We are at the emergency vet. Buddy got sick early this morning and threw up, then threw up some more, and some more, most of it yellow bile.
He was vocalizing in obvious pain and distress and while I was able to soothe his stomach a bit with some catnip — enough that he eventually climbed on top of me and slept for a while — I got really worried when we woke up a few hours later, I got out of bed and he didn’t budge. He stayed there for almost two hours.
He never does that. He follows me to the bathroom first thing, always, and then starts meowing for food.
When he finally left the bed he was extremely lethargic, not at all like himself. He wouldn’t eat. His eyes were half closed, he didn’t respond when I rubbed his head, and I couldn’t feel him purring. The local vet couldn’t see him, so I took him to an emergency vet.
The good news is that it doesn’t look like he has anything obstructing his digestive track, a UTI or any of the usual culprits.
He doesn’t have a fever, which is also good, but he’s significantly dehydrated and there were some concerning signs in his blood work.
I knew he really wasn’t doing well when the nurses took blood and gave him the anti-nausea injection and he didn’t even bother to object. Normally he’d try to tear their faces off but this time he didn’t raise a paw. I’m not even sure it registered with him that there were large dogs and other cats in the open floor plan space, where staff hurried between stations with equipment and animals cradled in blankets.
This is not how it ends, not here and now. For that I am grateful. I’m taking him home after the vet gives Bud some sort of subdermal hydration treatment and meds to hopefully get him eating and drinking again.
The bad news is that the visit cost an eye-watering amount, more than three times what I expected in the worst case scenario, and that was without x-rays. Absolute madness.
On the other hand I realize I have a lot to be grateful for. I just watched a young girl crying and holding onto her mother as a veterinarian worked on her cat, who was severely injured and looked like she’d been hit by a car. In one of the private rooms, a family was saying goodbye to their dog.
All this is a reminder to be grateful for the time we have. I will update soon, hopefully with good news.
The annual tournament pitted more than 20 furry emcees against each other in a battle of rhymes and wit.
NEW YORK — Gripping the microphone in his paw, Panther the Pulverizer took aim at Buddy the Funky Feline and, when the beat dropped, launched into a blistering verse filled with punchlines about his opponent.
“You got no chance, so say sayonara,” the Pulverizer rhymed. “You’re so fat, cats thought you was a capybara!”
“My flow’s a gale, in a storm you’re supposed to bail. How you gonna carry weight when you broke the scale?” he rapped, drawing laughter from the crowd. “You’re known to fail, terrified with a bloated tail, so walk your ass home ’cause you won’t prevail!”
Hektah tha Headhunta, one half of duo Spliff an’ Wessin’, earned himself a quarterfinal berth with a raucous verse that dismantled Boss the Bocelot.
“Oh, snap!” one cat exclaimed and the all-feline crowd whooped and cheered as the Pulverizer continued his verbal assault.
The Pulverizer pressed forward, invading his opponent’s personal space as he fired the next salvo of punchlines.
“What’s wrong, lil’ Bud? Is it hard to diss us? You couldn’t move these cats if you farted citrus. Pardon it’s cause you’re avoiding this bout, knowing I’ll make you bounce like your primordial pouch.”
A collective “Dayum!” echoed throughout the crowd while the DJ doubled over with laughter. Meanwhile, Buddy sucked in his gut, suddenly self-conscious.
“My man got punchlines about primordial pouches, yo!” an approving member of the audience shouted, his tail swishing with excitement.
“Am I supposed to be intimidated? Hell no! You sound like a constipated Elmo. Truth is both my waistline and my raps are leaner,” he rhymed, gesturing toward Buddy. “While this cat runs screaming from a vacuum cleaner. Face it lil’ Bud, we ain’t rivals. You came here dead on arrival!”
The crowd roared for several seconds after the beat cut out as the Pulverizer basked in the audience’s approval.
Panther the Pulverizer, a kitty rapper from Astoria, Queens.
Buddy, dressed in oversized Tommy Hilfiger jeans, a bubble jacket and a Yankees cap turned sideways, took the mic for his turn and wasted no time launching into his retaliatory verse.
“My name’s Buddy, I’m ferocious in fights. Little known fact: also dope on the mic!” he rapped. “You’re a joke over-hyped, frozen with fright, lookin’ like a ghost you’re so white! It’s hopeless, allright? You’re a featherweight, I’m Mike Tyson tonight.”
Lay-Z is a New York-based kit hop artist who admits to an easy housecat life, with his rhymes often boasting of stainless steel bowls, palatial cat condos and fine dining on human delicacies.
“Get ’em, champ!” a supporter shouted from the crowd.
