Ghost Cat or Cat Trick?

So, last night, I took the dog out and both of the cats (avert your eyes, Rachel) ran outside, which is not so unusual for the orange cat but is very rare for the tiny cat.  I begged them to come back in.  I called “kitty, kitty” and I tried to scoop them up, but dog in hand, it wasn’t happening.

So, fuck it.  Stay out all night doing cat crap.  What do I care?

Picture it, then.  Both cats I know are outside.

I’m laying in bed.  Upstairs in my bedroom.  Which is, I suppose, where most people have their beds, so maybe that goes without saying.  But for those of you who like to put your beds in various rooms around your house, just to see what it would be like, to say, have a big bed in the kitchen or be able to fold laundry while covered in blankets, I’ll just say that I was laying in my bed in my bedroom, which is upstairs.  Not that that detail matters.

And suddenly, the dog starts to bark, from the floor, next to my bed.  And, as you dog-owners know, there are three barks a dog has in the middle of the night.  The “I’m an asshole” bark they bark just to let you know that you’ll sleep when they say you can sleep.  The “Oh, yeah, that was just a car or another dog in the distance, but I’d better bark a little just to let them know to stay back” bark.  And the “holy shit, what the fuck is that right here in front of me?!” bark.

Mrs. Wigglebottom starts in with the third.  I ignore her because I can open my eyes and see that there’s nothing in the room large enough for me to be concerned about.

And then, plop, it feels like a cat jumps onto the bed and steps across my ankles.  Like, the bed depresses near my left foot and then, as it does when a cat normally steps across me, depresses near my right foot.  And then… nothing… just the feeling of the bed being depressed right near my right foot.

Well, now I’m convinced, from the feel of the bed, that the orange cat is just standing there, staring at me, and I start to get annoyed.  Sleep or move on, buster, but don’t just stand there.  So, I move my foot to the right, to move him along, and at the same time that my foot hits nothing, I remember that he’s not even in the house.

Here’s my working theory.  Well, I have two.  One is that this is some effort by the cats to drive me mad and, in the dark, when I thought they were running out into the yard, one of them managed to circle back around and get in the house.  This cat then climbed up on the bed in a normal cat fashion; I was moving slower than I thought I was, and thus the cat was able to leap away before my foot made contact.

Two, I was not as awake as I thought I was and my body was just having random twitches and whatever that my mind interpreted as coming from outside me.  And attached a cat to.

Or three… I have a ghost cat, jumping around doing ghost cat things.

Which, just to completely switch tracks, makes me wonder.  I’m working on a song about Jim Voorhies, just to sing to myself when he makes some awesome snarky comment, and maybe to sing to others when I want to annoy them, and maybe just to freak Jim out a little bit.

Do you think I could pair “ghost cat things” with “Jim Voorhies” or is that not close enough to even count as a slant rhyme?

Edited to Add:  I just got off the phone with Mack (who I swear, between the names he picks out for his daughters and the name his kids pick out for their goats, is going to end up with grand-daughters named Guy and Dude) and we’ve come to the consensus that there would be no better way to spend this day than writing–and encouraging you all to write–haikus about Jim Voorhies, which will be made funnier by the fact that we’re not sure what the rules for haiku are and most of us don’t know who Jim Voorhies is.

Mack wanted to make it a contest.  I tried to talk him out of it, but I think we’ve negotiated down to this.  The winner WILL NOT end up with Mack slapping his or her bare back with a frozen bratwurst.  I can’t vouch for what might happen to the folks who don’t win.