Who can understand cats?  They act like such independent creatures yet they still rely on their humans for food, water, and (apparently) entertainment.  Take my fat meatloaf of a cat, Onyx.  To begin with, this overweight and underloved creature was given to me by my daughter shortly after my husband left me.  He was a rescue cat, came from a woman who hoarded these animals and when the government discovered her vast collection (over 300 in a townhouse in Fairfax, VA) all but 2 dozen were euthanized.  My cat was one of them.  Most people believe his name is Onyx because of his color but that is a fat no.  His name is Onyxpected as he was a gift I did not know I would be receiving.

When I first got the cat, he was skinny and starving....or at least he thought he was starving.  I would come home with groceries and not being able to carry all the bags at once, I usually had to take a second trip to the car.  This didn't take an abnormally long period of time, but no matter how fast I was, Onyx had torn into a shopping bag and attacked meat or a carton of milk or something and was devouring it on the spot.  It took a while to break him of this habit of jumping up on the counter (packing tape laid sticky side up finally did the trick) and to this day I'm not sure if he actually was broken of it, or he realized he wasn't going anywhere and that he would be fed eventually.  But it seemed, at least for that first year, that he was afraid he wasn't going to get the opportunity to eat again and would suck down food like there was no tomorrow....hence his being overweight.  And he was smart, he could figure out how to open cabinet doors, then the pantry door.  When I began keeping his food in the upstairs linen closet located in the bathroom, he learned to jiggle the door until it gave way, open the plastic bin of food, wedge the thing against the door so I couldn't get in, and eat the entire bag of cat food.  Thank the stars the litter box was in there too!  One time I was going out of town and bought a manual automatic feeder.  I filled the jug up with cat food and went about my business only to later find Onyx asleep in the bowl and the jar half eaten.  He would NOT move away from the bowl until it was empty so I'm sure he starved for the few days that I was gone.

Onyx has never been affectionate, he's actually quite standoffish.  He will move just out of your reach so you can't pet him, sit there and watch you make attempts to pet him.  If you do have the misfortune of rubbing his skin, it's because he has stopped and rolled over onto his back.  DO NOT TOUCH HIM LIKE THIS!  It's a ruse.  He just wants an arm to attack!  He is, however, affectionate to those who are highly allergic to him.  Take Angelo who has a terrible cat allergy yet allows him to stay here.  Angelo will be working at his desk and the cat will jump up to look out the window then proceed to calmly walk across the keyboard in a very calculated manner, stepping on as many keys as he can possibly touch then rubbing against whatever happens to be there, which is usually Angelo's arm.  Goddammit cat!  (Angelo is a lawyer and an inveterate Republican propaganda Facebook poster.  His computer is his lifeline on so many levels.)  The cat swishes his tail, leaps onto the chair where Angelo is sitting, rubs against him (aiming for the face but missing), jumps down and slowly walks out of the room with this "whatcha gonna do about it" attitude.

But I believe his all-time favorite annoyance is his incessant need to run back and forth down the hallway, to the bed, down the hallway, into the darkness and back.  Of course, he only does this when it's pitch black outside and it's 4:30 a.m.  And he does this no less than six times that I know of.  Shoot he might have done it a dozen and the last six are for my benefit because I'm now awake and it's time to feed him.  (His second big thrill used to be to get under your feet first thing in the morning, but Angelo, who is not a small man, stepped on him too many times...now Onyx is very careful of feet.)  I hiss at him and he runs away and sulks until I fall back to sleep then the ritual begins all over again.

Why I keep him is beyond me.  Why he keeps me?  Well isn't that obvious.  He has me trained!