writing – Pain In The Bud

Buddy The Cat

He’s crazy, he’s a whirling ball of energy and he frequently plots to take over the world, but he’s my feline pal.

We’d only been home for a few hours and already the kitten was demanding I let him out of the bedroom.

I’d done lots of reading before bringing my new pal home to his forever abode. I was prepared for him to remain in his carrier, dash under my bed only to emerge for food and water, or cry in confusion.

He did none of those things.

Instead the tiny kitten came striding out of his carrier, surveying his new surroundings with interest, and proceeded to conquer everything in sight like a furry little Genghis Khan.

He was loud, he never stopped “talking,” and I got the distinct impression that everything that previously belonged to me now belonged to him.

“Comfy chair! Mine!” he meowed. “Oooh, a big bed! Mine! Are these bowls mine too? Of course they are. Look, toys! Mine! Hey what’s this thing with black and white keys on it? A synthesizer, you say? Well, this ‘synthesizer’ is now mine! Look at how much fun it is to run on it!”

All the advice on the internet emphasized keeping the kitten in one room for at least a couple of days so as not to overwhelm the little one. He needed to know where the essentials like his litter box, scratcher and food bowls were located, and he needed to feel safe.

But Buddy, the name I called him while trying to think of something clever — and would officially bestow on him two weeks later — had other ideas.

There was an entire apartment beyond that closed door, and it was very important for him to survey his new kingdom and claim its contents immediately!

So I reluctantly opened the door and a little ball of whirling energy came tearing out, narrating his activities in real time in a voice that sounded like a baby Elmo as he got into everything.

I realized very early on that first night that the cautious approach I’d planned on was out the window. Any restrictions recommended by internet guides were not applicable with this kitten.

The idea that he would sleep in his bed and I’d retain my own? Laughable! I was fortunate he would allow me to continue sleeping there, and only after he was tired of tormenting me. With the lights out he ruthlessly attacked my toes, tearing me out of sleep almost as soon as I lost consciousness before retreating into the darkness to cackle gleefully and do it all over again.

The human makes funny noises when I bite his feet! the tiny kitten trilled delightedly. So fun!

Enduring his relentless assaults on my feet seemed a small price to pay when I woke up on one of those first nights and found Bud fast asleep with all four paws wrapped around my right arm, clearly comforted by my presence and proximity. It would become the first of countless times when I would endure an uncomfortable position, an arm or leg going numb, or put off the call of nature to avoid disturbing my little Buddy.

That was 12 years ago and I can’t really remember what life was like before Buddy was a part of it.

He has become my best friend, my constant companion, my foil, my partner in crime, and a reliable reminder not to take life too seriously. He’s my shadow. I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to sleep without him draped over me or borrowed between my knees.

He is, unfortunately, the primary culprit in interrupted sleep, but he doesn’t wake me because he’s hungry or thirsty. I make sure he has a bowl of dry food and fresh water before bed every night in addition to his two daily wet food meals. (And all the snacks he demands through urgent meows.)

He doesn’t conduct night time commando raids on my feet anymore either. Mercifully he grew out of that behavior within a year.

He wakes me not because he wants food or water, but because he wants to be buddies. He wants to purr contentedly as I rub the top of his head and tell him what special, handsome and good boy he is. He wants to thank me by grooming my hair and later, while I am asleep, he’ll groom his butt with his barbed tongue before grooming my face. I’m a lucky man!

He is such a major part of my life that I began writing humorous stories about his exploits and founded this blog at the request of people who wanted more Buddy.

Heck, he’s even become the context by which I define myself online. He is Little Buddy and I am Big Buddy. On this blog I cover cat-related news, post movie and game reviews and write about topics that interest me, but the primary focus has always been Buddy and his adventures, real and imagined.

In many ways it’s absurd. What kind of lunatic writes a blog glorifying his feline friend and imagining him in ridiculous scenarios, like joining Yemeni pirate crews, running his own catnip empire and maintaining a popular OnlyFans account for female admirers?

And yet with Bud, it’s appropriate. He’s crazy in the most endearing, lovable way imaginable. He’s a remarkably vocal cat who trills exuberantly when he’s happy, chats with the speed of an auctioneer when he spots birds, and screeches with unshakable determination when the treats I dispense – or their volume- disappoint him.

Schemeowtics for Buddy the Cat. Note the huge meowscles.

Perhaps most touching of all, there have been three times I’ve gotten debilitatingly ill in the last 12 years, and on each of those occasions Buddy refused to leave my side.

