As a background, I grew up in a house where my pets were treated exactly as they should have been: as animals - and far below humans in the caste system. My dog never got table scraps; in fact, with one look from my mom, she never even had the nerve to get close enough to the table to figure out what human food even smelled like. Feeding my horse a hot dog bun was pretty much like teetering on the brink of my getting a tramp stamp in my mom's eyes.
So, because of my clearly over-structured childhood, it never occurred to me that pets could be regarded any differently until one day I was pulling slices of wheat bread from a bag to make a sandwich when I looked down to see those all-too-familiar yellow eyes staring up at me. I'm not sure whether I cracked under the pressure of his insane baby panther cuteness or because I thought one taste of the cardboard-like 45 calorie whole wheat would solve the begging problem forever, but I shared. Whatever my reasoning, that one small crumb of bread changed my and Guinness's lives forever:
I now no longer make any food alone. In fact, I can't even enter my kitchen alone anymore. If I open my dishwasher, he climbs in. Another fun fact: Guinness fits on the bottom shelf of my fridge. He climbs pantry shelves, scales the refrigerator; all while purring madly in the shear bliss created by the possibility that a crumb may materialize.
After a few weeks of this, I realized that by being Guinness's sole source of human food, I was infinitely powerful. So I decided to use my leverage to make make Guinness do tricks. Obviously, striving for awesomeness runs in our family, so why wouldn't my cat want to be better than all of his feline counterparts and cross over into the realm of trick-performing usually inhabited by dogs only. Thus, I set out to use breadcrumbs to teach Guinn to sit. Five minutes and a few Pavlov conditioning techniques later, Guinness knew the word "sit" and to do so even in silence if I pointed at his butt. What a genius.
This new useful application of his psychotic love of little morsels of my meals must have blinded me from my previous annoyance at his constant hyperactive presence in my kitchen and the always-present risk of death by tripping over his black furry body with its impeccable ability to blend into my black kitchen rug, because today his little yellow eyes struck again. While cutting up a chicken breast on the coffee table in front of my TV, I looked down to see a little black paw on the glass surface of the table and his cute wishful expression moving rapidly from my face to the chicken and back again. I caved. What harm could a one centimeter by 3 millimeter piece of chicken really cause, anyway?
OH, WOW.
He loved it. Understatement. He was absolutely cracked out by the chicken. He began purring madly and literally hopping around the coffee table. I spent most of my meal holding him back with one arm as he meowed and pawed and purred and frolicked. Then I remembered I hadn't tested his sitting skills recently. A few chicken pieces and successful sits later, he was going nuts. I had to move to the corner of the kitchen and eat the rest of my meal cowering in the corner while he continued his happy hopping and purring.
I thought the craziness would never end until, upon realizing I could no longer hear his scampering or the sound of his motor-like purr, I looked over and saw the thanksgiving turkey effect had set in. Guinn was completely passed out; sound asleep with his face covered by a DVD case he had knocked down onto himself.
WHAT??? This cat is SO not normal. Anyone want to put money on him learning to roll-over for a potato chip?
Oh yea, he has a Biker Jacket. Straight Baller.
