Spitball Army

My back yard has become the gathering place for three of the neighborhood ne’er-do-wells.  A yellow tabby that I call Thomas is the least fearless of the bunch, and will calmly lay in the driveway until I get within six or seven feet of him, then ZOOM! he disappears.  The smallish black cat – the runt of the trio – generally hides behind the woodpile or underneath my back porch.  One sight of me, even two houses away, and he’s gone.  The fuzzy (read: mangy) brown cat – the only one with a collar – will sit on the short garden wall in the back yard and taunt me to chase it away by broadcasting a high siren of a growl in my direction.  I guess he thinks the yard belongs to him.

The notion that the claim to ownership of my own property was being loosened from me became clearer yesterday, when I returned from a week out of town.  A couple of neighbors had been keeping an eye on my place, and one of them had kindly placed both issues of my Sunday New York Times on the front porch.  When I picked up the edition from the 24th and pulled the blue plastic bag from it, a bitter acid smell slapped me in the face.  I immediately dropped the bag, looked at my hand and, raising it to my nose, got blasted once again by the unmistakable stench of cat urine.

I don’t know about you, but the mental image of a tomcat walking around the yard pissing on everything isn’t one that I like replaying.  I have two cats of my own, one female and one male – both fixed – and there for a while I was having problems with the yard cats tormenting my cats when they went for an excursion onto the front porch (which is, thankfully, screened in).  Though I never caught them in the act, judging by the smelly evidence left behind, the toms were jumping on the ledge surrounding the porch and spraying everything including the mailbox and the recycling bin.  Apparently, these items were in their way.

But to take aim at the New York Times, sitting in its drab, inanimate way somewhere in the middle of the front yard, makes me suspicious that Thomas and his small gang of feline hoodlums have been contracted by timeswatch.org to assure that I avoid pissing my time away reading smelly left-wing liberal propaganda.