The Cat Palace

For days, my friend who was house sitting kept telling me that the apartment was depressing.

I could not wrap my mind around the concept based on what she was telling me:
6 story walk up (okay, challenging and annoying, but not depressing)
Sparsely furnished and what furniture was there seemed to be left there not really intended for the space. (okay, bad decorating or no sense of design, hell, I'm guilty of that but not depressing)

Then, I visited.

All I could think after looking around and realizing that, with the exception of the bed, desk and dresser, everything in the apartment was for the cats.

There were cat antojos like the box under the ladder. Lady cat likes to climb on ladders and sit in boxes or sleep in boxes. Like small children who would rather have the box than the gift.

There they were unceremoniously standing in the middle of the room: old, painted ladder with box underneath.

Scratch stations placed around the two rooms of the apartment, not strategically, but where the owner figured out the cats like them. You might argue this is strategic until you had to carefully walk around them in order to navigate the two rooms. I mean, really, how many scratch stations can two cats need. And, if you were there to hear when the cats needed to scratch, you would begin to get the picture.

In the other room, another ode to the climbing cat with an elaborate climbing structure.

Perhaps even more eerie was the lack of any personal items of the human living among these cats. Okay, I snooped, and there were barely any personal care items in her bathroom...

If you are not convinced that the pet owner, I almost hesitate to call her that as it may be more appropriate to call her the cats' human, has engineered everything for the cats' comfort per their specifications, then I will tell you why she needed a cat sitter.

The cats have no litter box. The go in the toilet, but they need a human to flush for them. There is a little sign across the lid, that read: Keep seat up. I wondered if it were draped there for the cat sitter or if it was a permanent feature. Again, I wondered, how many guests this apartment hosted that would need to be reminded.

The sense that this was depressing became clear when I took it all in together. I had known about the flushing before I arrived. It was odd, but not depressing, in and of itself.

I am not that kind of pet person. Remember, I have an aquatic turtle. We love each other from afar and low maintenance is an understatement with her. (except when she was sick but that was me taking low maintenance too far.)

If you want to find another angle because depressing is too, well, depressing, consider this... Cue Rod Serling's voice...because this would be an awesome episode of the Twilight Zone.