Water Sports

"Hey, you think someone could turn the water on?"

Kibble Kat looked around, half expecting someone dressed like  Lawrence of Arabia to show up to turn the tap on.  He stared at the gold crusted faucet for a moment.

"What do you do to get a little service around here. Back home I could expect Daddy or Mommy to show up in a half hour or so.  Here, you're paying $3,500 a night in this joint.  You'd think they'd have room service."

The 'little place in the country' was actually in the country of Dubai and Kibble Kat had stopped in for a little r&r at this luxury motel built on an artificial island in the Gulf of So and So (Kibble Kat, like his dad, wasn't so hot on geography . From the desert the hotel actually looked like a big chicken bone.  Well, it wasn't a chicken, alas, but they served some tasty chicken dishes, and he loves chicken, and so kibblekat  happily tried them all when no one was looking.

You  may wonder, brave reader, how kibblekat was able to afford such a high price tag.  Well, that's easy.  You see when you are a little kat, you are TINY, and you just wait for opportunity of the everpresent opening door, and walk right in!  He had finely honed this useful skill over years with Mommie and Daddy.  Patience and the right moment are crucial.  Omit the occasional meow in this case, tho.  (Another time he would cleverly disguise himself as an impressive Count, but his tailor could not be reached at this episode.  So katskills would have to do).


When opportunity knocks, the paws are ready to roll.

Kibble Kat Meets Louis the Crumpet

 Under Cupcake's tutelage, Kibble Kat soon became an experienced time traveler.  He was soon dashing here and there. breakfasting on Baltic cod in 16th Century Rostock, lunching in the 12th Century Baghdad on a buffet of shabbut pulled from the muddy Tigris, only to plop down along the Nile to watch the sunset on some ancient evening, as he munched briskly away on fresh river perch. His cat's whiskers guided him unerringly through the narrows of time, where a single misstep might drop you into the vortex of eternity. 

Kibble Kat was in his element.  There was no doubt about it.  What cat didn't like endless choice?  And we know that Kibble Kat was all cat.  Decades of boredom dropped off like a second skin as he zoomed around the globe through the centuries.

He soon started coming back time and again to a single point in time and place.  Kibble Kat loved comfort and who appreciated comfort and ease like the French.  Are we forgetting the Court of Versailles?.  For a cat who styled himself the Sun Kibble, what better place to be than 17th or 18th Century France, lolling around on a hand embroidered pillow as your mistress lazily scratched behind your ears? ( In the meantime, the scullery maids three floors below were chopping up a little whitefish in a Limoges bowl for your brunch.) 

And no one knew the places to scratch better than Madame Pompadour, mistress to Louis XV and patron to the great Voltaire.  So, it was that Kibble Kat found himself in the chateau of Armac somewhere in the region of France known as the Limousin, ensconced in the lap of luxury as the Marquise's favorite feline.  No one quite understood, however, why the court favorite would disappear for long periods of time while liveried staff would search high and low through every dungeon and every tower to find 'Le Gris." 

There was nothing that the Marquise would not do for Le Gris.  After she was bored and depressed,  exiled as she was for the time being from the court of his paramour, Louis XV, in Versailles, having to content hersld with the company of the few members of the minor nobility who visited her.  She had a smaller version of her own richly canopied bed build for him next to her bed.  He was treated to 15 course meals on silver and porcelain service consisting of delicious morsels of fish from every part of the Mediterranean.  On occasion, Voltaire would visit his beloved patron, the Marquise, at which times he would read from the last European best seller while Madame gently stroked under Le Gris' soft chin.

One of Madame's other visitors was Comte Louis d'Artingac.  Madame Pompadour called him Louis the Crumpet as he was famously addicted to the English pastry imported from abroad at great cost to to his crumbling, nearly bankrupt fiefdom.

Comte Louis was too poor and too far down the nobility to ever be invited to Versailles but that didn't stop him for lording it over every one a notch below his own perilous station in life.  And he was insanely jealous over the attention that Kibble Kat received from Madame, a state of mind you could pretty much translate into pure hatred.  Whenever Madame would turn her back, the Comte would scowl and made horrible faces at Kibble Kat, drawing the blade of a mock knife across his neck to symbolize his precise feelings at the moment. 