When I was knocked on my ass after finally getting COVID in 2023, Buddy was practically attached to me. Miraculously he did not screech or slap my face when his mealtime came and went. He just let me sleep and purred quietly as he waited for me to wake. Knowing cats were vulnerable to COVID, and having lost a relative and two neighbors to that virus, I thought if I got sick I’d find a way to quarantine myself from Bud for his sake.

That was never going to be an option, I realized in retrospect.

Cynics will say he was worried about his meal ticket, that his survival is pegged to mine. But that’s not true. While Bud has no way of knowing I have made arrangements with my family for one of them to take him if anything happens to me, ensuring he will never end up in a shelter, he misses me dearly when I go away.

I’ll never forget the way he meowed in excitement when I was in Japan and called home to Facetime while my mom was cat-sitting him. He gave me a slow-blink as if unsure if he was really seeing me on the screen, then gave a cry of joy when I blinked back before he launched into one of his usual monologues.

Likewise he always makes a big deal of my arrival back home. The first few times he actually began shaking with emotion and threw up in relief. The poor little guy, I realized, didn’t know if I was coming back. Since then he has a routine that involves pretending he’s angry at me for leaving and feigning ambivalence, which usually lasts about a half hour at most before he drops the act. Then he clings to me even more than usual for a few days.

Yet he does not have an unhealthy attachment. Like all cats, Bud opts for alone time sometimes, and when he shuffles his napping spots every two or three months there’s usually a few days when he prefers napping on the other couch, under the dinner table or on top of a heat vent. Then it’s back to his regularly scheduled lap-napping.

So if the question is “What makes your pal special?” my answer is everything. Every day with him is a gift, and I intend to appreciate every moment of it, even when he’s a royal pain in the Bud.

This post is a response to WordPress’ daily writing prompt: Share a photo of your pet and tell us one thing that makes them uniquely them.

What’s The Funniest Misunderstanding You’ve Ever Been Part Of?

A tale of Big Buddy’s stupidity!

I had a crush on Meghan.

She was a sophomore resident assistant on the second floor of my dorm. Short, blonde and witty, with an easy smile and an understated sense of humor. I really liked her.

The problem was, I couldn’t stop making an ass out of myself in front of her. Whether it was jokes that landed with a thud, awkward encounters or my own general self-sabotage, it just never seemed to go well. Yet she still tolerated me.

While I was getting accustomed to living at school that first year, juggling classes, new friends and easing into the responsibilities of adulthood, I had a minor crisis: my dorm had undergone a “refresh” over the summer, and my room must have been one of the last because I discovered the wood stain they’d used on the dressers hadn’t fully dried.

I came home from class one day to find my roommate wearing a pair of my boxers on his head like a hat and a bunch of my friends laughing at me. All my boxers had sticky, stinky wood stain on them. T-shirts too, which proved I wasn’t soiling myself, but my roommate and friends had a field day with it nonetheless.

I removed all my clothes from the drawers, did a cycle of laundry and was dismayed to see the wood stain stuff hadn’t washed out. I don’t remember how many cycles I did, just that after several attempts the clothes appeared to be clean, finally.

So there I was in the laundry room late at night, crouched in front of an open dryer door, trying to determine if I needed to do one more wash. I reached in, grabbed a fist full of clothes and took a deep huff to make sure I couldn’t smell the wood stain any longer. Was I still smelling the stuff, or was it my imagination? I inhaled deeply again, my nose pressed against the fabric.

That’s when I heard someone behind me. I turned, saw Meghan the RA giving me a half wave with a strange expression on her face, and that’s when I realized the fistful of clothes I’d pulled from the dryer, the clothes I’d been deeply huffing a moment ago, were mostly boxers.

So now Meghan didn’t just see me as a joke-bomber and an idiot. I was also a weirdo who liked to sniff his own underwear.

“Hey Meg, it’s, uh — My clothes. The wood stain wasn’t dry in my room, and it got on my stuff so I, uh…” Ah, @$%! it, I thought. There was no way I was going to explain my way out of this.

So I just accepted she would see me as a weirdo, which she most certainly did at that point, and banished any thought of becoming more than friendly with her.

Sadly that is not my most mortifying moment in college, and there were some comically awful low points, but that one felt particularly shameful. No one wants to be known as a pervert who sniffs his own underwear. No one wants to be that guy.

The lesson here, ladies and gentlemen, is to make sure the coast is absolutely clear if you’re sniffing stubborn dirty clothing after a wash. Or maybe the lesson is not to put your clothes in drawers that have been recently treated with wood stain. Or maybe it’s just about not caring what others think of you. Regardless, it’s a misunderstanding I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

This post is a response to the WordPress daily writing prompt. If you found it amusing, please consider following Pain In The Bud and whitelisting us on your adblocker. Buddy the Cat demands it!

