Whenever my father yelled, he would also walk toward you and, more often than not, end with a slap in your face, so I was quick to sidestep the sofa and avoid him by doing a cartwheel straight into my bedroom. Then I peered out of my door for one last comment. "There's a reason you never see anyone's house with a Beware of Cat sign. Because they're not even worth mentioning." As soon as he attempted to get up from the couch, I slammed the door and hid under my bed.

I used to look at that cat with such disgust. Even dogs have the dignity to go find a private area before dropping a deuce. Only cats think they have nothing to hide and can get away with just a couple of back kicks to alert the area that's about to be unsanitized that it's got something coming its way. And then that's it. They walk right back into the room, sometimes even have the gall to hop onto the sofa and look around like, "Hey, whose turn is it to contribute?" I decided to name the cat Poopsie Woopsie. It was the nicest way to say, "I just took a poop, whoopsie."

I used to stare at the cat and imagine how many Smurfs I could fit into it. Then I thought about painting the cat blue and throwing it in the microwave like a little Shrinky Dink. It would be the Smurf no one had. I had terrible thoughts like these throughout my childhood, and luckily I never acted on most of them. It was a Tourette's of sorts; I knew that the thoughts were bad, but I couldn't stop them from entering my mind. I just wanted some fucking Smurfs. Why did the cat have to take up the same amount of space as fifty Smurfs yet bring absolutely nothing to the table? It would just sleep and sleep for hours, like it had nowhere to be and nothing to do. My sister Sloane loved the cat and would try to trap it under her covers, but Poopsie Woopsie wanted nothing to do with Sloane and craved the lack of attention I gave to it, so we ended up spending most of our time together, with the understanding that there was going to be very little affection. Sloane always accused me of turning Poopsie Woopsie against her, but the truth was, the cat could tell that my sister was "off," and by "off" I mean Mormon.