets and pillowcases for washing. This is easier said than done with a cat in the middle of things.

See, once the brisk fall mornings arrive Miss Mia insists on a daily sojourn in the Winter Palace — the comforter folded over like the corn tortilla in a quesadilla, with Miss Mia as the filling — and preparing it for occupancy is one of my chores as cat wrangler, second shift. It takes priority over everything else, even that first cup of coffee.

Ordinarily, no problem. Unless it’s fall-back Sunday, the bed needs stripping, and suddenly it’s full of cat.

At this point your hardcore java junkie, nonplussed by a clock that displays a time of day inconsistent with a dopamine-serotonin-caffeine mixture optimized for basic functionality, might spiral into a twitching, hissing fit, not unlike a cat abruptly evicted from a warm bed on a chilly morning.

Not so Your Humble Narrator. I am, after all, a Professional Dope Fiend who has learned through bitter and painful experience to avoid scenes in the pale gloom of morning, before the first fix of the day. One must swiftly overcome all obstacles between one’s habit and its solution without invoking some vile keening that draws the lazy eye of the constables.

Happily, one of the voices in my head is a prestidigitator, The Amazing Doggini, a wizard of legerdemain with the supple fingers of a Marseilles pickpocket and the desperate focus of a Hell’s Kitchen smackhead.

You’ve seen a magician whisk a tablecloth from underneath a full dinner setting for four without a single crack in the crockery? Stripping a bed of its sheets while a cat naps under the comforter requires similar dexterity, but less velocity.

Also, patience. If at any point the purring stops you risk acquiring an enraged cat attached via all five pointy bits to some tender part of your anatomy, like one of the face-huggers in “Alien.”

Fortunately, this wasn’t The Amazing Doggini’s first rodeo. In a previous life he jerked a throw rug out from under the Hound of the Baskervilles and escaped unmarked to tell the tale. Thus the sheets slid slowly from beneath Miss Mia and into the washing machine.

And I finally got to have my cup of coffee. I needed it, too. Because I still had a litter box to clean out. The Amazing Doggini doesn’t do litter boxes.