Subject: Rock, Paper, Marshrutka
Like everyone else, my attention span has suffered greatly over the last few years. I’ll go on the computer to do something innocuous like look up Vin Diesel’s age, and before I can even do a search, I’m somehow on Reddit learning about skincare. Or, even worse, I’ll go to check my email on the computer, wander off into a distant tab, then end up opening the gmail client on my phone. Life has become ever more an experience of drilling down, a kind of endless recursion when it comes to focus.
It’s like the prince who goes to the witch about a potion, and the witch needs an herb to make it so she sends him to the forest where it’s guarded by a spirit who won’t let him have the herb until he goes to crypt to retrieve the spirit’s ashes, and at the crypt the prince meets a sketchy grave keeper who won’t let him have the ashes unless he does him a favor, which involves a bandit and a couple goats, but the goats need a special kind of hay, which is only available at a certain Inn, where there lives a certain barmaid who has a particular ailment…
Except. Instead of the prince it’s just me trying to get a glass of water from the kitchen, which reminds me I should run the dishwasher, where I notice some empty jars that would be great for storing spices, which reminds me that I need to buy a few groceries online, which takes me down the Internet rabbit hole, from which I emerge hours later with no groceries but I have ordered a new pair of sweatpants and learned every detail about the company Basecamp falling apart, and then I realize I was supposed to send someone a card, and only then does it occur to me that I am still very thirsty, and then I try to get a glass of water from the kitchen, which reminds me—
“Mlaaaaaoww.” A plaintive yowl breaks my impotent frenzy. I go room to room, window to window, until I see her: Marshrutka. Unmistakable Marshrutka. Ears: too far apart, always radared outward. Eyes: too close together, angled into a perpetually dopey expression of alarm and confusion. Her tail is a little too short and a little too fat, so when she is laying down it just looks like a fifth leg.
I look for her on the side porch by the kitchen first. She often comes over the fence from our disliked neighbor’s yard, directly to the minimally trafficked path on the North side of our house. That’s where we feed her. She mostly seems to live under the disliked neighbor’s shed, but we also have solid evidence that she sleeps under the side porch and on our roof, beneath the grapevines. She patrols our entire yard frequently, stopping to spray the cabbage flowers. When she’s backed up like that, it’s easy to see how much her balls have grown in the last few months, and I’m forced to contemplate whether I’m willfully misgendering her or I’m picking up on other clues re: her preferred pronouns or whether all this wondering is ridiculous because she’s a cat and doesn’t care about human genders anyway.
Marshrutka first started coming around during the February snowstorm. I wrote about her in that newsletter, although we hadn’t named her at that point. I named her after a sort of private taxi bus that is common in Russia. The marshrutki (that’s the plural) run fixed-route schedules, but they aren’t necessarily published anywhere. You pack into the back of these little vans that veer chaotically through traffic at breakneck speeds, you pass your fare up to the driver when you get on, and then yell when you want to stop. They are kind of like a feral form of public transit, which seemed appropriate for Marshrutka the cat.
She is also feral and seems to operate chaotically, mysteriously, but in fact is very regular in her habits and schedules. Lately, she has been napping on the roof, right outside the kitchen window, before breakfast. She wakes up when I come down in the morning and run water from the tap, and watches me prepare and set out her food and fresh water. Sometimes she’ll get a little overeager and climb down from the roof onto the side porch before I’ve finished setting out her food. She’ll run down to the bottom step in that case and stare at me until I’ve gone back in and closed the door. By the time I can turn around and look through the glass, she’s already run back up and is mowing through the kibble.
One of the enduring things in Marshrutka’s favor, apart from from the fact that she’s perfect in every way and I love her, is that our cats, Griff and Steve, seem to get along with her. She must have just been on the cusp of puberty when she starting coming around, on the hunt for a cat colony. For whatever reason, she picked our fully domesticated cats and began following them around, particularly Griff. She would howl at the house until we let him out, then she’d follow him around the yard as closely as she could get away with. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, she’d run up to sniff his butt. When he turned around, spooked and offended, she’d roll onto her back and flaunt her belly.
