THE BOOK OF KNEAD
Cats knead us. We need cats.
I. Knead
It all begins with knead. Cats knead us. And we convince ourselves that cats need us. But it is really we who need them. Catakism’s power stems from our deep and abiding need for kitties in our lives.
Let us look at the act of kneading itself—that mysterious cat behavior in which a cat’s claws puncture our flesh, like a meat tenderizer into a steak, while purring loudly—for this act encapsulates the heart of the human–feline relationship and sets the stage for Catakism.
Kneading is a process that universally unfolds in several steps:
1. The cat locates the softest part of the human’s body. This could be the thigh, the belly, the breast; as a general rule, finding a soft spot on a human is not particularly challenging. It’s important to understand, though, that as the cat seeks a literal soft spot on the human, it is symbolically seeking an emotional soft spot, the place where the human is least guarded and defended. For that is where it gains its point of entry into the human’s psyche.
2. The cat begins applying pressure on the human’s body like a Swedish masseur named Sven. Just as a human kneads dough to turn it into bread, the kitty kneads the human to turn her into dough. The rhythmic up-and-down action of alternating paws does an end-run around the rational mind and lulls the human into a state of delirium.
3. The cat emits the loudest purr in its repertoire, further hypnotizing the human and rendering her incapable of defending herself physically or mentally. To seal the deal, the cat turns on the “soft eyes” and the slow blinks, which reduces the human’s vocabulary to two words: “Yes, meow-ster?”
4. The cat releases its weapons. Once the human is sufficiently lulled into mental surrender (average time required: 5 seconds), the cat unleashes its hidden weapon. It flips open the tiny switchblades hidden in its paws and commences to repeatedly lacerate the human it professes to love, over and over, with needle-sharp mini spears.
Does the human scream and fling the cat across the room? No. The human submits, and the cat literally has its hooks into her. The human now wants to be kneaded—and needs to be needed—by the cat.
And so begins that exquisite marriage of love and pain called “cat ownership.”* Think Fifty Shades of Gray Tabby.
* As noted earlier, no human owns a cat.
II. Need
Although humans need cats, we also possess a strange entity known as an ego. This delicate and fragile entity feels threatened at all times, so it protects and defends itself by making the human feel vastly more important than he/she actually is. In Catakism, this manifests with the human convinced that the cat needs her, rather than the other way around.
However, cats are totally fine without humans. They can feed themselves, bathe themselves, house themselves, have kittens without midwives, and, yes, even poop all by themselves, all without any human intervention. This thought is horrifying to the human. After all, if the kitty doesn’t need the human, the kitty might decide to leave, and that would be cat-astrophic!
And so the dedicated Catakist convinces herself that kitty has a huge list of highly specialized needs that only the human can fulfill.
Cats need protection and shelter. The first thing a Catakist tells herself is that a cat needs the shelter and protection of a human home to survive. Because out there in the savage wilds of suburban Sunnyvale, the cat might be attacked and eaten by any number of predators, such as … thinking, thinking … dum de dum. Pterodactyls?
Okay, yes, in some places there are wild animals, such as coyotes, that occasionally prey on cats, but cats are pretty much the apex predator in most environments where humans also live. Just ask the local blue jays, mice, and even dogs.
Yet humans are so convinced that kitties need protective custody that they basically place them under house arrest 24/7. Many Catakists turn their homes into Cattica, Whisker’s Island, Alcatraz, Pawshank … only permitting their cats to explore a tiny outdoor exercise yard using any means possible short of barbed wire to keep them contained. But up until about seventy years ago, many house cats roamed freely outdoors and they were just fine.
The real reason many Catakists are so protective is not that Cat can’t fend for herself, but that, given an option, Cat might take her chances living with the “other” crazy cat lady down the street. And every once in a while a cat does just that—packs its bags, collects its security deposit, and moves in with the Franklins around the corner—just to remind the humans that Cat has a mind of her own and decides where to live.
Cats need gourmet food. Catakists actually believe that Cat is incapable of eating without human intervention. Not only is Cat unable to feed herself, thinks the Catakist, but she is also a highly finicky, specialized eater that requires a nonstop variety of cooked and prepared gourmet dishes such as Flaked Tilapia in Consommé, Turkey Soufflé, Duck and Wild Rice in Gravy, Extreme Tuna Surprise, and Grilled Chicken and Prawns with Spring Vegetables. Dog food comes in the form of “chow” and “kibble,” but cat food comes in the form of paté, mini-fillets, flakes, shreds, premium cuts, and entrées. Catakists, in fact, won’t feed their cat any food that doesn’t have an accent mark over one of the words.