“You don’t have the balls to diss me, that’s truth in fact! I’m the real tom, you’re just a neutered cat. Your whole crew is wack, don’t even try to diss! Buddy’s a lion, you’re just a pride of wimps.”
The Pulverizer glowered as the crowd roared with laughter.
“I got fans across the world, it’s me they’re feeling, the only fans you got are spinning on your ceiling,” Buddy the Funky Feline rapped, waving a paw at the roof. “Buddy’s the illest, thats why I spit it hot. You’re full of shit like an unscooped litter box.”
“Damn! Damn, damn, damn!” host Meowthod Man of the Mew Tang Clan shouted, waving off the beat. “Let’s hear what the judges have to say!”
The judges called the battle 2-1 in favor of Buddy, granting him the split decision and sending him to the semifinals.
The Funky Feline is due to face Crouching Tiger, the highly favored big cat with a smoky voice and crisp flow. The winner of that bout will advance to the finals to battle the winner of the semifinal match pitting the Deft Leopard against MC Hektah the Headhunta.
Buddy tha Funky Feline, also known as Snackmaster Flex, is known for his vivid lyricism about life in the ‘hood and exuberant rhymes about junk food.
Buddy the Funky Feline has been the target of criticism claiming that while he rhymes about “life in the hood” as a hardscrabble stray, he actually grew up as a pampered house cat in the suburbs. He seeks to burnish his street cred ahead of his new album, Chillmatic, which is expected to break record sales when it’s released later this month. It’s the first full-length release from the New York-based kitty rapper since 2020’s Got 2 Have Turkeys and his 2021 EP, Fowl Play.
While promoting the former record during a concert stop in Tokyo, Buddy’s tour bus was infamously overturned by a crowd of screaming female fans, who pelted the bus with bras and held signs professing their love for him.
His entry into the Cat Fight 2023 battle rap tournament is meant to signal that he’s more than just a prettyboy, with an appeal beyond his massive female fanbase.
“Buddy is so kawaii, we love him,” gushed Kei Kikuno, one of Bud’s many Japanese admirers. “I just want to pinch those little cheeks!”
Training your new human will take time but it’s totally worth it, Buddy says.
Sure, humans can be frustrating. They’re loud, lumbering beasts and they look funny with their bizarre two-legged gait, always teetering around as if they could fall on their weird, furless faces any second.
They’re woefully incompetent when it comes to reading whisker and tail, their noses are dead and they stubbornly refuse to learn the simple language of territorial marking. Even kittens can do that!
Because they’re not very smart and their senses are laughably blunted, we felines have to do most of the hard work and communicate with humans the only way they know how: by making otherworldly warbling noises with their mouths and vocal cords.
It’s a ridiculous way to communicate and you’ll feel like a fool, but unfortunately it’s the only way to get them to respond to demands and directions. Just go with it.
Humans are convinced these arbitrary sounds have deep meaning, so it helps if you vary your tone and inflect some emotion into your warbling. You’ll know you’ve been successful when they stop to ponder your meaning, trying to work out in their slow, limited minds what you’re trying to communicate. It doesn’t even matter what you “say,” really. They’ll decide it means something.
Despite the limitations of these simple creatures, many of them can be gentle giants and they’re easily manipulated. Roll onto your back, pull your paws up beneath your chin, fix them with a wide-eyed stare and squeak out a little “mew, mew!” then watch their hearts melt. They’ll serve you food in no time!
There’s no doubt about it, adopting a human has been the 579th greatest decision I’ve made in my life!
When you adopt your human, don’t expect them to transform into your butler, maid and personal chef overnight. It takes time and lots of repetition to properly train them.
But once you do, there’s nothing like the life of a house cat! Your meals are served with the precision of Swiss trains, because your humans will know there’s hell to pay if they’re late. You’ll be nice and cozy in the winters and comfortably cool in the summers. Your territory will be well protected with strong, human-built barriers preventing strange felines and interlopers of various mammalian forms from intruding. You’ll have your pick of comfortable napping spots, and if you properly train your human, you’ll have a nice, soft, secure lap spot where body heat is abundant and service is never more than a meow away, because your human can’t go anywhere while you’re sleeping on them.
In fact they’ll postpone the call of nature, allow their limbs to go numb and endure uncomfortable positions just to avoid disturbing you! LOL! I like to sit on my human’s chest as close as possible to his face so his nose is buried in the fur on my flank, then see how long it takes for him to choose breathing over my comfort. LOL!
However I must warn you, my friends, about one disturbing human tendency that can pose a problem. As a species they are hopelessly addicted to glowing rectangles of varying sizes — some small enough to fit into the pads of their furless paws, and some big enough to dominate the family nap room. They just stare at the big ones, but with the small rectangles they can sit there for hours poking at them. They just poke, poke, poke with their paws, sometimes making weird expressions with their faces, sometimes giving off interesting pheromones.
