Pillow Talk

You've got cats. You wouldn't be reading this if you didn't, right?

And, most likely, you LOVE your cats, don't you?

You may even put up with certain, err, annoying, irritating, painful, itchy, smelly and/or costly "inconveniences" associated with the loving of said cats. Again, am I right about this?

I'm pretty sure we're on the same page here.

So let's travel back in time 24 hours-ish or so. I'm in my queen sized bed with my king sized load of cats and humans. We're all either sleeping, licking ourselves clean or switching our tail back and forth as we wait for the perfect moment to attack one of the other sleeping/grooming forms and scare them off the bed because we have a territorial aggression problem. I will leave it up to you to decide which one of us is doing what.

I will give you a hint that at least I am SLEEPING.

Other than the hum of the oscillating space heater and Sam's snoring (ah ha! I gave you another hint: Sam is also asleep, so who is licking themselves?) there is peace throughout the house.

I'm not sure if this is when I'm dreaming about the man in the tuxedo holding out a wedding gown, that has been removed from a happy Bride. He offers it as a blessing, a giant Buddhist Kata to another woman in the room, who gleefully bows under the shelter of the glowing white fabric. Then, the tuxedoed man walks over to me and holds out the Wedding Dress and I step back in fear. I do not want this dress. No, I do not. Please don't tell Sam about my dream. He proposed to me one year and seven months ago. I'm not sure he would be happy to hear this one.

...or it may have been the dream I had about the fire truck passing by the house. The ladder on the top of the truck hit the branches on a tree in my yard. Sparks flew and set the tree on fire. They kept on driving away, not seeing they had started a fire. I feared that my house would be fully engulfed in flames at any moment (and in real life, you should know that my neighbor's house burned so badly on Christmas Day that they have to tear the house down and build a new one!). Then, the firemen came back and had to LIFT my house UP to get under it to put the fire out! Everything in the house slid sideways. I could hear the pumping of the water through the hoses.

"Gulp, gulp, gulp."

Or was it???

I woke up too late. My house was not on fire. I wasn't sliding across the room because the house wasn't tipped on its' side. There were no hot firemen in my bedroom, ready to save me from harm. No.

It was Gracie.

She had just puked.

On my PILLOW.

NEXT TO MY FACE.

That "Gulping" sound was her stomach pumping up bodily fluids—which she decided needed to land by MY FACE. Did I mention it was NEAR MY FACE?

I knocked her off the bed, as I sat up in disgust, while she proceeded to do a traveling puke of inch long, matted hair ball bits, every few feet from the bedroom, down the hallway and onto the landing of the first floor.

So I woke Sam up and told him I had to turn on the light. He mumbled something about; "What now?!" and went back to sleep.

I looked down at my beloved pillow. The only pillow I can get a good night's sleep upon. The pillow that Sam accidently slept on and got all sweaty with man-smell, which I then had to air out for a week and boil in the washing machine before I could be reunited with it again. I honestly can't sleep on anything else. I've tried about 10 pillows, even one of those $150 Temperpadic things that made my neck muscles lock up and I woke up screaming my brains out from pain because I couldn't move my neck at ALL.

THAT Pillow.

That PILLOW with the long wet, creamy splash of Eau (err, EWWW) de Cat Blow on it. I dragged myself out of bed and got some paper towels and cleanser to take care of the multitude of messes. I blotted up the goop on my beloved pillow, but there was a stain. I faced the sad fact that I would have to really clean this pillow in the morning (it was already 3:15 AM, so technically it WAS morning, but I mean the REAL morning when it's after 8AM and normal people are awake) and, for now, my only option was to try to sleep on the back up pillow; the second string pillow that was okay to date once in awhile, but not one to make a lifetime commitment to.

I tried to sleep, but my neck was sore from the pillow being too mooshy and not supporting my fat head or weak neck, one of the two, or both. I finally got to sleep a few hours later, just before the alarm went off and I had to get up to go to work.

In the haze of the new dawn, I reluctantly and stiffly got out of bed, showered, slapped on makeup, dressed and went off to work. Sam, as usual, got up, showered and made the bed, not remembering what had happened a few hours before. He MADE THE BED. He MADE THE BED with my CAT-PUKED-ON-PILLOW, still damp and gooey. He just didn't notice, I guess and left it in its' proper place—stacked neatly and erectly right there in front of the two other pillows on my side of the bed.

When I got home that night, the gooey stain had dried into a slightly darkened swath. I was so tired, it didn't even dawn on me that anything was wrong; until I my head hit the pillow and it all came back to me in a flash—the dreams, the sounds, the PUKING.

So I just flipped the pillow over, puke side down and went to sleep.