Saturday Morning's Alright

Saturday. Saturday morning, to be exact, and my apartment looks like a wreck. There are empty beer bottles everywhere, and all the furniture has slid across the floor to different positions than they should be, leaving behind a trail of dust and bottle caps. The only living thing in there when I wake up is my cat, which stretches and runs past my feet (that are on tiptoes, to minimize the amount of shit I have to step in) to his food dish, pitifully empty. If I can’t get any food, neither can you, I think, and begin to look through the kitchen cabinets. I play the role of designated everything, so I am usually the first to encounter the weekend wasteland every morning.

The kitchen is empty, which is what I expected, yet it is habit to try and find something—perhaps a forgotten granola bar, or leftovers from last night, or a little bit of milk in the back of the fridge that would make a great bowl of cereal. But all I see is beer. Beer and more beer, with a little vodka sprinkled in. I give up, and accidently kick the cat, who is now rubbing against my bare legs, purring gently. He retreats back to the couch, and with a contemptuous look that only cats can pull off so well begins to claw at the arm of the sofa. He eats as much as each of my four roommates and me combined: his multiple meals a day, and his attempts to eat all of our meals a day (which are few, but still more than appetizing to him when they appear). I decide to drive to Dunkin Donuts. Not much is better when you first wake up then a large, black coffee and a donut, and I make the trip quickly in the cold, winter air with anticipation that the cat is going to try to eat all of my donut when I’m not looking.

When I return it is as I expected. Nobody else is awake, except the cat is waiting. He leaps from the couch to the coffee table as I crinkle the bag with my donuts in it (I went with two, not one—the teasing racks of donut after donut makes it very hard to get just one, especially when I know that it will be my last meal for a while) and begins to sniff the first donut, a seasonal gingerbread one. I shove him off the table. Politeness is not a trait the kitten has developed yet, and he is also stubborn as all hell. As if to mock me, he is quickly back on the table as soon as he hits the ground. I surrender to the fact that he will stay there, and proceed to eat my breakfast. Black coffee, two donuts. Surrounded on my small coffee table in my dirty apartment with beer bottles, ashtrays, something dreadfully sticky in a far corner, and a cat. That damn cat. He’s eating something off the table now, not satisfied with my donut. Elton John said it best; I’m a juvenile product of the working class, whose best friend floats in the bottom of glass.