Kegels, Cramps and Cats
This is Dixie. I've alluded to her before. Lookit her cute widdle tongue.
Dixie expresses her unmet needs through toy based semaphore. I have no idea whether all or most cats do this, I’ve only ever had Dixie. But it’s a real thing. Here are some highlights.
“None shall pass.”
“Your lack of faith displeases me.”
Here she is when she’s happy.
And here she is earlier today, thoroughly pissed off.
Sheepy (bottom right) is her primary. If she sheeps you, whatever she’s trying to communicate, she MEANS IT. She has two sheep obviously, because fail-safe. Sheep the second has a bell hung around its neck, which means you can actually hear her ill-will from an adjoining room. It sounds festive.
The number of toys increases with the time she’s had to suffer unattended or unfed. These periods of tribulation can last anything from moments to seconds.
Four toys, as seen above is Dixie 911. She may have gone minutes unfed. Multiple minutes. You’ll see that the toys in question look like the victims of a vicious gangland murder. As with the mafia, the horror and the visibility of the imagery is strategically and purposely chosen. It’s both a message and a threat.
A BRUSH WITH DEATH.
Having been alerted (once again) to my complete negligence and abdication of care, I decided to give Dixie a brusha. ‘Brusha’ is our cute cat word for brushing her fur. We add a’s to the ends of words all the time. Some turkeys will tell you it’s wrong to play fast and loose with nouns like that. But that’s just the cavalier linguistic fast-lane we choose to live our lives in. Okay Boomer?
Dixie loves a brusha, and I love giving her one. It’s been a nice experience getting better at it. To begin with, I was trying to brush her. But I soon I developed the brush inside. I hover the brush the right distance from her head, provide resistance, then Dixie does the rest.
So after encountering the four toy remonstrance, I went to get the brush out of its basket which was located under the couch. It’s normally beside the couch, but tonight we have three quails in a box (not a subscription meal service, three actual pet quails) occupying that space. We’re trying to fatten little Julian up and he gets lonely without company. Yes there are birds in the house. No, they’re not always there. Yes, we misgendered two of them. Maybe I will write about it, maybe I won’t. This story isn’t about them, loosen up square.
Stretching my arms under the couch and countering the weight through my core and legs, I’d just wrapped my fingers around the brush, when a bolt of lightning disguised as the worst cramp I have ever had in my life shot up my right leg at near light speed.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
If you want to know how sharp the pain was, I forgot about the cat.
I never forget about the cat. She’s Dixie. I mock. But with the deep love you mock your best mates with. And let’s not forget. There were four toys.
But in that moment, I didn’t have a cat. I’d never had a cat. What is ‘acat’? Is acat the same as standing up quickly, because if if it isn’t, I don’t care.
It was so bad. But that’s the funny thing about the worst cramps. Once they’re under control, you don’t say “That was a bad one!” You say “Wow. That was a GOOD one.” It’s just nice to feel alive.
It’s the speed that gets you. ZAP! No warning. We watch tragedy on the news, lives turned upside down in a moment and think, “What must it be like to go through something like that?”
I think like a really bad leg cramp. One that never completely goes away. That’s why you should hug your loved ones.
IT’S ALL MY FAULT!
The biggest shock was I’ve gotten that brush from under that couch hundreds of times and never had a cramp like that. And almost immediately, I knew why.
Not to be indelicate, but recently, when I’ve been frequenting the water closet, there’s been, leakage. Not much. But some. I don’t know how much. But not none.
So I thought, quite reasonably, ‘I could do without this getting worse.’ A stitch in time saves nine and all that. So I googled it. And yada yada yada, now I’m doing kegels. For the gentlemen readers (ladies know) kegels are exercises for you pelvic floor.
You know the bit you squeeze when you want to stop mid-stream? Well it’s a muscle. And like all muscles, if you don’t use it, you lose it. You use it? A trophy. You don’t. Atrophy.
Either way, after 40, it starts phoning it in a little bit, unless you conduct active performance reviews accompanied and enforced by strong, hands-on management.
So I done some kegels. Sure, piss yourself laughing. But one day, the laughing will stop. And you’ll just piss yourself.
It felt, different. Like that deep ache the day after you use muscles you stopped using along with monkey bars.
You have to understand. My partner takes my diligence in applying anti-fungal cream to my big toes as a proxy metric for my commitment to our relationship. My self-care, the regard I give myself quite accurately mirrors the care and regard I give her.
But look at me now! I’m getting out in front of this thing. I feel good. Diligent. Here I am, doing kegels. Just for me. Just for Yianni.
It’s not performative, it isn’t seeking status or fame. It’s noble, which isn’t something you can say for a lot of things that have taken place within my underpants. Exercising further self-care and prudence, I reject the temptation to overdo it, and stopp after five. I don’t want to wake up tomorrow with travails in my entrails.
Five however, was apparently enough to disturb the slumbering spirits of long-dead and forgotten muscle mummies and tissue wraiths. And now, with a brush in my hand and a long way up from the floor, I am pain. I am panic. Imagine if I’d done twenty.
Finally, I stand up. I put the weight of the world on my right leg, randomly move limbs and tense a spasmodic sequence of muscles inside my leg like a high stakes game of whack-a-mole until the situation stabilises. Finally, I limp outside to my partner.
She sees me hobbling gingerly, still clasping the brush and wincing because a stable cramp condition is like being ‘in a stable condition’ in hospital. It just means you’re not dying. It’s still really bad.
“Oh my God, are you alright?”, she asks.
“It was the cat! I did kegels and got cramps! There were four toys!”, I reply.
She might have been forgiven for patting me down to locate the psychoactive drugs. But the intensity in my eyes tells her that whatever this is, it’s real. All too real.
This is 44.
Yianni Agisilaou - 04 August, 2022