Paradise with an Ocean View

I'm on a tropical beach, laid out in a lounge chair.  Sun is just perfect, shining down, warm.  I'm in shorts and a blouse, nice wide brimmed hat, book across me, sunglasses crooked, drool escaping my half open mouth. I'm asleep!  Gloriously dozing in the sun, the ocean 200 feet in front of my feet.

I jostle awake.  There's a shirtless guy in shorts standing beside me, offering me a Margarita.  I have no idea where he came from but he's welcome to stay.

This is my dream.

I can go anywhere and do anything in my dreams.

Today has been a bad bad day.  All I want to do....is dream, dream, dream.....

Not only did I have the neighbor fight, but I got sucked into another miserable awful cat situation when I was just going to get some cats fixed from some guy referred to me with the need.

But he wants me to solve his entire life for him, which includes but is not limited to having four feral adult cats, the adult kittens of his unfixed pregnant again house cat, running in his house.  He claims they're not house broken.  Before i see the place, I already know, because I've heard it before, that he doesn't keep the litter box clean.  Oh my does he ever NOT!

Then he makes claims his landlord is going to evict him if they're not gone, or charge him a huge cat deposit, will I talk to his landlord for him, will I do this and that for him, until I stop him, when I'm over there to pick the unfixed cats up tonight, aghast at the awfulness of the place.  He hasn't cleaned a litter box or his place in at least a year. I trick them into live traps.  Takes only minutes and I'm glad because I want out of there badly!

Every litter box is overflowing in cat shit.  The cats then began using the carpet, which reeks.  He hasn't vacuumed it in a long time, looks like.  The stench makes my eyes burn.

I give him the overflowing outhouse comparison.  I tell him cats can smell 100 times better than he can, at least.  Would he walk into and use an outhouse overflowing in shit and pee?  Would he?  Or would he go behind a bush, somewhere else?   Well then, buddy, your cat, who can smell a zillion times better than you can, isn't going to use a filthy litter box.

He's trying to get me to take the cats.  I don't feel sorry for him in the least.  He did this to these cats and to himself.  He caused this.  Now he's trying to play victim and get someone else to pay the costs of his behavior.  No fucking dice.  But I feel for these poor, probably doomed, cats.  I should have walked away, gotten out of there, run!

Bad day.

I try to go get the two to three unfixed males, at the ramshackle trailer where last week, I took two from to be fixed.  They're leaving, moving and the husband says taking only two cats.  I'm met by the woman, this time. The cats are not ready.  She starts in about how upset she is the female cat fixed last week was pregnant at spay, how she is pro life and anti abortion and that we should have done a blood test or ultra sound.

I say, "Actually you should have if you have those beliefs.   I don't have those beliefs.  If you do, then you pay for them yourself.  I'm not paying for your  beliefs."   They let the cats free roam, probably will abandon some, told me the mom of all these young adults is dead, but she isn't.  I got her fixed down the street, along with her mostly grown daughter.  A kind couple feeds them as strays.  Both were pregnant at spay.

She calls me a heathen devil.  I call her a cat killer.  Sort of.  I tell her when she lets her cats have kittens, she kills living cats, waiting for homes, because there are just too many.  I think she'll understand this, because the area is over run in unwanteds, many bred by these here radical pro lifers, who seem to have no regard for their breeder effect on the neighborhood.  You would think they'd give a shit about the living.

She says a living cat is exactly the same as an egg that has been fertilized.  Ok.  So you're a vegan then lady?  No, she's not even a vegetarian.  So I'm lost, in her value maze.  I tell her I'm leaving, that I don't help people anymore who are screaming at me like heathens.  I tell her to quit breeding cats and causing problems in the neighborhood with the overflow.

One thing she said makes me wonder.  She claims she ran into someone, who was on the city council once, who told her the city gave the developer who bought the trailer park there, evicting all the tenants, money, so he'd be better able to buy it.  She was mad, angry, and I should have seen the connection. I told her how horrible, dishonorable that was, if true, that the city would do such a thing to them, all those long term very poor tenants.    She was feeling betrayed, unwanted herself, I knew that.  I commiserated with her, told her to write a letter to the editor, complain to the state, ask it be looked into.  What a horrible thing, if its true, to have a city not want your eyesore poverty so badly they'll pay a developer to buy the land out from under your place.

I don't care what people believe. But leave me out of it.  And don't ask me to pay for it and don't scream at me and call me names for helping you out.  I didn't stick around more than two minutes to take the shit being thrown my way. I tell her to take care of those lovely cats and get them fixed.

Then I drive off into the sunset.

I wish I was sailing off into the sunset, in my wide brimmed hat and my shorts with the azure sea around me, the sounds of the ocean so calming and peaceful.