Brian's Song

Brian is a 3.

We had a discussion about cat IQ a while back and talked about the cats we have known, on a scale of 1 to 10.

E was at least a 9. She could open the back door and let the dog out, snag food off the table with the stealth of a jewel thief, and use humans as a bridge to get to her bowl on top of the deep freeze. She would sit on laps, but only if you had a pillow for her to lay on to cushion her old bones.

Slipper is a 5. A large, serviceable congenial gullumphing sort of a cat. We call him Loaf, short for Meatloaf, which he resembles.

Brian, alas, makes Slipper look like the Rhodes Scholar of Catdom. Brian is undone by the simplest of obstacles, and under pressure, he cries and falls to the ground like a fainting goat. He likes to lick things and chase things, but he's afraid of everything, including his toys.

Brian and his sibling were all trussed up in their intertwined umbilical cords for some unknown number of hours after their birth. I think the combination of oxygen deprivation and bad genes (his mother was previously the holder of the title of the Dumbest Cat I've Ever Known) Has made Brian, well...what's the PC word? Oh, yeah.

Retarded. Dumb as a sack of hammers.

Brian's only recognizable talent is to make a running start at the windows and cling to the frame six feet off the ground, all four limbs extended like he's being stretched on the rack. When he does this on the porch door, we can open it and go in and out seemingly without disturbing him, while he clings to it like vertical roadkill.

My theory about cats is that it takes them several years to go from irritating kittens to satisfyingly lazy cats. Brian has almost reached two year mark, and he'll still chase a T-shirt strip with as much clueless enthusiasm as he did at three months.

I suspect that Brian will outlive all the other cats, since he's not overburdened with deep thoughts. He'll probably die in another 30 years while batting a pill bottle or running under the dining room table with his T-shirt strip.

And it'll take him an hour to figure out he's dead. He's just that dumb.