This is a picture of The Blob. The Blob is a cat, she’s my cat, and I’ve decided not to use her real name if only to give her a sliver of privacy.
This is not a sob story, though. There is nothing wrong with The Blob. Despite her voluptuous physique, she’s a healthy and happy cat, as healthy and happy as fat cats can be. She may not be Instagram cute, but she’s cute in her own way, and neither The Blob nor I are much inclined to discuss her appearance.
To be quite honest, however, The Blob would care very little for what I have to say of her. She would probably roll her eyes and make a snarky remark to herself about how uninspired “The Blob” is, and how she would have come up with a way better nickname if she could be bothered to do so. Or at least that’s what I’d like to think.
It is inevitable for me to try to understand The Blob in terms of my own self. I can't help but believe that she loves as I do, that she hates as I do, that she fears as I do and that if only she could talk, she´d tell me all the wonderful things about love and hate and fear that only someone as close to me as The Blob could say. After all, we’ve lived together for over 13 years, so she should know me better than most of my friends, most of my family, better than almost anyone for that matter.
It´s entertaining to think about what The Blob would do if she were more human than Blob, but the harsh truth is that she isn't. The harsher truth is that even if she were, even if by some pompous miracle she would wake up tomorrow with the gift of speech, she wouldn´t really have much to say. She would, perhaps, scratch my door at midnight and steadily yell “food, food” over and over until I got up and fed her. She would come running her chubby run and pounce on my leg with the grace of a potato, as she does, only to celebrate her victory by crying “leg, leg!” and then running back to whatever hole she likes to hide in just to reflect upon her existence with a powerful monologue that would sound something along the lines of “food, hole, food, leg...” until she ponders herself to sleep.
It sounds sad, doesn’t it? An existence so trivial and simple that renders her incapable of having goals and dreams and spiritual fulfillment and all the other things that we humans crave so much to find purpose in these un-blob-like lives of ours. I would say I pity her, but I really don’t. There is something about The Blob’s unsophisticated life that I find tremendously liberating. It is not the fact that she doesn’t worry about global warming or the pain of others or politics or the future. It’s the fact that she can’t. Her happiness is pure and unencumbered, and when she lays next to me, purring as I pet her belly, she feels safe and content in a manner I could only have felt as a baby. In a manner none of us could ever feel again.
It is not pity what I feel. It is probably envy. It is I who longs to become The Blob and to find purpose in life itself in a way I know no human can. But then it hits me. Then I realize that unencumbered happiness paves the way for unencumbered fear and unencumbered fear is primal. A fear so primal that our privileged human condition forbids us from even beginning to understand. A fear so primal that it could stop my heart just as easily as a rogue firework could stop hers.
And just like that, I don’t want to become The Blob anymore. I suddenly feel a mild content with my own humanity and realize that, perhaps, if I wasn’t occupied with global warming or the pain of others or politics or the future, if I had a degree of consciousness so distant from that of humans as The Blob’s is distant from mine, then I would face other forms of insurmountable horrors. That my life is too short and my mind too feeble to worry about the smothering of the sun or the heat death of our galaxy. That I’m indifferent to the atrocities of the universe precisely because of my very own unsophisticated existence.
And so it all settles down into one single, comforting thought: that I’m smart enough to make something of my live and, by the grace of some cosmic lottery, dumb enough to live.
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