Griff and Steve are fully antagonistic toward all the other neighborhood cats, but they tolerate Marshrutka even as she’s gotten older and a little more aloof. Griff will get spooked by his own toys or sometimes a bit of hair on the ground, but he doesn’t hesitate to launch himself claws first at any cat that comes into our yard, the only exception being Marshrutka. Even so, he’s a little overwhelmed by her. Once in a while, I’ll see them sleeping next to each other on the roof, but when she showers him with attention, he’ll run away and hide behind my legs if they’re available.
This is actually pretty great, because in our current two cat system, there’s a power imbalance. Even though Steve is enormous and basically a piece of furniture packed with rippling muscles and tiny knives and an insatiable appetite for murder, tiny jumpy orange Griff is the undisputed sovereign at home. With Marshrutka in the mix, we have a perfect closed loop. Griff beats Steve. Steve beats Marshrutka. Marshrutka beats Griff.
If Tita and I ever break up, I think I’m in the high risk demographic for becoming a cat hoarder. I already keep acquiring new items “for Marshrutka” that end up in our house mostly for Steve. Tita keeps trying to make the house look like we care more about aesthetics than cats, and I keep thwarting those efforts. She got rid of our ugly cat tree a couple years ago, but I just migrated it to a corner of the yard so Stevie could have an outdoor cat tree. It started falling apart, so we put it over by the trash. It’s been there for about a year now, but the cats keep using it and who knows, maybe when the other cat tree I snuck into the living room starts to look ratty, I’ll put it outside and the old one can finally go.
I would like to turn our into home into a jungle gym for the cats, and I insist on taking off their collars every night before bed because they deserve to sleep nude if they like. Tita gives them spoonfuls of ice cream and sleeps in weird contortions to keep from disturbing them. We both quietly judge each other, but it has no effect on our behavior. You may not like it, but this is what love is; forever negotiating the degree to which your cats can rule your domestic sphere.
Ask a Gecko 🦎 🦎 🦎
Due to the relentless heat, the gecko has been relocated to the basement. He’s not thrilled because it’s more humid than he’d prefer, and the digs are a real downgrade. As is often the case, he’s not here to answer your burning questions. Instead, Griff has volunteered to do your horoscopes for the week.
Horoscopes by Griff 🦁
Aries: You can grab a cat by the scruff and he’ll go limp. You can grab a cat by the tail and you’ll have scratches across your face. To get what you want, maybe you should try less grabbing and more petting.
Taurus: Have you ever watched as tufts of your fur floated and eddied around you in magnificent clouds? If not, either you’re not getting brushed enough or you need to open your eyes.
Gemini: A purr is not always an invitation, and a claw is not always a punishment.
Cancer: If you don’t like the tuna, don’t eat it. You don’t have to throw up at the foot of the bed to get your message across.
Leo: Catnip is best fresh. Meat is best stinky. Wisdom lies in knowing what is catnip and what is meat.
Virgo: There’s no point in cleaning your face with dirty paws. Take care of the important things first, and everything else will follow in due time.
Libra: If every time you’ve touched the fluffy belly you’ve gotten bit, don’t act surprised if you touch the fluffy belly again and end up with bite marks.
Scorpio: The higher you climb, the more dominant you are; just be careful you don’t climb so high that you can no longer look out the window.
Sagittarius: If you kill the mouse today, you can’t play with it tomorrow.
Capricorn: You don’t have to buy Fancy Feast if you prefer Friskies.
Aquarius: People will put up with all kinds of bullshit as long as you’re soft and a good listener.
Pisces: Every butthole is a gift and an opportunity to say thank you. Just because you’ve seen mine doesn’t mean I need to see yours.