But our her, the brave and mildly vindictive Kibble Kat,  would never let some puffed up cartoon character like Louis the Crumpet come out unscathed from a contest of wills.  There came a day when Kibble Kat found himself in the Comte's bed chambers.  And what did he find on the Comte's dresser but the that hideous noble's very own wig.  And what did Kibble Kat do to that slightly moth eaten hairpiece?  Brave readers, we will leave it to your imagination.  But, please bear in mind, whatever it was, well, it wasn't pretty.

Have a good time

 "Wanna sniff my butt Big Boy?  No need to stand on ceremony.  We're 18 million miles from Patterson New Jersey you know.""  Kibblekat rubbed his eyes in disbelief..  He looked again.  Yep.  It was not just his imagination, but a REAL cat in outer space, and SHE was CUTE.  An opportuinity of a lifetime!   Go for it, an inner voice said.  So Cupcake and Kibblekat began to travel together.  She showed him beautiful galaxies of unlimited dimension.  The brightest lights.   He got to know her better.  She waa actually an alleycat from Patterson NJ who had been shut up in a dusty attic, so she had spent hours reading the stacks of old National Geographic magazines, pouring over them, learning of faraway lands and other species, nebulae and galaxies, quarks and black holes.  She found that world that had been denied her, so when she got her moment, she escaped, but was soon killed by a larger cat, and that is when this great new life started in space.  Being resourceful (a characteristic of tabbies), ,she figured out that you can stick your tail in a cosmic windstorm which then lets you travel through time.  So she taught him to do this too, and he quickly caught on.  Soon he was catching windstorms from left, then from right, and once in a while you could catch an updraft, which as especially exciting and dangerous.  Soon he was figuring out his own special moves to impress her.  Then, she taught him how to perch on top of the Hubble telescope so you could take a nap, as it wheeled thru space snapping pictures of the universe like a cosmic paparazzi.

Cupcake taught him how to rummage through the garbage behind the International Space Station for half empty tins of Beluga Caviar discarded by the Russians.  Later, she showed Kibble Kat how to use black holes in space as a giant litter box and watch as your nuggets got swooshed down, disappearing into the immense vacuum cleaner of space and time.

ccllll

Brave New Worlds to Conquer

Let's check in with where our hero, Kibble Kat, is. 

Knowing that his days on earth were numbered, Kibble Hat constructed an escape balloon capable of travel in deep space.  He painted it the brightest colors that he could to suit his personality and moods, then tucked it away cleverly in his carrier so Mommie and Daddie wouldn't find it when they took him to the vet for his appointed encounter with Dr. Death.

Mommy sadly carried Kibble Kat in his carrier out to a waiting taxi, then traveled the short distance to the vet's office.  All the time Kibble Kat furiously performed a last minute check on all the valves and rigging of his Escape Balloon.  He knew he had only one chance to get away before he was hooked up for the Big Sleep from which little cats never come back.  That was not his idea of fun.  He had places to go, planets to conquer, alternative realities to explore.

Mommy deposited the carrier in the waiting room once she arrived at the vet's office and went out to reception to pay the bill.  At that very moment, Kibble Kat lightly tapped the balloon release but with his paw.  Psssoosssh!  The balloon slowly expanded outwards against the walls of the carrier until the flimsy plastic gave way.  Suddenly the tiny little waiting room could no longer contain the rushing outward expansion of the balloon and within moments, Kibble Kat, perched safely in the gondola, was looking down at the quickly shrinking roof of Dr. Death's uptown office complex.  The balloon rose steadily through the cold ,gray overcast Minneapolis sky.

And our hero never looked back.  He was free. 

Now let's get one thing straight before we go any further with our story.  Kibble Kat is not on his way to becoming one of those so called Angel Animals that you read about in magazines and books. Yuk!  In the immortal words of Kibble Kat's occasional pal-about-town, Lil' David, the stuffed mouse.

"Screw that shit."

Nosireebob.  Kibble Kat is not, was not, will not ever be an angel.  And, if you think this blog has anything to do with that dreck, well, maybe it's time to check your Face Book status, or in other words, take a powder.

But let's get on with our story.  Kibble Kat's balloon is soon far away from Minneapolis, Minnesota.  Far, far away.  Drifting into the vast emptiness of space. Well, not quite empty.  As becomes apparent when Kibble Kat has to jump on the controls to avoid colliding with an increasing amount of space debris.  Old telecommunications satellites,  garbage from the several generations of Space Stations, you name it.  Hey, space, the next generation for the trash men of Earth. 

