Yesterday, my cat DJ passed away at the age of 20. She was my grandfather’s cat, and I adopted her after he died back in 2020, and I wasn’t about to dump her at the side of the road or leave her at the pound.
A couple days after taking her in, I was in my kitchen. I grabbed a pair of scissors out of a drawer, because I needed to cut something. Of course, I didn’t close the drawer, since there would be no point to opening, closing, then opening and closing a drawer again when I only needed to make a single cut. When I turned around to put the scissors away, I see a wide-eyed DJ hanging off the side of the drawer. She must have assumed that the drawer was a platform for her to jump on, and found out the hard way that it wasn’t. In that moment I realized that DJ was a perfect fit for me and my dogs; she walked around with this air of superiority, despite being dumb as shit. Despite being in a precarious situation where she could have been hurt, she was really unhappy about me pulling her off the side of the drawer and putting her back on the floor.
she once pulled her bed off the little ledge it was kept on. instead of waiting for me to put it back up, she simply crawled into her crooked bed and slept in it.
The thing about DJ is that she has always been a grouchy, ornery motherfucker. There are friends of mine that have been in Discord calls that can attest to how mad she could get. I don’t have a family to sit around the table and eat with, so I tend to eat my meals at my desk while working on projects, watching a show, or some other activity involving a computer or my TV. If I was eating something DJ liked, she would make sure to let me know by jumping onto my lap and trying to climb on the keyboard and onto the desktop. I would discourage her from doing this by doing what every cat owner does: using the back of my forearm to gently nudge her backwards and say “no.” Most cats tend to ignore this, and keep trying to get your food. DJ would respond to this by growling at me; a big angry MROOWWWWWWwwwwwww. After a few nudges, she would full-on hiss at me, then growl again before jumping down and leaving in a huff. It was always loud enough that my friends could hear her over my headset. She would never bite or scratch, only yell. DJ’s grumpiness was just a gimmick.
WHY ARE YOU TOUCHING ME FUCK OFF actually wait i kind of like this
That was kind of her whole deal. She definitely used to bite and scratch at me or my dogs when we would come up to visit my grandfather every few weeks. My poor dogs had the fear of god put into them by her, giving her a wide berth when walking past her, right up until the end of her life. Then when my grandfather died and she became part of my family, she warmed up to me, but still had to keep up appearances and be a big angry jerk. Towards the end of 2021, and the first half of this year, she chilled out considerably, actually laying on my lap and licking my face for reasons other than to wake me up at five in the morning to say FEED ME FEED ME RIGHT FUCKING NOW YOU SON OF A BITCH A FULL BOWL OF DRY STUFF ISN’T ENOUGH I NEED ANOTHER HALF A CAN OF FRISKIES.
she once walked through the handloop of a plastic bag, and kept walking away when i tried to pull it off of her
That’s just how it was with DJ. She was a pain in the ass, but she was my pain the ass. She would break stuff, she would growl at you for walking too close, she would eat your food if you had to get up for a minute, do all types of headache-inducing shit. But she would also snuggle and purr and forget the tough girl act sometimes.
I’d like to think I handled the stress of the last month of her health deteriorating in a well-balanced, mature way. But I’ve also spent the last few weeks going to YouTube and watching numerous Family Guy Funny Moments compilations, so uh, maybe I haven’t been handling it well. At least she’s in a better place physically now, and I’ll eventually be in a better place mentally. Thought I would write some words about her, because she had made herself known in various Discord calls and a couple of Twitch streams and ended up being something of a character to a few of you out there. I’ll be sure to ask “hey DJ, how’s the weather down there?” on your behalf. Of course, I’ll still be keeping her in my Twitch intro, assuming I ever get the time to stream again.
Anyways, here’s some more pictures of DJ to close this out.
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