Video - Death By Kitten (Speakeasy)

Dustin Fisher tells a true story at SpeakeasyDC's open mic. from SpeakeasyDC on Vimeo.

Holy Quick Turnaround, Batman! I have to thank the incredibly talented and apparently extremely fast-video-editing Nick Newlin for getting this video out less than a week after it was shot. This is the video from all that nonsense I posted over the weekend about going Inside the Head of a Performer. Now you can see the fruits of my efforts. There's about a second or two when the video skips, possibly by accident, possibly because I said the F word one too many times. It's not perfect, but neither am I.

• Inside the Head of a Performer II - Part 1


• Inside the Head of a Performer II - Part 2


• Three Beer Rule

Still Standing Right Here...

Snowmaggedon 2010 - Part 1

Snowmaggedon 2010 - Part 1

I’m not a meteorologist. You know this. But what I am is someone with a memory and eyes. Normally when I hear crap like “record-setting snowfall,” I think about all the cars that seem to all be the best in their class. How the hell is that possible? How many classes are there? Could I just come up with a class and vote for my own car and claim that it was “2010’s best in-class?” I believe that’s the only reasonable explanation. But anyway, I figure that there’s probably some way to skew the statistics with regards to snowfall to make it sound like whatever we are in the midst of is the worst snow ever. It makes us feel like our meaningless life has purpose when we’re a part of history, even if we didn’t really do anything to earn it. But with another 12-20 inches predicted to come tomorrow night, that puts the weekly total at around 50 inches, which is three times the amount we normally get in one whole season. Those are numbers not even car buyers can disagree with.

I’ve seen storms that had a lot of hoopla beforehand only to turn out a small dusting and also storms casually mentioned on the news which debilitated cities for days. Well, they got this one right. I thought everybody was being little pansy babies, shutting down school on Friday and stocking up on water and toilet paper the night before. And why water? Do faucets stop working in the snow? Maybe I’ve just been blessed with decent pipes all these years.

But when the snow started coming and I saw all the salt trucks waiting in the on-deck circle on the side of the highways for the manager to call them to the plate, I realized this wasn’t one of those overhyped dustings. This was the real deal. And I needed cat food. We had enough human food and toilet paper at our place to last us through the weekend, and I was confident our plumbing system would keep delivering. But the cats needed to eat too. They were going to be stuck in the same damn storm. And because they never leave the apartment, I was going to have to get their food for them. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to wait in line at Giant for 2 hours just to get cat food. They’ll be eating spaghetti and clementines before that happens. So I figured I’d go way out of my way to the specialty pet store north of Baltimore on my way home from work. This made less sense as the snow was starting to accumulate, mostly because there was a moment of panic when I was about 2 miles away when I had a thought. If high schools, colleges and all government agencies were already closed for the day, what made me think a privately-owned, report-to-no one, independent pet store would still be open? Boy, I really hope I have enough pasta. Well, to make this story super anti-climactic, the store was open. And I got my kitty food. And to subtract even more from the drama, there was still plenty left. Probably enough for another 2 weeks. I think Jen just likes to make stuff up when she calls me to see if I’ll actually do it. Next thing, she’ll be asking me to go get bottled water.

Cat Scratch Fever: The 9th Day of Giftmas 2009

Cat Scratch Fever: The 9th Day of Giftmas 2009

If wearing my kitten's collar as a bracelet to remind me of her while she gets her kitty surgery makes me less of a man, well then I don't want to be right.

Poe is fine. And I did wear her collar around all day, partly as a reminder, but almost entirely for the sake of telling this story to people. I’ve given away all my man cards already, no point in hiding my hand. And as I found out when I went to pick her up, she learned how to hiss at no extra charge.

I had this same surgery done with Clementine, my Ohio cat. And the greatest part of it was seeing her wake from her anesthetic-induced haze. She pushed open the rest of the kitty door, wobbled the 7 inches to the kitty box I had placed in front of her, and laid down with her head and one paw in the sand and the rest of her, complete with newly shaved belly, on the rug, tail still in the cage. After fighting with gravity for a few minutes , she then regained her balance and, much like a sorority girl in heels after a couple Water Towers at Brick Street on a Thursday night, fell back the other way. Like the good father I was, I made sure she didn’t hit anything as she fell and managed to take a lot of pictures of the event to eventually show to her boyfriends when she brought them back to the house to watch a movie in her room with the door open. This continued with varying levels of pleasure for me for a couple hours.