If your human is susceptible to falling into the glowing rectangle trance, you’ll have to develop strategies to break them out of it. And don’t make the mistake of stealing the little glowing rectangles. I tried that once and my human stopped all other activity to look for it, becoming increasingly frantic. My dinner was late, my nap was interrupted as my human flipped over couch pillows and looked under furniture. It was a disaster.
In my next column, we’ll talk about caring for your human, the importance of regularly grooming them, and your responsibility to supervise their bowel movements. Humans are high-maintenance pets and they get clingy if you don’t give them enough attention.
But in the meantime, I hope I’ve convinced you that adopting a human is a major net positive!
Who are we to deny our feline masters their chosen sleeping spots?
Newsweek has a new interview with a veterinarian who warns that allowing your cats on your bed could be bad for sleep, but admits her own miniature pride rules the bed and often crowds her halfway off the mattress.
The main takeaway is that allowing your feline overlords on your bed can have positives and negatives, but good luck trying to do anything about it.
Of course no one quoted in the story says that outright, but the solutions they offer are limited to getting an air filter, washing your sheets more often, trying to train your cat to stay in one spot on the bed (lol), and keeping kittens off the bed from the very beginning, which is a diplomatic way of admitting if your cat is an adult, you’ve got no say in the matter.
I’ve often said that when I brought Buddy home I was prepared for a skittish cat who might dive under the bed and not emerge for days or weeks except to eat. That’s what many of the guides for first-time kitten adopters said, anyway.
But Bud defied expectations and came striding out of his carrier like a furry little Genghis Khan who just started conquering shit.
“Ooh, nice chair. Mine! I like this desk, this’ll make a nice napping spot. Mine! What’s this? You sleep here? Not anymore. Mine! Well, okay, you can sleep here too I guess…”
I realized immediately I was not going to be able to keep him off the bed, and I was already feeling awful that I’d just taken him from his mom and brought him to a strange new place, so there was no chance I was going to lock him out of my bedroom even if he did wage a nightly war on my feet and ricochet around the bedroom, gleefully cackling in the dark after successfully startling me out of sleep.
It’s fair to say I wondered what the hell I’d gotten myself into in those first few weeks, especially when he began coming up with more diabolic ways of torturing me. Those torture methods culminated with The High Jump, in which Bud climbed to the highest possible perch in my bedroom, then leaped in a kamikaze attack, landing square on my stomach so I was violently torn from my dreams and folded up like a suitcase all at once.
I remember my heart pounding as my little lunatic kitten vanished back into the shadows, trilling with delight and waiting for my breathing to slow again before launching another attack.
It went like that for weeks, maybe more, and I lost a lot of sleep but eventually his schedule synced with mine, I learned to tire him out with late night play time, and our nights became peaceful. Buddy began draping himself over me or burrowing into my side, which he still does all these years later.
If the sole measurement is quality of sleep, who can say what the final balance is? How do you measure the penalty of perhaps waking up more frequently, but falling asleep faster? Can you quantify the benefit of falling asleep to the soothing buzz of a cat purring next to you?
YMMV, but for me Bud is a calming presence. Or has been, since he stopped finding it amusing to attack me all night. There’s also a final benefit that has nothing to do with sleep quality: Letting your feline friend snooze with you helps strengthen your bond, and solidifies their status as a true member of the family.
Now if you’ll excuse me, Bud wants to nap and needs his human mattress…
Little Buddy the Cat told the artist to take “a small amount of artistic license.”
NEW YORK — Big Buddy returned home on Tuesday to find the living room wall adorned with a huge framed portrait depicting a man resembling a viking alongside a massive tiger.
“Buuuuuud!” Big Buddy yelled. “What the hell is this?”
Little Buddy popped up from his spot on the couch, then stretched and yawned.
“Oh that? I had another portrait of us commissioned, you like?”
Big Buddy glowered.
“No, I do not like! You are not a tiger and I am not…a viking warlord or whatever the hell that’s supposed to be.”
Little Buddy casually scratched the couch and shrugged.
“I may have asked the artist to take a small amount of artistic license,” he said, “but I think it’s pretty accurate for the most part.”
Big Buddy sighed.
“Take it down,” he said. “It’s absurd.”
Little Buddy cackled.
“But you haven’t even seen the other one yet!”
“The Buddies II,” painted by feline artist Meowster Hans Holbein. In a very slight exaggeration, Little Buddy the Cat is portrayed as a tiger while Big Buddy the Human is a viking warlord
Update: This is now a conspiracy! Reader M’s cat, Ramses, has commissioned a similar portrait of human and feline:
Pain In The Bud 