The most casual glance at a nature show, however, reveals that cats are the most exquisitely designed hunters in the animal kingdom. Turns out, if you don’t offer them a jeweled chalice filled with Yellowfin Tuna Florentine, they will happily rip a chipmunk into “gourmet shreds” and eat it—horror of horrors—without the giblet gravy. No, says the Catakist, not my Snowball!
Cats need pampering. Despite the fact that cats take better care of themselves than the average hotel chain heiress—some spending up to 50 percent of their waking time cleaning and grooming themselves (fact)—Catakists tell themselves that their cats require 24-hour human pampering. This may be in the form of thrice-daily brushings; special blankets, beds, and indoor play areas; hypoallergenic bathing wipes; professional groomings; “nail pawlish”; servings of warm milk in crystal stemware; special platforms from which to watch the birds outside; and bejeweled accessories.
Nine Signs That You Might Be Spoiling Your Cat
1. Passersby ring your doorbell asking if they can rent the cat house in your backyard as a summer home.
2. Your cat gets an iPad upgrade before you do so it can play Cat Fishing 2 in super hi-res.
3. Your cat’s litter box not only cleans itself, but also offers the user a steamed towel and an assortment of eau de toilette.
4. Your cat has begun to resemble a hassock with feet.
5. Your cat has its own online account at Socks Fifth Avenue.
6. Your cat occasionally tips you for your services.
7. All of your furniture has built-in tunnels.
8. You worry about how your cat is going to rate your service skills on your annual staff evaluation.
9. “Repair the cat elevator” is higher on your to-do list than “Feed the kids.”
Cats Need to Be Carried. Thirty million years of evolution have crafted the cat into the most finely tuned athlete in the entire animal kingdom. And yet some Catakists believe that cats are incapable of even rudimentary self-locomotion. In fact, 37 percent of Catakists believe they must carry Twinkles from the couch to the bird-watching window to the feeding platform to the feather bed.
Not only must a cat be carried from point A to every point B—and placed in a stroller when going outdoors—it must also be picked up and set down with the delicacy reserved for handling live grenades.
Cats Need to Be Entertained. Cats are Zen masters who require no external stimulation whatsoever, but Catakists provide an endless parade of cat toys, cat shows, and cat devices before Mr. Tibbs all day long, despite Mr. Tibbs’s cat-aclysmic lack of interest.
Cats don’t sleep 17.5 hours a day because they’re tired—we make sure they don’t have to do anything to tucker themselves out—it’s because they want to avoid our endless barrage of mechanical fish and electronic mouse-noise generators.
Cats Need Poop Intervention. Perhaps the greatest way humans have inserted themselves into the natural processes of cats is the invention of the litter box. Evidently, humans believe that cats are not capable of pooping on their own, and so they have created a multi-billion-dollar industry based on the collecting and disposing of cat doo-doo.
We have convinced ourselves that without spring-breeze-scented, miracle-clumping, scoopable, multi-cat litter box crystals with odor-eliminating carbon, poor Cat would be forced to hold it in throughout eternity. We are genuinely shocked to learn that when not provided with luxury toilet facilities and bathroom attendants, a cat will poop on something we like to call the ground.
And so, yet another paradox of Catakism is revealed. On one hand, we worship our felines as superior beings, but on the other hand we tell ourselves that cats can’t eat, sleep, walk, or poop without our help, which places them somewhere below the garden slug on the evolutionary scale.
Of course, all our posturing about cats needing us is just a smokescreen for the fact that we desperately need our kitties.
III. Kitty Misses Me
One way humans deal with their attachment to Cat is by telling themselves that their kitty suffers from separation anxiety when the two are not together. Humans feel extremely guilty about leaving their kitties home alone for a few days or even a few hours.
In order to help ease kitty’s fictional separation anxiety, humans do things like leave Too Cute: Kitties on TV “for kitty” when they go out for the evening, leave an electronic fish game running, or leave an article of clothing with the human’s scent on it for the kitty to sleep on. When they’re going to be away for more than a day, some Catakists actually call and talk to their kitty via the answering machine or send them mouse emojis on their kitty tablet devices.
But who really misses whom? Do cats really give a litter-lump about humans leaving them for a day or a week? No, as long as they have plenty of food and water, cats view their time away from the human as (warning, the following content may be disturbing) … a vacation!
Yes, without the human around, Cat can:
walk through a room without being scooped up and asked, “Who’s the sweetest kitty in the world? Bootsy is! Oh yes he is, oh yes he IS!”
eat a meal at her leisure without a human face six inches away, anxiously asking, “Does Princess like her Trout Supreme? Mommy bought it special for her little one.”
enjoy a full twenty-four hours without being photographed in a hat of any kind
experience actual silence, as opposed to human silence, which includes background music; televisions; beeping and pinging from electronic devices; footsteps; belches, sighs, groans, and stomach growls; clanging dishes and silverware; flushing toilets; blenders, choppers, and garbage disposals; electric fans; and, of course, spontaneous and unconscious outbursts of “Who’s my snuggly wuggums?”