However, this time Poe was kept to be monitored overnight, depriving me of the one minor pleasure that came out of shelling out $200 and admitting to myself and the cute girl at the counter, who noticed my collar/bracelet, that I was now a cat owner. That sucked. They wouldn’t even take pictures for me. And when I showed up to pick her up, they said that Poe was “being fussy” and I would have to take her hospital collar off when I got home because they refused to do it. This wasn’t a good sign. The next sign that wasn’t good was the one where the first thing Poe said to me when I got her back, was “HHHHHHHH.” I don’t know how to spell the violent, cobra-esque hiss that came out of her mouth for the first time ever, but that’s how it sounded.

I felt horrible. I’d just taken away her spirit. Not to mention her woman parts. I wanted to assure her that we were going back home to mommy and the fat kitty, but sticking my hands in that cage seemed to have the same effect of that time I managed to take the safeguard off the pencil sharpener back in 5th grade. So I put on her favorite CD, the Bangles. Not even that made her feel better. I told her how sexy the lead singer was, but then I figured she probably didn’t even like girls. Or humans. Or sex. So I put on Air Supply, the most asexual band I had. Same disgruntled meow. I started to realize it had nothing to do with the musical selection. After about 20 minutes of meowing, she started at the cage like the wood-chipper again. At least this was a familiar response. Maybe she’d go back to her old Poeness after all.

And it now appears as though she has. She’s back up on the counter breaking wine glasses and Sweetie is shitting on the rug again. Poe, it’s good to have you back. Kinda.

Kitty Climax: The 8th Day of Giftmas 2009

Kitty Climax: The 8th Day of Giftmas 2009

I’m not a big fan of Drew Carey, but I’m not going to leave my cat unspayed just to spite him. So I scheduled Poe’s little kitty surgery for this Wednesday. Unfortunately, due to a poor miscalculation based on data I just kinda made up, my cat went into heat a month before I figured she would. So now I have a poor horny kitty struggling through her transformation into adolescence as I type. And if you’ve never seen a cat in heat, it’s unbearable both for her and her owners. It’s like she’s on ecstasy. She rolls around on the rug and the bathmat and rubs her head on everything she walks by – the table leg, the TV stand, the sharp corner of a bike pedal. Everything just feels sooooo gooood. And she walks around sticking her ass up in the air looking around for boy kitties to come up behind her. She’s scratching at our cabinets looking for them too. And she meows all the time, calling out to these boy kitties to come beat down the door and satisfy her newly discovered womanly needs.

I’ve been telling people she went into heat already and about 37 people said “Yeah, I know how she feels, heh heh.” No you don’t. And if you were thinking that same thought as I was typing, you can either feel bad that you’re as predictable as everyone else, or you can be excited you’re just like everyone else, depending on your own self-worth. Also, some people tried to compare it to when dogs go into heat. Though I appreciate you trying to sympathize, you can stop. Dogs in heat and cats in heat is as different as getting out-of-a-bad-relationship horny and getting-out-of-a-20-year-prison-sentence horny. Now you show me a dog in heat who just spent a hair shy of 3 years in jail, and I’ll give you that one.

The last cat I had in Ohio was in a really bad way, as they say. Like a life-sentence-with-no-conjugal-visits bad way. She was to the point where if she didn’t get her kitty surgery soon, she was going to die. Not because of that, but because Seth was going to kill her. But really, it was incredibly annoying. It was to the point where I was about to take care of it myself just to shut her up. Kill two birds with one stone if you know what I’m sayin. You don’t have to tell me. I know how wrong that is. But really, I was thinking about going out to find a boy kitty for her, but I’m not that generous of a wing man. If anybody was getting pussy in that house, it was going to be me. Relax, that one wasn’t as bad.

So I dropped Poe off at the Kitty Hospital today and I am picking her up tomorrow. And I caught a stroke of luck. On the way there, Poe was stuck in the kitty carrier. She hates the kitty carrier. After about 20 minutes of meowing and trying to dig out of the plastic bottom of the carrier, she went to work at the metal gate. Like a crack addict trying to get to her crack. Her claws were flying off her paws like a tree-shredder. That horrifying experience was apparently enough to snap her out of heat. I guess if you were thrown into a cage that you could barely turn around in and thrown in a van for an hour, you’d probably forget how horny you were too. Even after a 20-year jail sentence. So the surgery went fine and I am going to pick her up tomorrow. Looks like I don’t have to have that father/daughter talk after all. Maybe a different one. About how I took out her uterus just when she finally wanted to use it.

