Hungry Cat won't live with us.

Hungry Cat, the stray who lives somewhere in our backyard, refuses to come in to live with us. He's scared and intimidated by my wife's cat, and irritated by my sister-in-law's cat. If he's brought in, he just sits at the door, waiting to be let out. And when he's let out, he runs, and we don't see him again for the day.

Hungry Cat will beg for affection if you're outside with him. He waits atiently for food in the morning, and will spend time hanging out on our back deck. He loves people; he loves attention. He just doesn't want to be inside with us. At what point do you start thinking, with tongue in cheek, "What's so wrong with us that a stray cat doesn't want to live with us?"

I used to have another blog, a LiveJournal, that I kept from the time shortly after my mother died to just around a year ago. I deleted it after I'd decided that it had served its purpose. On the surface, it was a convenient creative outlet. But I used it as a place to vent whatever was tearing up my gut at the time. I needed to work out a lot of things after my mother, then my father, died.

My sister told me that my parents died assuming that I'd hated them. They imagined that I had some type of resentment towards them, for what, I don't know. Neither did they. I never hated them at all, of course. I just didn't fit (another observation that my sister had made). There was something "off" about me. I was too smart for my own good, and thought I had every answer. They, being older and from a different time, had no idea, of course, how my life worked, or how life in general worked. But I was also creative and wanted to try things on my own. I was obsessed with making the imaginary tangible (something that affected my hobbies, my attitude towards art, as well as my religious faith). I was terrified of growing up to be an adult child. I never wanted to be the guy described in a line from a Billy Joel song, "You're 21 and still your mother makes your bed." So I made effort to separate myself from my family's influence.

And so, I needed time to sort all of this out. Guilt tore me up for years (and still hits me, now and again). I sorted things out as best as I could. And in the process, I discovered I really don't feel comfortable talking about myself any more. Some of that comes from not wanting to come across as whining on-line. No one likes a whiner, and for some reason, the on-line medium just seems to amplify the whiny-ness. There were also times I'd been told by some friends, "Stop with the emo crap on your blog, you're starting to sound like _________ ." (Insert name of whiny emo-kid of the day there) That was enough to get me to shut up. I also didn't feel the drive to share so much anymore. I don't know why, but it became too much of a chore.

The black-and-white cat in my backyard has it hard. We built a shelter for him, and we know he stays there when things get cold or wet. But he acts content. He doesn't hate us, not as far as we can tell. He's aloof. He does things he wants to. His refusal to come in and live with us still confuses my wife. I think I understand it.

(I just took a drink of water, and thought it tasted a little funny. I'm reminded now that my wife's cat likes to drink out of our drinking glasses, and has been sitting on the kitchen table behind me this entire time. Damn cat.)