Because humans possess the aforementioned ego, though, they have a need to view separation anxiety as coming from the kitty. The truth is, when they leave their cat, it’s their own anxiety that humans are sensing. The cat has no need to set his human’s face as his smartphone’s wallpaper so he can look at her all day when she is at work. The cat has no need to get a coffee mug custom-made with his human’s face on it and the caption, “I love my Latina Longhair.” In the human’s absence, the cat has no need to post videos on YouTube of the human sleeping and wait anxiously for the “Cutest. Human. Ever.” comments to start rolling in.
No, when the human is away, the cat will play.
IV. Every Pounce of Our Love: We Can’t Be Without Them
For Catakists, cats provide a reason for living as well as the default focus for all of the love and attention in the household, and the Catakist simply doesn’t know how to handle Cat’s absence. Catakist couples, for example, get nervous when they don’t have the cat around to serve as their relationship go-between. For without Whiskers around to talk to in a ridiculously high-pitched voice, they actually have to talk to each other.
V. Controlled by the Cuteness: Feline Attachment
Humans are attached to Cat like no other creature on Earth. American homes, for example, have more than ninety million cats, as opposed to seventy to eighty million dogs. The greatest measure of human attachment, of course, is the way we spend our money. For example, spending patterns reveal that while humans may enjoy going to the movies, they are attached to their televisions; while humans may enjoy sushi, they are attached to pizza. Similarly, while humans enjoy cockatiels, ferrets, and lop-eared bunnies, they are attached to Cat.
According to Peteducation.com, the average cat owner spends between ten and twenty thousand dollars on a cat over its lifetime. This covers the initial purchase, spaying/neutering, food, litter, litter boxes, cat furniture, replacement of cat-damaged human furniture, window perches, cat beds, cat door construction, cat carriers, scratching posts, food dishes, grooming tools, fur-removing tape, carpet stain removers, flea control products, heartworm prevention, training (ha!) aids, routine vaccines, dental care, ear care, vitamins, and occasional boarding.
A Catakist views such mundane expenses as a mere starting point, adding further staple purchases such as:
climate-controlled cat condos
ergonomically designed cat grooming tools
alternative therapies, such as aromatherapy; Shiatsu, Thai, traditional, and Tellington TTouch massages; Reiki; acupuncture; acupressure; and kitty chiropractics
a 24-hour film crew for capturing cunning videos
And let’s not forget all the cat toys, cat treats, cat costumes, and other purr-aphernalia that fills a Catakist’s home from top to bottom.
VI. Feline Attachment Disorders
Feline attachment creates a number of mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual conditions that Catakists must guard against. Most Catakists eventually contract one or more of these grave disorders and must seek treatment by a physician, cleric, or pet store owner.
Feline Deprivation Disorder (a.k.a. cat separation anxiety) affects most Catakists who are forced to endure more than forty-eight hours without playing with a cat, watching a cat video, or sharing photos of cats dressed in their finest. Symptoms include nausea, dizziness, a glazed look in the eye, and the proclivity to roll around on the floor batting a ball of yarn. When this syndrome appears in children, it’s know as Juvenile Feline Deprivation Disorder (JFDD), for which there is only one cure: kittens, kittens, and more kittens.
Urine Nasal-blindness. Cat urine bears one of the strongest, most distinct, and least pleasant odors known to humanity. Catakists, however, are blissfully unaware of it. The human brain adapts to any stimulus it is constantly surrounded by, and when your home contains three litter boxes, a spraying tomcat, one Shadow Cat angry at its human for taking too long at the grocery store, an open-door policy on strays, and wall-to-wall carpets, then cat pee is like oxygen to you. You need an intervention—namely, someone with a working nose who will slap you back to your senses.
YouTubular Compulsivity. At first it was just a social thing. You enjoyed an occasional YouTube cat video with friends. But now it has turned into a dark compulsion that’s threatening to ruin your life. You watch on your computer, your smartphone, your tablet, and your watch. You secretly store cat video files on your hard drive in case the Internet ever goes down, and you have backup devices in your desk drawer, under your bed, and even under the bathroom sink. When everyone is asleep, you stay up watching cat videos and endlessly typing “adorable” into comment boxes. You need help. Or at least a faster Internet connection so you can download more cat videos.
