a sad story about a cat

The story you are about to read happened to my friend John Mitchell. I did not, repeat, DID NOT make it up. John, if you are out there somewhere, please verify.

John lived at Woodlawn plantation in a house that was divided in two. On one side was John's place, which he shared with his sister. On the other side was this crack head kind of couple that had a million cats. Okay, actually they only had about 20 cats. Anyway, the cats kept getting eaten by foxes or whatever, and the crack head wife (they weren't crack heads, actually, they were just really weird not quite hippy people and I think the guy wore black socks every day, and his wife was that crazy lady with 20 cats, you know the type) kept accusing John of trying to poison, strangle, capture, torture, barbecue, or relocate (the cat version of extreme rendition) her brood.

John is the type of guy who would never hurt a living creature unless it was human. So it used to make him mad because the cats would pee in his flowers and scratch up his screen and the only thing he ever did was yell at them. Once one pooped in his softball shoes, which he had left out on the porch because they were wet.

Fast forward to the point of the story. One cold, rainy morning John went out to the driveway to start his truck. The driveway was a long dirt thing ending in a big circle from which everyone's parked vehicle radiated like petals on a pollution flower. He put the truck into gear and started to back up. Suddenly he heard a horrible howl.

He pulled forward and hopped out of the truck. There, on the ground, was a flattened cat. And not just ANY cat, but the crazy lady's FAVORITE cat. It seems the cat went to sleep in the well of John's back wheel because it was dry and warm. The cat did not register that starting the truck meant moving the truck.

John was in a panic. He didn't want to tell crazy lady that he killed her cat. So he did what any man in his position would do. He got a small shovel and pried the cat off his tire tread where it was lodged. Then he placed the cat on the back tire of the crazy lady's car.

Amazingly, it worked. The woman had a nervous breakdown and she and her husband moved from Woodlawn Plantation. We had a huge party, which, oddly enough, is the last time I saw my friend Doug Rippey. Apparently I was wearing leather pants at the party. Oy vey.

New Computer Status Choices

I hope someone reading this has contacts at Microsoft. Ever since Dell "upgraded" my "operating system" to Windows Vista, I've been coming up with new computer status options (accessed when you go to, for example, log off):

-Instead of just sleeping, how about sleeping with the fishes, for when my bastard machine refuses to boot up and then I open it up and touch the mother board without grounding myself and of course I'm standing on a shag wool carpet wearing a fleece. Bye bye mother board. I never learn my lesson...
-Instead of just hibernating, how about hibernating for the winter. I have had luck leaving a computer off for a couple of months, and then turning it on and discovering it works again.
-Defenestrate - or is throwing Windows out the window redundant?
-Recrash - for when you want to reboot but you know the bastard is going to just crash again, so why not just say recrash instead of leading us down the hopeful path that some day the computer might reboot.
-Sleeping but possessed - For some reason the blue power button on my new computer starts flashing randomly in the middle of the night.
It wakes me up and makes me think of Poltergeist the movie. Does anyone know where I can get some virtual holy water, or maybe I should burn some sage in the DVD drive...
-Sleeping with nightmares - sometimes when I put my computer to sleep it seems to wake up, but then when I try to do something with it, it slips back to sleep. Strange.