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Molly & Mabel
Dec. 7th, 2025 11:55 amIf I'm braindead, so be it!
I'll spend the rest of my life watching movies.
###
Last night, I watched something called The Friend, in which Naomi Watts inherits a massive Great Dane from Bill Murray after he commits suicide, and it was the saddest movie ever because even though Naomi Watts eventually comes to love the dog, at the beginning of the movie she doesn't, she's just stuck with him because nobody else will take him, so the movie made me think of the fragility and ultimate unenforceability of the compacts we form with companion animals.
This hit home for me because I don't love the two cats currently my companion animals as much as I've loved companion animals in the past.
Molly & Mabel are not cuddly cats.
They don't sit on laps. They don't like to be picked up and... packaged, enfolded with affection. They will struggle if I try to do this. They are wary & guarded with everyone but me: Gus reported he did not see them once while I was away in Ithaca over Thanksgiving, and Icky reported that while Molly kiska would sit at the head of the stairs and stare down at him, she would never come down.
Sometimes, they are even wary & guarded with me.
Mabel will still hiss at me occasionally—not because she is an aggressive cat but because she is a very frightened cat. She has a scar on her head swooping down from her ear to her left eye, and I suspect she was badly used as a kitten, poor little girl.
Clearly, they love me in their own way.
Molly always trails me downstairs whenever I cook and at night, crawls into bed alongside me and kneads on blankets there; Mabel is forever flopping down on my feet and exposing her plump belly: Pet me please!
It's so odd the way both of them adore having their bellies rubbed but can hardly bear to be touched on any other part of their anatomy! Most cats of my acquaintance have been the other way around.
They are quite the most talkative cats I have ever been around. Molly will meow to me for 15 minutes straight if I keep asking her, "What, Molly? What?"
"It's good that you have the two cats," Brian told me. "They're like your little family. You need a little family."
###
But I am disloyal. I keep thinking, It would be easier to move if I didn't have the two cats. It would be easier to travel.
And I feel bad for thinking that because I take the animal/human compact very seriously. These kiskas are so eccentric and idiosyncratic that no one would ever want them except me—and I only half want them.
They trust me.
They hardly trust anything else outside their own bodies and instincts.
But they trust me.
Betraying that trust would be like betraying the universe somehow.
But I'm tempted to sometimes.
I'll spend the rest of my life watching movies.
###
Last night, I watched something called The Friend, in which Naomi Watts inherits a massive Great Dane from Bill Murray after he commits suicide, and it was the saddest movie ever because even though Naomi Watts eventually comes to love the dog, at the beginning of the movie she doesn't, she's just stuck with him because nobody else will take him, so the movie made me think of the fragility and ultimate unenforceability of the compacts we form with companion animals.
This hit home for me because I don't love the two cats currently my companion animals as much as I've loved companion animals in the past.
Molly & Mabel are not cuddly cats.
They don't sit on laps. They don't like to be picked up and... packaged, enfolded with affection. They will struggle if I try to do this. They are wary & guarded with everyone but me: Gus reported he did not see them once while I was away in Ithaca over Thanksgiving, and Icky reported that while Molly kiska would sit at the head of the stairs and stare down at him, she would never come down.
Sometimes, they are even wary & guarded with me.
Mabel will still hiss at me occasionally—not because she is an aggressive cat but because she is a very frightened cat. She has a scar on her head swooping down from her ear to her left eye, and I suspect she was badly used as a kitten, poor little girl.
Clearly, they love me in their own way.
Molly always trails me downstairs whenever I cook and at night, crawls into bed alongside me and kneads on blankets there; Mabel is forever flopping down on my feet and exposing her plump belly: Pet me please!
It's so odd the way both of them adore having their bellies rubbed but can hardly bear to be touched on any other part of their anatomy! Most cats of my acquaintance have been the other way around.
They are quite the most talkative cats I have ever been around. Molly will meow to me for 15 minutes straight if I keep asking her, "What, Molly? What?"
"It's good that you have the two cats," Brian told me. "They're like your little family. You need a little family."
###
But I am disloyal. I keep thinking, It would be easier to move if I didn't have the two cats. It would be easier to travel.
And I feel bad for thinking that because I take the animal/human compact very seriously. These kiskas are so eccentric and idiosyncratic that no one would ever want them except me—and I only half want them.
They trust me.
They hardly trust anything else outside their own bodies and instincts.
But they trust me.
Betraying that trust would be like betraying the universe somehow.
But I'm tempted to sometimes.
