Poor Whiskers

On my morning stroll to work I passed the corpse of a cat who had been run over. Its eyeballs had been ejaculated from their sockets and were loosely hung by the still-attached optical nerves. It...was...horrifying (I was going to post a picture but it was just too gross). It immediately made me repent of the time I laughed after accidentally running over a cat.

I don't feel all that bad though, as the cat was culpable. It ran out in the middle of the road, and like a stupid jack-rabbit, got out of the way only to run right back under the tires with a loud POP!. The girls in the car screamed; I got wide-eyed in disbelief at what had happened. It popped! I couldn't believe it. The sound was a pop! I had to laugh.

The adages to be "cool as a cat" or to have " the reflexes of a cat" do not hold their value anymore. I thought cats were smart? Why do animals do that, anyways? Right when they are safely out of harm's way, as if they had a suicide wish but got scared at first, they go directly back into the line of fire.

I suppose that in some fashion or other, we, like any other animal, are guilty of this phenomena too. The man who overcomes his drinking addictions goes back to the bottle in an instant of rage or insecurity. The family, who has suffered through years of financial difficulty finally emerges from debt only to take out another mortgage. The young woman, after leaving an abusive relationship, finds another man of the same low class and respectability. And the list could go on.

That is probably why Lehi told his sons to be as the Valley and River he mentioned. Geographical features are not capable of screwing their lives up. In this spirit, I wish to now be known as "cool as a cumulonimbus cloud" or to have "the reflexes of a willow in the wind" or to be "tactful as a stream finding its way quietly and discretely through the forest," you know, these types of things.