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Walnut | Oct 22 2005

The cat is in the other room, playing with its favorite toy: a long strand of wire with a tiny knob of wood at each end. I’ve never liked the cat. As K says, it has brain the size of a walnut. Whenever K says this I picture a walnut inside the cat’s head where its brain should be.

I’m the one who usually feeds the cat because I wake first and because I’m here more often in the early evening. I don’t mind doing this, except I don’t like the way the cat begs to be fed. It particularly bothers me when the cat wakes me in the morning with its begging. For this reason I keep a spray bottle at the head of the bed, directly behind my pillow. The cat hates to be sprayed and will run away once she sees me brandish the bottle. One morning last week I squeezed the trigger but ended up spraying the wall behind the bed because I was holding the bottle backwards.

As a rule I never feed the cat when it begs to be fed as this would send the wrong message. The wrong message is: begging works. Tonight I was about to get up and feed the cat, but then it suddenly started begging, so I had to wait another ten minutes.

The walnut I picture has no shell. It’s just the walnut part.