Trying to Sleep In When You Have Cats

Anyone with cats will recognize the following scenario. It’s from my book Waiting For My Cats to Die, and it was written about my cats at the time, Veets and Beamers.

6:30AM. Beamers jumps up on my chest and wakes me up.
6:33AM. Veets bats my face with a paw, nails extended.
6:38AM. Beams sits behind my head and starts treadling.
6:43AM. Beamers jumps up on my chest again.
6:44AM. Beamers drools on my arm.
6:49AM. One of them digs, continuously, for five minutes straight, in the kitty litter.
6:49AM. I can smell it.
6:50AM. Beamers jumps up on the coffee table, lands on a magazine, and slides off the other
side.
6:52AM. Veets jumps on my chest from across the livingroom floor.
6:53AM. I think I slept for a minute.
6:54AM. Veets jumps on my chest, misses, digs his nails into my chest to stop from falling, falls anyway, dragging his nails down my chest.
6:55AM. Veets starts eating from the garbage. I try to remember if I threw out anything poisonous.
6:56 AM. Beamers picks up a ping pong ball and cries with the ping pong ball stuck in his mouth and I think it’s because it’s too big for his mouth and he’s crying for me to help him get it out before he chokes to death and I have to rush him to the hospital but then he drops it.
6:57AM. Veets and Beams charge up to my desk. (Pigeon in the window.)
6:57AM. I watch them because what if they get cut to ribbons crashing through the window to get the pigeon and I have to rush them to the hospital.
6:59AM. Veets starts gagging. I watch him to see if it’s just a furball or something worse and I have to rush him to the hospital but it turns out to be a furball. “Gack. Gack. Gack.” (Their furball throwing-up noise.)
6:59AM. Beams starts eating the leaves from a plant, which makes him vomit.
6:59AM. I push him away from the plant.
6:59AM. Now Veets is eating a leaf.
7:00AM. When is someone going to love me who isn’t a cat? I get up.

This is a picture of Bali when he was a kitten, sitting in a dish on my shelf. To his left is a picture of Veets and Beams, and to his right is a picture of Veets. Yes, I am insane.