Short Story: The Wrath Of The Cat!

Humans have insulted felinekind for the last time!

Little Buddy was determined to win the prize.

A lavish spread of his most favoritest snacks — including a mouth-watering variety of crunchies, Gouda and American cheese, turkey meaty sticks and more — would be his if he could rush to the kitchen, open the refrigerator door, remove a cold beer, and somehow get it back to his human before the end of the half-inning commercial break during a Yankees broadcast.

“Sixty seconds left!” Big Buddy called from the living room.

Little Buddy panicked. He was still working out how to reliably open the refrigerator door and was worried about whether he’d be able to carry the bottle by gripping the slender part with his teeth, or would be forced to roll it.

With a back paw resting against the adjacent cabinet, Buddy wedged his body against the refrigerator door and, with a bit of wiggling, finally pried it open. Yes!

There it was: the cold beer.

“Thirty seconds!” Big Buddy called.

Oh crap! The feline tried to grab the top of the bottle with his teeth, but it was slippery with condensation and cold.

I’ll have to roll it, then, he conceded.

Working quickly, he had the bottle safely on the floor in a few seconds and began rolling, nudging the icy brew with his nose and correcting its direction with his paws. Think of the snacks, he told himself.

He was out of the kitchen and heading toward the living room, beer rolling along, when Yankees announcer Michael Kay’s voice boomed through the speakers.

“And we’re back here in the bottom of the sixth, Yankees up two runs over the Red Sox,” he said.

“Time!” Big Buddy said, then got up and walked over to where his feline pal was sitting dejected with his shoulders slumped.

The human picked up the beer and cracked it open.

“So close,” he said, shaking his head. “What a shame.”

Little Buddy stared at the floor sadly as Big Buddy walked into the kitchen. Then he heard the unmistakable crinkle of a plastic bag. It was music to his ears, a balm for his soul, relief for his rumbling stomach.

I knew Big Buddy wouldn’t do this to me! he thought. He’s gonna give me that snack spread anyway!

The excited feline came skidding to a halt just inside the kitchen doorway and looked up to find his human digging a few mochi nuggets out of a Trader Joe’s bag. His tail, which had been quivering with excitement a second ago, sank like an inflatable air dancer suddenly deprived of wind.

“Mmmm,” the human said. “These are delicious. Don’t you just love snacks?”

He walked back into the living room and collapsed in his chair, leaving Little Buddy staring longingly up at the inaccessible Cabinet of Yums.

The hollow pop of a fastball discharging its kinetic energy off a wooden bat and the roar of the crowd sounded through the speakers in the next room, sending minute rumbles through the floor that tickled Buddy’s paw pads.

The gods of yums are pooping on me from great heights, he thought. What have I done to deserve this cruel fate?

“He’s training you!”

Little Buddy spun around. Who was meowing to him?

“Up here, dummy!” the voice meowed, and Little Buddy looked up to find a cat the color of a tangerine sitting on the outside window ledge and licking one paw.

“What do you mean by ‘he’s training me?'” Buddy asked the mysterious interloper.

The other feline continued raking his tongue along his paw at an insouciant pace, then finally stopped and looked down.

“He’s conditioning you to retrieve bottles of beer,” the interloper said with certainty. “The promise of a reward lit a fire under your behind, so you didn’t even question the ridiculous ‘challenge.’ And that, my boy, is how humans train lesser creatures like dogs. It is beneath us felines and an insult to our dignity!”

Buddy let the new information sink in.

“That bastard!” he meowed.

“Yes!” the tangerine cat replied.

“He’s treating me like a mutt? A dirty dog?”

“An abominable way to treat a friend, and if I may say so, an insult to your stature!”

Buddy seethed. “I’m supposed to be his best pal! His little buddy!”

“Some might call it a stunning display of absolute contempt for your feelings and your stomach,” the other feline nodded. “Criminal, really.”

“I’m gonna kill him!” Buddy meowed angrily.

The orange cat held up both paws.

“Hold off on that for a minute, will you, pal? If you go scorched Earth right away, you’ll have nothing for when this inevitably escalates.”

Buddy nodded reluctantly. “What did you have in mind?”

Tangerine smiled mischievously.

“My friend,” he trilled, “do you know what a toothbrush is?”

Author’s note: This is a work of fiction. At no time has Bud ever been denied a snack, nor has he ever missed a meal.

