Bugs Quiet

A quick word if you’re new here:  Bugs was a semi-feral six-month-old kitten when he permitted this Bean to take him in.  He had some contact with other beans before he came to this one — but not much.  This blog is essentially about how Bugs is teaching Bean how to live with him — and Bugs is, my friends, a lot of man-cat.

Mr. Jackson Galaxy, of Animal Planet’s “My Cat From Hell,” has come to our attention thanks to our friends in the blogosphere.  Here is Bugs entering Jackson’s link into Teresa’s iPad the other day.

Yesterday we watched an episode of Jackson.  A couple of things stood out.  This morning it seems most fitting to talk about the aspect of Jackson that is:

gentle.

I want to hasten to add, though, that gentleness is not the whole Jackson story.  You’d have to have some steel in you, to do what Jackson does with the desperate felines lucky enough to get him.  (This steeliness is most apparent when Jackson gives orders to works with the humans involved.)

But when Jackson talks to the felines, he softens his eyes and he softens his voice.  The guy’s called a cat whisperer, but to me he seems more like a cat singer.

So this morning Bugs and I went through the drill that’s a happening thing between us these days.  Bugs starts his engines around 6:30.  I persuade him away from the claw-launch maneuver.  You who know what I’m talking about will be as glad as I am to hear me say:

We are making progress with this.

I’ve written about how that’s been going, and it’s still going in that direction — i.e., GOOD.

Today I want to announce a new development, born of Jackson’s wisdom and Jackson’s gentleness.

Jackson’s wisdom told us we needed to expand Bugs’s world into the third dimension.  We complied; we installed shelves.

Jackson’s wisdom told us Bugs’s claw-launch maneuver was probably play-aggression, and that what we needed to do was work him out; let air out of the balloon.  We complied; we play vigorously.

Here’s a shot of Bugs as we’re playing — up on one of our shelves.  You can see:  He’s still pretty intense at this stage of operations.

At this point, though, I’d had about enough of the crazypants gig.  I felt tired and hot (friends, we are in the grip of historic shvitz down here in this July Arkansas.  “Shvitz” meaning like Turkish bath, for you who don’t speak Yinglish).  I then remembered Jackson’s gentleness.

I sat down and started to do a probably-somewhat-bizarre combination of t’ai chai, audible breathing, and chanting.  (Kim, Max:  I was doing “lift-hands.”)

Look what happened — in short order.

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

He’s still in that position.

And I’m in the room with the window-unit, doing what I want to do, which is writing this blog.

COOL-IO.