A BRIEF NOTE ON CAT POOP

I woke up this morning (okay, it was afternoon, but let's not mince hairs or whatever) to find Genji the Kitten (a.k.a. The Bean Bean) nosing around my face in a friendly and inquisitive manner, stepping on my forehead with his cool little toe pads, and purring a big slow purr that sounded like the lazy thwup thwup thwup of helicoptor blades.

Here's the thing, though . . . even through the Horrible Demented Killer-Pea-Soup-Brain-Fog that typifies my initial waking hours, I was sure that I had caught a slight whiff of, well . . . cat poop.

And I'm a bit of a psycho about cat poop. Uncontained cat poop on the loose all willy nilly makes me extremely uneasy. I have very strict rules about cat poop, whereas I am otherwise rather lenient with the feline members of the household. (Just ask my Japanese Mother: "You mongrel cats so bad behave I never can come visit you again, unless you decide to give away to pound. All jump up here or there or wherever they please and do whatever they want, no punish. Your father and I so shock make us run away as soon we can.") Well, okay . . . I have one very strict rule, which is the NO POOPY PAWS ON THE BED OR FUTON RULE UNTIL THE POOPY PAW CRISIS HAS BEEN SATISFACTORILY RECTIFIED! (Hee. Rectified . . . no pun intended, at least not initially.)

So . . . there was this whiff of cat poop, leading me to suspect that someone was in major violation of House Code I(A)(1)(a)(i) -- (i.e., the NO POOPY PAWS ON THE BED OR FUTON RULE UNTIL THE POOPY PAW CRISIS HAS BEEN SATISFACTORILY RECTIFIED code -- otherwise known as "Code Brown"). Upon inspection of kitten paws and kitten posterior, it seemed that perhaps it had all been a hoax . . . an Olfactory Hallucination induced by excessive caffeine the day before and too much time spent on eBay cruising for paperweights. But after some more sniffing about (and believe me, there's just no way to glamorize the act of sniffing around for cat poop, either on the cats themselves or around the house on ones hands and knees, for that matter), it appeared that the source of cat poop was smack dab on the kitten's head!

Yes. There seemed to be a minute smear of cat poop on the kitten head, thereby rendering him a literal, and not even remotely metaphorical, Poopy Head.

What was it doing there? How did it get there? What did it mean? I tell you, it was like something out of the X-Files.

Admittedly, it was not the same magnitude of Code Brown Crisis as the time when Muku (only several months ago, as a matter of fact), gave himself a rather alarming case of diarrhea by an unauthorized chow down of kitten food. Not only did he give himself diarrhea, but there seemed to be some sort of concomitant diarrhea-related debacle in the litterbox. I came home from running errands to find Muku in a very sorry state of affairs -- with scarily semi-solidified cat diarrhea all tangled up in his posterior, tail, and tangled all throughout his (very hairy Persian cat) haunches. Furthermore, he'd managed to get it everywhere . . . on the futon cover, on the bed, on the chair. About a gazillion loads of laundry later, and after several lengthy sessions of holding Muku wedged between my knees, upside down with his head on the floor and his tail clamped down in my armpit, wherein I had to cut out the offending matter with scissors . . . about ten pairs of latex gloves and two pairs of dollar-store scissors later . . . the Code Brown Crisis was at least temporarily allayed, and Muku had the earliest appointment I could make for another Lion Cut with the local cat groomer.

So, the little dab of cat shit annointing my kitten's head was, of course, Small Potatoes, by comparison with the aforemented Code Brown Crisis.

But still . . . how on earth did it get there?

What was it doing there?

What does it mean?????