”Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”
.
As I’ve said before on this blog, I’m a doggie person, but I know that there are a lot of people out there who like cats. However, I don’t think any of them could have liked the cat that is the subject of this post.
It happed a few years ago when a colleague and myself were on a business trip that included a visit to a small town in West Virginia. It was a lovely little town, called Rednecksville (I won’t tell you it’s real name so as to protect the guilty), full of lovely, very friendly and hospitable people.
During the time we happened to be there they held a local fair come flea market where people from the town and the surrounding countryside would gather. Some set up stalls to sell their home crafted goods, others, like myself just went along to see what was on offer and perhaps buy a few trinkets as gifts.
But, whilst the experience itself was enjoyable, the items that were on sale left a whole lot to be desired. They were quite unbelievably crudely made.
There was a guy with what I think were supposed to bird nesting boxes and/or feeders, but they looked more like an old plank of wood with a bit of drain pipe nailed to it. (It looked like that because that’s what it was, lol)
Other stalls were selling home made jewelry in what you could only call primitive style.
And yet more had bits of metal junk.
Surprisingly one of the junk stalls seemed to be doing good business, selling big rusty nuts and bolts and bits of chain and so forth. On second thoughts perhaps not so surprisingly since this was a largely rural community and new uses can always be found for stuff like that.
I smiled quietly to myself as I wondered if the bird box guy had been a customer of this stall the last time they had the fair.
At another stall a woman was selling some stuffed toys/animals she had very obviously made herself. None of them were good, but some were just downright awful.
For some reason best known to himself my colleague chose to buy a stuffed cat for his wife. He was getting on in years and had been married a long time, but in all those years he never had any idea about women or what they would like – and that was especially so in regard to his wife, although in his defense I have to say that she didn’t seem to like anything he did very much.
To my utter amazement he choose the most unusual stuffed cat I have ever seen. It wasn’t that it looked ugly as such, or that it was badly made. This thing looked pure evil. And no matter where you would be standing it always seemed to be looking right at you, or through you.
It was terrible, horrendous, occultish. If Steven King had been there he’d have written a book about it for sure. If Vincent Price had been holding it in some horror movie set it might have looked more acceptable. Or if we had been in Haiti, I could have understood it if it was supposed to be some voodoo ritual piece. But this was right in the middle of good old evangelical Christian Bible Belt America. This was no place for the cat from hell.
“What do you think?” he asked, proudly showing me his new purchase.
“I hate it!” I told him in no uncertain terms. “What the hell did you buy that thing for?”
He seemed rather miffed.
He must have been more miffed when he got it home. Needless to say his wife hated it. Wouldn’t give it house room at all. And I’m sure she made her feelings very clear to him, as she usually did about almost everything.
So he gave it to his daughter.
She hated it. Didn’t want it near her house either.
So he gave it to his daughter-in-law.
She hated it. She was actually scared out of her wits by it.
So he gave it to his grand-daughter.
She hated it. Started to cry, I believe.
So he put in the trunk of the car and brought it to his office the next day.
His secretary hated it, too. Wouldn’t have it near the office.
So back in the trunk it went.
Eventually he must have got to hate it too because it disappeared never to be seen again.
And the weirdest bit of all….
I photographed him with it when he bought it and I would have attached it to this blog post except for one thing – the photo is nowhere to be found!
That was one weird cat!
fasab 