Low Blow

Exhaustion claimed me yesterday.  I had been doing too much and intended to just return all the cats and sleep yesterday.  I returned the Two Legged Torti cats.  I like those folks there.  The woman feeding them is very poor, has no car, has to take a taxi to get groceries if she can't find a friend or family member to take her, but the apartment in the old house is something you might think would exist in New York City.  It has that sort of a lay out and look.  Cozy and perfect for one person.  She does house cleaning and can only take jobs close enough she can walk or bike to, or where the employer will give her a ride.

She struggles to make it and feed the cats but somehow survives.

I'd been told about a house with possibly a lot of cats on Hill street.  So I drove Hill street and saw a house crawling in cats.  There were not that many and the woman who answered the door was a familiar face, as she clerks at a local convenience store.  She'd moved in with her mother after a divorce.  Her mother had five fixed cats, stolen or killed by neighbors, she claims.  Then she began feeding a couple of strays who showed up.  They each then had kittens.  And one was on a second litter.

They were overwhelmed.  I immediately made plans with them to get them fixed, and told them maybe they could get some into Oregon Humane, up in Portland and gave them their website.  In the meantime, I went home and contacted Heartland, asking if by chance they could take some.  They offered to take the young kittens, four of them, about five or six weeks of age, and the three teens.  So I went back to get them and put the Corvallis business cats in carriers to return also.  One employee had claimed he would adopt the tamer male, but he isn't big on communication and I had no real thought he would actually take him.

These women told me more horror stories.  The daughter had lived not far from me and told me there was a woman on her block she was warned about when she and her husband had moved in there, that she might be killing cats.  But she let her cat outside anyhow and sure enough, he went missing.  Since the alleged cat killing woman lives only a block from me, I immediately thought of Screech and two other strays whom I got fixed and was feeding, who all, over a couple months, vanished.  It made my stomach turn.

She also told me a landlord, who owns the townhouse units across from the Circle K, came in once and told her he'd found 12 dead cats and kittens in a shed behind that block of townhouses.  That also turned my stomach.

Anyhow, I picked up the four kittens and three teens and headed off to Corvallis with them and the Corvallis business boys, intent on returning them.

I turned the seven from Hill St. over to Heartland.  Someone I knew from Albany was there, picking up her lost cat, found in Corvallis.  The cat was microchipped and her owner could not understand how her cat, missing five days, could be found over near the Dollar Store in Corvallis.  The cat didn't cross the river on its own.  She also didn't think her cat would just come to someone under such circumstances, if it had gotten into a car and got out in Corvallis.  I said "I bet you have a cat hating neighbor."  I bet she does, someone who either dumped her in Corvallis or gave a fake Corvallis address or got Corvallis friends to turn the cat in to Heartland.

Then I go off to return the business cats.  I have to check in to go on the property.  I hate that, actually, always have.  To help that business out, I've had to jump through their hoops, even though it was they who asked me to help.  They were given my number by the S/nipped director.  She has relatives who work there.  It has not been easy.  I hope now she can somhow intercede there, for the cats.  She's better at talking to people than I am, and more respected I think, since she owns a business.  That's my hope for the cats, the only hope now.  Anyway, they refuse to stop feeding and have not helped in any manner.  This has resulted in a nightmare for me, of expense and time.

So I stop in to tell them, which always causes me stomach fluttering, as about half the employees seem to hate cats.  I don't know how to talk to people.  No practise.  I talk to cats and kids and animals of all kinds, but not much to people.  I have to muster my guts every time to do it.

This supervisor is one of those who seems to hate cats, and he lit into me, that I'm not supposed to be returning cats, that they shit on "his" product, just went into a tirade, out where anyone passing could hear.  It was awful and I was already so exhausted.  I struggle for words normally with people, in face to face encounters, since I am kind of an isolated soul, but in confrontation like this, that is unexpected, when I am totally exhausted, I was shocked.  It was as if he was pummeling my brain with his fists.

I yelled right back, in the end, all my frustrations, sitting there half the night on so many occasions, because there was no communication, no compassion, and I had not been reimbursed as promised.  He just said I was stupid to do it then. He was probably right.  I did it with good faith, believing the cats would be safe if fixed.  Now I know they're doomed.

 I was denied access to return the cats.  I was mad, frustated and realized, in those moments, I had been played by that business.  A horrible sinking feeling of betrayal and embarrassment over my trusting nature overwhelmed me, and as I drove off, I began to wretch.  My stomach had been hurting, and now I was going to throw up.  I wish I could have done it there, when he was yelling at me, but it was after I got home,  I vomited into my sink.

It's hard to realize I've been played, probably for their own sport, that the cats were doomed from the start, that I was never going to get my expenses reimbursed. And now I have those two boys here and don't know what to do with them.  I had called the original contact man after that encounter with the day super, only to have him text me later, making a mockery of me.  He kept texting after I told him not to contact me again until I finally removed the battery from my phone.

It's ridiculous really. It's a handful of cats, all family, because they never made the effort to get them fixed over the years. It's a vast area too. They only go into the buildings to get out of the cold or rain.  If they built them a couple of nice feral housing units, that would be not be an issue at all.  Many of the employees like the cats as it gives them an interest in being there on the job.

Devastating.  Painful.  Harsh. Speaks volumes about them.

That's life though.  None of them know me.  Can't take it personally.  They were yelling out their frustrations.  I was in the way yesterday. Somebody else will be in the way next time.  Nothing to do but lick my wounds and keep on.  I've been yelled at before.  I've had cats dumped on me before too.  I've been promised expense reimbursement before by the best of them, who were lying through their teeth too.  The old rich Hulls Oaks woman who died recently leaving thousands upon thousands to nonprofits who were so feet licking grateful they held a celebration in the dead woman's honor.  I remember how she promised reimbursement for cat trapping at Hull Oaks and how I never got it.  How awful that was to realize, that I'd been duped and cheated by a millionaire.  Must have made her smile to cheat me out of about $200 in gas and bait money like that.  I wonder if she got a big old kick out of that.  She had told me what a Christian she was, too.  Wonder if she prayed to god thanking him for the extra $200 after cheatnig me.  Or maybe she dropped it in the collection plate at her church.

The alternative is to curl up and die.  Not that that doesn't sound peaceful even appealing many times.  To just give up and die.

I still had to return the Extreme Seniors cats.  I did so.  Then I went to bed.

I have too many cats here.  I still have three from that Lebanon shithole Bone Pile colony.  I have the starving abandoned torti from Lebanon too.  And now the two business cat boys whom I should have euthanized since there's no place for them.  This in addition to my hordes.  No adoption venue.  No community support.  What am I to do?