As I mentioned earlier, I used to hate all cats with a passion. The time has come for me to tell the story of what made me hate cats so much. Why, why the hatred? Well, here it comes, and it ain’t pretty.

Back when I was living with my folks, post college graduation burnout, next door there is a house we came to call the Hell House, because the family that lived there were a psychological cesspool of dysfunctional, rancid energy. Fights, screaming, smashing things, littering. Name the drama, it happened there. One of the more unsavory mutations of that family lifeforce, while it inhabited the Hell House, was their chaos attribute of Infestation (Dumper Cats).

Specifically, they maintained a stable of cats in the general vicinity that ran loose at all hours. These cats bred with each other, attacked birds and squirrels, and invaded other people’s yards in large numbers. And, of course, they relieved themselves in other peoples’ yards as well, thus the nickname of “Dumper Cats”. Well, that’s not what they were really called, since the actual descriptive was a profanity. Use your imagination.

Since they were free to breed at will, plenty of yowling and mewing occurred at all hours. Yet the actual number of the cats didn’t seem to increase, although I always saw new arrivals with different shades. My guess is that the litters were sold off for extra income, with an occasional kitten kept over to replenish the stock when these cats inevitably fled or died from disease. Our only recourse was to have the super-soaker primed at all times, since the cats grew wise to the sound of the hose being turned on.

Perhaps it wasn’t so much the cats themselves, but what they represented. They were a visible sign of psychic contamination. The folks and I came to hate them with a passion, and reveled whenever we got a direct hit with the water. The family’s drama was bad enough, to have to suffer the invasion of your own personal space by numerous cats was a transgression. You’d be sitting in the backyard, enjoying the garden and the birds eating their seed or washing in the bath, when along comes a mottled white cat through the fence looking for a bird lunch. Peace and tranquility disrupted! You have to scare the birds while you scare off the cat, and your thoughts have been interrupted.

So all cats became known as Dumper Cats. Eventually, the family broke apart despite itself and the house was abandoned. For a long time it was a morass of psychological residue, and the cats wandered off in search of some other source of food. The house was bought by a nice handyman. He moved his family in, and fixed the place up so you would never guess it was once the Hell House. The Dumper Cats are ancient history. But it would be a long time before K would come along and show me the power of the non-Dumper Cats.