On top of the loss of my e-life, I now feel as though I am losing the cats. Since our temperatures have started topping off this summer, I took a shot at trying to shanghai the cats and keep them indoors during the scorching days, but they are fighting much harder against my efforts. In their maturity, they seem to feel only a stronger sense of independence, feeling their cathood more deeply. It is as though they have regressed back into a quasi-feralness.
The lesson hit home with me this morning. I did succeed in getting Coco inside the house, but she starting yowling and climbing the walls to be let back out. I imagine it did not help that Ash and Sammy were outside. I thought I just needed to let Coco cry herself out. However, in her antics, she ended up knocking the laptop down, crashing to the floor. The laptop actually survived, but Coco won her point. I let her go.
I am not unfamiliar with the feline temperament after these eight years of dealing with cats, but I figured that I held the trump card over them: their food. Instead, they showed me that they hold the trump card: my love for them. I do not want to see them going hungry all day to avoid being trapped inside the house. And we do not want to risk our flat-screen TVs and laptops crashing to the floor.
So, it looks like we will be going back to that first phase of our first years with the cats, when Pop and I never dreamed of having the cats inside the house, and I would just bring food out to them. At least it is not like the very first batches of cats, when they were wholly feral and there was never the possibility of even getting to pet them. That was kind of a cold relationship, and I was starting to grow tired of it. At least Coco, Ash, and Sammy can see me as being something like a friend and not wholly a foe. It's just not exactly like a boy and his dog.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