Feline Numerical Dysfunction. This disorder manifests as a mysterious inability to count cats. While sufferers retain their full mathematical competency in all other areas of life, they lose their ability to keep numerical tabs on how many kitties they own. Thus, as the Catakist acquires more and more felines, she tells herself, in her mind, that she has “at most two.”
Researchers believe it is the fear of being classified as a crazy cat lady that often causes this common form of psychological denial. In other cases it may be an ultimatum from a spouse, such as, “If you bring home one more cat, I’m going to bulldoze the house, bury the rubble under six tons of pine tree air fresheners, and join a monastery.”
Catatonic Navigational Disorder. Many Catakists develop a pathological inability to steer their automobiles away from pet stores, cat rescue centers, or cat cafés. Though they have every intention of just driving to the grocery store, they slip into an unconscious fugue state and then find themselves sitting outside a feline-centric location with no memory of how they got there. Then, of course, they tell themselves, “Well, now that I’m here, I might as well go inside and take a quick peek.”
VII. Man Makes Cat in His Image and Likeness: The Humanization of Cats
The ultimate sign of the powerful attachment to cats is people’s insistence upon humanizing them. Catakists are so identified with their cats that they find it impossible to believe their kitty does not share a full range of human tastes, emotions, abstract thoughts, and behaviors. That’s because when a Catakist looks into a cat’s eyes, she sees another person looking back. So when the cat, for instance, awakens from a nap and looks at the human with a raised eyebrow, the Catakist imagines the cat is thinking something like, “I still haven’t forgiven you for laughing at me yesterday when I mistook that piece of cellophane for a predator, but you can start to work your way into my good graces by warming my canned food for me today instead of feeding it to me cold from the fridge like I’m some kind of savage,” when the kitty is really thinking, “What the hell are you looking at?”
Here are some of the most common ways diehard Catakists humanize kitties:
Dressing cats in human clothes. Cat lovers are endlessly fascinated by the sight of kitties dressed as humans, in spite of the fact that this custom brings only annoyance to felines. Seeing a kitty dressed in a pirate costume, granny dress, top hat, cowboy hat and bandanna, hoodie, sombrero, tam, witch hat, ballerina outfit, hipster getup, or a wig of any kind is enough to send Catakists into paroxysms of laughter. Cats wearing sunglasses are the all-time favorite. Perhaps this is because of the cool factor we attribute to cats, or maybe it’s because sunglasses hide the look of raw disgust beaming from the cat’s eyes as the human tries to wrangle said cat into an Elvis wig.
Cats doing random human activities. In addition to dressing cats in human clothes and projecting human thoughts onto them, Catakists are driven to spiritual ecstasy by looking at photos and videos of cats doing things like: “typing” on a computer keyboard, drinking at a bar, using a toilet, playing a piano, dancing on two legs, pushing a shopping cart, reclining in a La-Z-Boy,“ answering” a phone, opening doors, “talking,” and reading.
Catakists also believe cats require full human treatment when it comes to boarding, grooming, feeding, entertaining, and celebrating their cats. Don’t believe it? Read on …
Cat hotels. When a Catakist is forced—and force is usually required—to be away from his or her kitty, the only acceptable boarding choice is a full-scale cat hotel. Most of these facilities make the Waldorf look like a Red Roof Inn and feature things like four-poster beds, piped-in music, soft armchairs, plasma TVs, down pillows, private toilet facilities, climate control, and gourmet bedtime snacks.
Cat sitters. For the Catakist who can’t bear to board their baby, there is an option of hiring a cat sitter who will come to the house and literally just sit there (because Catakists tell themselves that cats can’t bear to be without human company for twelve whole hours). To Cat, this is known as “ruining my human-free vacation.”
Special events. Catakists firmly believe that cats keep track of the human calendar and have a need to mark special events the same way humans do. This includes kitty birthday parties, complete with tuna birthday “cakes,” and kitty Christmas card photo sessions, replete with (what else?) tiny Santa hats. But for the creative Catakist, this can also include celebrating holidays like Pink Floyd Day, which kitty celebrates by indulging in catnip; Bastille Day, when the cat is let out of the house for a day; and Cat Glory and Exaltation Day, which is pretty much every day of the year.
Catakists also celebrate the anniversary of their own Cat Mitzvah, the day they formally took on the mantle of Catakism.
Ninefold Path Guidepost #2
If you have money “left over” at the end of the month after paying your rent, utilities, and life insurance, you are not spending enough on your cat.
Some helpful ways to spend down: Consider, perhaps, adding a bidet to the litter box or a sound system to the kitty condo. Or maybe it’s time for a new set of dining stemware in a shellfish theme. The one thing you don’t want to happen is for your cat to see your checking account balance, inviting the question, “Why wasn’t this money spent on me?” Good luck explaining that.