Death by Kitten: The 4th Day of Giftmas 2009

Death by Kitten: The 4th Day of Giftmas 2009

This is an actual sentence I said last week.

“Hey Keith, my kitten ate Jen’s roses and puked all over your invitation. Could you give me directions to your baby shower again?”

I’m going to table the fact that I attended a coed baby shower for a little while so I can introduce you to the reason I show up to work with scratches all over my forearms and face. That would be Poe, the little kitten that I decided to plague our perfect happy home with. She’s apparently a “Russian Blue” breed, which is odd since she’s completely grey. And her eyes are yellow. And she’s from Jessup.

So I’m not necessarily a cat person at all. Which is another way of saying I’m straight. And yet, some impulse I had made the decision to add another cat to our 11th floor apartment.

Oh yeah. We already have another cat. Oh, and I moved in with Jen. There. Now you’re caught up.

So the main problem isn’t with the kitten, but it’s with her interaction with the 22-pound beast which Jen keeps trying to convince me is a cat. See, Poe likes to play and Sweetie (fat cat) is old and prefers to lay there and be left alone. Well, anytime Sweetie gets up to go anywhere, Poe will run behind her, jumping and swatting at her tail the entire way like it was a toy. As you can imagine, this pisses off the big cat. Especially when trying to use the litter box. As soon as Poe hears the scratching of the litter, she goes running after her. So what this caused is that now, Sweetie feels so much anxiety over going to the litter box, she will more often than not, shit on the wood floor. This does not make me happy. But think about it. If every time you went to the bathroom to crap, your little sister would hit you in the ass, wouldn’t you just do it wherever the heck you were at the time?

Anyway, an unfortunate side effect to this is that dried poop seems to be the most fun toy in the world to the kitten, provided there’s no chapstick available. So occasionally, we’ll move the couch to find a few pieces of dried, hardened Sweetie poop. It’s a sad life to have accepted for the three of us that aren’t Poe. I wish whatever part of me said “I’m not a cat guy” had spoken up louder back in April.

Rating Aspects of the Holidays

Aspects of the Holidays

Cookies - This is probably one of the best aspects of Christmas there is. Everywhere you go, people are offering you cookies and making cookies for you. It's gotta suck for people trying to watch their weight because they can't escape the endless torture that this cookie making holiday hell imposes upon them. But for the rest of us, eat on! A

Presents - Well, this is a two-edged sword. Unless you don't care what other people think of your gifts or of what you get. I think it's cool to get a nice gift every once in a while, but I think I stress out too much around the holidays about whether or not my Aunt is going to appreciate thoroughly the Espresso machine made in the shape of Paul Reiser's head. And it turns out that grandma doesn't listen to gangsta rap anymore either. And God forbid you forget anybody. But it is cool getting shit you want but wouldn't pay for. B+

Vacation Time - This is the single greatest thing about this holiday. Everybody has off. Schools and all other businesses. Schools are lucky enough to have off the entire week between Christmas and New Years. That's an awesome break to relieve some tension between summers. The students do however, have to worry about finals all the way up until the actual holiday on occasion. But if you're lucky enough to work at a college, you get the best of both worlds. A+

Family - Don't get me wrong, I love seeing my family get together, and the kids are great. But on the flip side, I get "So, are you seeing anybody? Why not? Is something the wrong with you? What ever happened to old what's her name? I know somebody you'd like." No you don't, grandma. And even if you did, it doesn't work that way anymore. We have no cattle to trade her family. And I don't have a farm that would require a child to plow it anyway. But I can handle that. It's when they lapse back into "So, when are you getting a real job? Did your parents bust their ass so you could become a flag football referee?" that I can't stand. I'm sure they're interested, but nothing's going on and I'd rather not talk about it. But you can't say that to them or it's considered rude, or so I found out on Thanksgiving 98. B

One of my secretaries (I have several) was telling us today how her dog chased her cat up into her tree. We thought this was moderately amusing until she mentioned it was her Christmas tree. That's really funny. I can picture ornaments flying off, tinsel getting stuck all over the cat's fur and in its paws. She didn't have to call the fire dept thankfully, but between the pine needles and the unhappy bitch cat, she required 13 stitches. Anyway, she was telling this story to my boss and myself, among others, to which my boss replied...

