I always wanted a cat. I like the stupid little furballs. Can’t help it. I know it’s irrational and expensive and environmentally suboptimal and you’re basically just setting yourself up for inevitable heartbreak, but when they bump their dumb soft heads into me I melt like a chocolate bar on the dash of a black car in the August sun.

My Dad was allergic to cats, so I wasn’t allowed to have a cat. Then my Dad left and I still wasn’t allowed to have a cat. In retrospect that’s pretty suspicious, Mom. My college had an extreme zero tolerance policy for pets: they caught this one dude red-handed and called animal control to come murder his pet snake. Then someone in that same dorm burned a bag of popcorn and the sprinklers wouldn’t shut off, flooding the entire building and destroying everybody’s shit. I’ve never been a big fan of the “snake guy” archetype but no one deserves that degree of irony.

In my first apartment, I wasn’t allowed to have a cat because there was a cat quota which was already filled by my roommate, whose cat hated me. That cat would wait until I brought a girl over and then walk up to us while we were making out and just piss right there in the middle of the floor, making eye contact with me. At the time I really had no idea how devastating cat urine can be to a rental property.

I stayed there for way too long because I hate moving. You know when you start to hate everyone who lives in a city, like it’s their fault that your personality grew out of that lifestyle? Time to go. I carefully selected only rental units with pet clauses, paid everyone in the world, and slowly realized that the carpet was saturated with cat urine from the last tenant. I report this to the property manager, who reports it to the property owner, who replies back to the property manager, who tells me, “Yeah, no more pets.”

So now I’m sitting in a townhouse that smells like cat piss, waiting weeks for these colossal dipshit moron douchebag numbskulls who installed carpet all over a pet rental to go through the doomed process of paying a series of professionals to tell them that you can’t actually get crystallized uric acid out of a carpet pad, and I’m still not allowed to have a fucking cat.