I spend most of my days with cats. Five of them. Lumpy has cancer and lays on the couch all day. Tigee is a feral cat living in the backyard, and semi-feral Pez has FIV and sniffles a bit.  Ozzie is hyperactive and is my least favorite. Lily is just a cat.

It seems like this life should bother me more than it does, and maybe it will later. I’ve only lived here a short while. I’m not used to cats. But even if I had lived with cats before, I wouldn’t be prepared to be with them most of my day. I don’t have a job.

The animals belong to my girlfriend and are very dear to her. She has had dogs, but prefers cats.

I am not a cat person. But cats, like most non-human animals, seem to take a special liking to me. And I tend to like living things that like me. I’m a friend. But not a relative. I occasionally direct language at the cats, but am mostly insincere. I think most people who talk to their animal overvalue the quality of the discourse.

I feed them. Eight or nine cans a day. Every day. And dry food on the side. I let them in and out of the house. Half a dozen times a day. And attend to various ancillary needs, including vet visits.

They are with me when I read and eat. Sometimes when I bathe and piss.

Never when I sleep or am intimate. I am thankful for that.

Like my fear of becoming that guy blogging in his underwear to an audience of one, rather than just being a blogger, I fear being that cat guy; not just a guy with cats.

I also fear being that guy with a website dedicated solely to years of troubling email exchanges with his ex-wife. Or that guy with a fantasy baseball website, but no baseball league participants. Or that guy who reads a lot but has no one to share his thoughts with.

If I become that last one, it’s gonna be a lot harder to bear being the others.

I’m not publishing this item. It’s private. For my eyes only. But I know I can’t write it as if no one else will read it. I am not that trusting of the world. (Ed. note: I published it 16 years later.)

So, I’m writing in the detached, over-explanatory style of my blog. Only this will be a personal scribbling I can’t write in public. There will be more like it, minus the personal scribblings I can’t even write in private.

I do this with the knowledge that it’s not at all healthy to be out of work, home alone and deep in conversation with oneself. I have resisted until recently the urge to start a blog. But I wanted to put WordPress on my resume and have clips to show prospective employers.

Although I add to those flimsy justifications a belief that the unimaginable could occur and an audience might stumble upon my blog, I truly expect to write the blog fully clothed and that no one will read it.

It would be quite another thing, however, to find myself holed up in a suburban cocoon, babbling incessantly in print just for the sake of babbling. That is an activity best accomplished after work rather than instead of work.

I have been here before. I kept a journal as an adolescent, sort of. Pages were churned out on my new typewriter, filled with pithy, perhaps profound, insights and clever poetry, illustrated with idiosyncratic stick-man line-art. Bound by metal clasps between cardboard covers. I made up words — effesdity was my favorite — and fretted that “common sense: to a man without it, it does not seem common.”

And there was this:

he talks to talk, not to be heard,
his guttural utterings, meant to be words,
come out as syllables, never to learn,
is he who talks constantly, not to be heard.

That’s all I remember of the journal. I threw it away after showing it to my mother, who then showed it to a mahjong gathering one afternoon while I was at school.

My current endeavor is fraught with peril. It gives me great pause. Yet, I feel I have let a lifetime of mental scribblings slip through that sieve of oblivion I call my mind, and am curious to see if this shit is worth preserving.

But only a little curious.

(Editor’s note: This essay is a combination of intro and first entry from my 2010 journal that never got past a second entry, and later ramblings. Other cats in later years: Butterfly, Zane and one who turned out to belong to a neighbor (outdoor cats) and Polly.)