Quote Of the Day 11/19/00

"That's why I don't have a cat. Or a dog. Or a tree."

-Boss Man G.


Of course, he's Jewish. That event would likely start a 3 alarm fire in his house.

Going home for Christmas,

Screaming Cricket.


Still Standing Right Here...

House Sat

House Sat

Well, the house sitting has come to a welcomed end. That dog was the most stubborn thing in the universe. And I had to take her out a total of 6 times a day! I guess I shouldn't complain too much, because these people were paying me pretty decent money to just basically sit in their house and watch TV (TV watching optional), which is what I would normally do at home anyway. But Jiggy is so much cooler than that boring dog. For one, Jiggy moves when you push her, and sometimes she does it voluntarily. Keesha (the husky) just sits around collapsed under her own weight most of the day. But anyway, it's over. The thing that really sucked about it was that I had to just sit there all weekend knowing that there was other, much funner stuff going on elsewhere in the world. And I was stuck with this stupid lethargic as she wanna be dog. I got sick of staying in all the time though, so I went out with Tony and Julie to eat and lay carpet Friday night. We wound up in Giant somehow at around 1:00 in the morning. I was complaining that I didn't have time to play all night in Giant because I had to drive all the way back home and get up at 6:00 in the morning to walk the dog. Julie was a bit confused because last she had heard, we had a cat. Gender can be easily mistaken, but genus is pretty hard to fuck up. So she looked at me and Tony with this look that said "but I thought..." I was going to keep her in suspense, but Tony decided to break the silent confusion...

Quote of the Day 7/19/99

"He's learning how to do the yo-yo again."

-Mellow-tone-n.


Remind me to get some mad carbs in my system before I try to rock the cradle again.

Robbing, er uh... rocking the cradle,

Mr. Cantaloupe.


Still Standing Right Here...

Fraidy-Cat

Fraidy-Cat

I don't think I told you guys this as a big collective group yet, but we now have a kitten. My roommate's girlfriend's parents decided it was a good idea to burden me with wildlife at this point in my life. This thing is wild too! It's traditionally really good about not clawing people's skin, but if it tries to jump up on your leg and starts to fall, it's no holds barred. Every cat for themselves. It's fallen from the height of my leg many times before, I don't know what it's scared of. Hell, I've thrown it at least 10 feet in the air across the room against the wall before and it didn't even limp. Hell, it didn't even move. And it did, even after impact, land on its feet. You know, they say that cats always land on their feet when they fall or when you throw them. Well, I figured out that so do dogs. And gerbils. And fish. It's just that we see cats land on their feet more often because it is necessary to throw cats around, whereas dogs, gerbils, and fish will listen to you. All you have to do is hit the dog once and say "NO!!" real loud and he'll get the idea from then on not to do whatever it was he did. He also learns what the word "no" means really fast. Not cats. He needs to jump on my lap to try to help eat my cereal, and he still does it every freakin day. And everyday, I punt him across the room into the wall. Damn thing doesn't learn. I'll bet modern psychology would turn 180 degrees if Pavlov had cats instead. People say dogs are dumb, but this kitten refuses to learn this stuff, despite it's many flights across the dining room against her will. And it comes right back for more. This dude has no fear. I don't know why there are so many terms associated with cats being scared. Fraidy-cat... Scaredy-cat... Pussy.

I'm going back to Spring Break for this quote that I almost forgot about. I almost got my ass kicked in Jacksonville for freaking some girl that was apparently already taken. I told Meawad I couldn't see. I was just happy to not be freaking a guy. Anyway, I went out there with Meawad, and I told Tony that he needed to start coming into the fire with us more often. There was a girl checking him out and I told him a good icebreaker is asking her to dance with him (this was before I used that same technique to almost get my ass kicked)...

Quote of the Day 4/29/99

"It sounds like a good idea, but I can't dance. I might as well go up and ask her to knit or something, because I can't do that either."

-Monotone-Def


"Hey baby. Howz about you and me go back to my place and I show you the antitrust & regulation of my macroeconomics, if you know what I mean." If that's the kind of stuff I was good at, I'd risk looking like a fool by gyrating randomly around the wood floor. Or shoving random needles into cotton.

"Playing" with the kitten,

Dustin.


Still Standing Right Here...