Never ever ever ever EVER try to do this to a cat

This is Bo.



He is our official weirdo cat. He will sleep on banisters and fall off of them promptly, go through the house miuing very very very VERY loudly for his sister who's asleep in the next room, cram himself in windowsills that are only open three inches,bite himself  until he bleeds (although that, to be fair, isn't really his fault-he has fleas)
and sleep in our drawers for two days without food, water, or litter box. He's in love with our outdoor cat Lila, who despises him, and he will stand at the screen door on his hind legs and mew, purr, and carry on until she hisses or smacks him through the door and gets her claws stuck in the screen, then runs away and leaves him heartbroken. After this procedure, he parades tragically through the house for a few days, preferring to flop around the house like a dying fish as oppose to walking, and then forgets about it until the next time he sees Lila, which is the time he completes the cycle yet again.


Needless to say, he is by far the craziest pet.


So anyway, this is a post about how you should never ever ever ever EVER try to give a cat a bath. Now most people know this already, but in the craziness of youth we were ignorant until Bo taught us a hard lesson this afternoon.

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I was sitting reading a book when I happened to observe Bo sitting on the sideboard chewing away like his scabs are the most delicious wonder ever to be created, and so I said to Ben and Emma, my fellow classmates in the world's school of hard life lessons, "Why not try to get those fleas off of Bo? let's vacuum him!"  After all, I was thinking of in Ramona's World, how her friend Daisy's cat, Clawed, likes to be vacuumed. Hey, maybe we would discover that Bo had amazing hidden depths and liked, even adored being sucked on by a huge noisy machine................................OR, as I was forced to observe after ten minutes of being scratched, mewed at protestingly, shrieked at by Rachel to quiet down, and trying to hold on to a Bo squirming like a snake out of my arms, maybe not.
But being a naive, optimisticly blind fool, I said in a desperate display of stubborn bravado, " Okay, so this isn't working too well. Let's try a bath!"


........................What a fool I was..........................................



Now, I am not going to tell the whole miserable story, only tell that it involves:


-Bo, obviously


-A flowery pillowcase


-Three dog towels

-The kitchen sink

-A wooden shield, a pair of shin guards,a rain jacket, one pair of rubber boots, and two oven mitts


- A lot of spilled shampoo


-And a pink pitcher.



So of course it was pandemonium, and I can only warn you NEVER to do this to your cat. And I fear I've shattered Bo's trust for a while.


So, as Peter, Paul, and Mary say, ......"A sadder man, but wiser now, I sing these words to you."