Then, suddenly, Kibble Kat sees a huge glittering contraption gyrating around one corner of space, a metallic four leaf clover of sorts.  If you recall, that's when Kibble Kat discovers that there is no cat food in the heavens.  After a fairly disappointing morning, rebuffed as he was by the space station crew, Kibble Kat continued his journey. 

A few hours later, he spied a strange shape out the corner of one eye.  No, it couldn't be. No way.  Kibble Kat rubbed his eyes in disbelief. It was ---a ------- , well, let's put it this way, a rather scraggly alley cat of sorts, leaping through space just as handily as if it was jumping fences in the neighborhood. 

"Meow!"

"Meow."  Kibble Kat replied, tail fur bristling in apprehension.

And more tomorrow or whenever in the continuing adventures of Kibble Kat, not to to confused with Angel Cat, which we sort of thing is the blog down the block about the Puerto Rican short hair. 

Whereupon Kibble Kat Encounters Cupcake the All Knowing

Brave reader, please do not presume that you are for an instant looking at an image of our feline hero, Kibble Kat, on his journey towards Paradise.

There are thousands, nay millions of orbiting cats, Saturn-bound pussies, planet-hopping felines and kindred spirits in space.  This has been confirmed numerous times in therapy sessions.

No sane cosmonaut or astronaut , just scooped out of the ocean or the rolling plains of the Ukraine,as it were, would ever come out in an official space agency debriefing with the the news that he had only the day before encountered a free floating tabby somewhere up there in the void 500,000 miles from Planet    
  Earth. That is, and not expect to be laughed out of either the cosmodrome or, albeit the case, the NASA country club.

So the beans get spilled in those private moments when the returned traveler straps himself into the therapy couch, finally able to talk freely about what did happen in space.  Typically, the psychiatrist will, upon hearing these tales of orbiting tails, begin to rummage through some mental list of pharmaceuticals for just the right drug to retro-fire the patient out of this drift into perceived madness.  After a couple of months on anti-psychotics, the daunted space traveler will drop his repressed memories and take the more sensible route of writing children s' books replete with hearty cosmo-cats and alien, shape changing mice. 

So, given this background, dear reader, you should hardly be amazed that our very own Kibble Kat, journeying through the recesses of empty space in his brightly colored escape balloon, should encounter one of these gravity defying kitties, a creature we shall come to know as Cupcake the All-Knowing.  In fact, it is Cupcake the All Knowing whose image we espied above -- a most extraordinary tabby who will play an important part in the future adventures of Kibble Kat. 

But we must leave that for another posting.

Kibble in Space

 Hta

What don't they understand about "meow?"

Is there a Russian word? 

Esperanto?

I've taken the time to get up here.  Through the atmosphere, the stratosphere, the catmosphere, what have you.  Up, up and more up in my brightly colored escape balloon.

Well, it figures I would get hungry.  For crying out loud, there ain't no reason to give up Fancy Feast just because I am no longer an earth cat.  There is Fancy Feast in Heaven, ain't there? 

SO I'M OUT HERE, OK, OUTSIDE . INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION AND I'M MEOWING.
Catch my drift?  HELLO IN THERE!

This stupid thing looks like some kind of giant air conditioner or something.  Hey, there's the Atlantic Ocean.
That rerminds me. Yep.  Home of Ocean Whitefish galore!  Yummie.  Seafood and Shrimp! 

MEOW!

Escape from Planet Earth

It all started one morning, after I had been very VERY sick for a long time, and my parents had to make that dreadful call to the Vet to “put me down”.  But I didn’t want to go down, I wanted to go UP.   You see, I am a kibblekat, and SO I am WILLFUL, CREATIVE, AND VERY VERY SMART.  I had a plan.  All night long that night before, I set to work painting my ESCAPE BALLOON .  I used lots of BRIGHT colors, painting and painting until the weather balloon was done to perfection, expressing MY personality.  So the moment came for my LAUNCH.  Mommie and daddie were very very sad because they thought this is the end of him and he will have no more adventures.  But I had snuck my balloon into the carrier, and when THAT  time came , I was LAUNCHED, UP , UP AND AWAY, AND ONTO UNTOLD ADVENTURESS AND LANDS.   I WILL NOW BE A KIBBLEKAT IN PARADISE.