Meals missed: 0. Snacks deprived of: 0. Snacks consumed: 10,967. Vet assessment: Slightly chubby. Self assessment: Extremely meowscular, meowscle definition hidden by silky soft coat.

Despite Household Ban On Teleporting, Buddy The Cat Enjoys Tormenting His Human With The Ability

“I could tell his brain was fried! LOL!” Little Buddy the Cat said of his human’s inability to reconcile the feline’s mastery over space and time.

NEW YORK — Buddy the Cat lounged on his back right in the middle of the doorway, making sure his human saw him.

“I did the ‘Meep meep, I’m just a cute kitty cat’ thing, you know?” Buddy explained. “Like I’m so innocently dumb I don’t realize it’s a terrible place to laze around.”

His human, Big Buddy, took an exaggerated stride over him, saying “Bud, you really need to stop …” then looked up.

The feline was 15 feet away and sitting on top of a table, head slightly tilted in amusement as his eyes tracked the confounded human.

“Then I watched him look down at where I was a second ago, then back up at me, and I could tell his brain was fried LOL!” the feline said.

Teleporting is technically banned in Casa de Buddy, but the feline has ignored the ban since he was a kitten. The key, he said, is to “use the ability sparingly, so you drive your human slowly insane as they begin to question reality.”

“It’s so much fun!”

Little known fact: felines have the unique ability to manipulate space-time, which they use primarily to extend their napping hours.

Although human scientists and most members of the species deny the feline ability to teleport, Buddy said it’s actually rather simple to manipulate space-time.

“I just kind of scrunch up my face, try to clear my mind of stuff I normally think about — turkey, being really handsome, turkey — and picture the spot in my head,” he explained. “Then I blink and boom! I’m in a new spot!”

His personal record, he claims, was traveling more than 700 feet when he accidentally teleported himself to the roof of a nearby building after hearing its resident female in heat.

“You know, it was such a charming sound,” Buddy recalled, “but once I teleported there, I didn’t know what to do.”

“A reader suggested it was because I didn’t have Testicles, but I didn’t have Pericles or Socrates either,” Buddy mused. “I’m not sure why I would have needed some old Greek guy. Did the ancient Greeks teleport too?”

A statue of Athenian statesman Pericles. It was suggested to Little Buddy the Cat that he didn’t know what to do when encountering a female in heat because he did not bring any ancient Greeks with him.

The tabby cat said he plans to wait a few days until his human forgets about the teleporting incident, then teleport himself into the passenger seat of the car when Big Buddy is about to drive somewhere.

“I’m thinking of saying ‘Don’t forget your seat belt, mister!’ or something simple like ‘So where are we headed, pal?”” Buddy said. “Haha, he’s gonna freak out!”

Little Buddy the Cat initiating his teleport sequence.

Hugely Popular ‘Warrior Cats’ Book Series Scores A TV Adaptation

The novels have sold almost 100 million copies worldwide and have prompted millions of kids to read.

Warrior Cats, a series of books that have sold in excess of 90 million copies worldwide, will be adapted as an animated series.

The new TV series is already in production with Chinese media giant Tencent producing in tandem with El Guiri Studios, an animation studio in Madrid.

The series will likely premiere in 2027.

I read the first volume of Warriors a few years ago to see what all the fuss was about and found a much better story than I expected. The narrative follows a young domestic cat named Rusty who ditches his comfortable life to join a clan of stray and feral cats living in the woods near his former home.

Warriors imagines groups of cats living in clans and working together to survive in a dangerous world.

As he adjusts to his new surroundings, he’s welcomed and supported by the clan’s cats, but others mock him as a “kittypet.” Rusty is determined to prove himself and his value to the clan.

The narrative is well paced, and there’s a compelling mix of world-building and action. The series is written for younger readers, probably appealing most to teens and pre-teens, but the authors — who collectively work under the pen name Erin Hunter — don’t condescend to their audience.

There’s tragedy, despair and death, but the book treats them with appropriate gravity, never trivializing events.

At a time when 28 percent of American adults are functionally illiterate, more than half read below a sixth-grade level, and schools are churning out graduates who struggle to read simple sentences, you’ve got to reach younger readers where they are.

We’re living through an unprecedented backslide in capability, one that cannot be fully explained by COVID-prompted disruptions to education.

Well-written books like Warriors are crucial in getting kids to read and turning it from a chore to something they enjoy. In a way, they’re this generation’s version of Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. Let’s hope the animated series inspires even more kids to pick up the books it’s based on.