obsessive compulsive disorder — Bloggery

I need a mirror on a stick.

Wait, let me back up. So, this morning I went to clean the catbox and discovered, to my surprise, that there was no poop in the box. None at all. I actually combed through the litter with the scoop, feeling for poop, and I just couldn’t find any. The cat has not been pooping in her box. This made me nervous, because — you may have spotted it already — that meant she’d been pooping somewhere else.

Now, I feel I should tell you up front that Hana — that’s the cat — Hana goes outside. I know, heap your scorn and judgement upon me, I’m a terrible cat abuser who allows his cat to do her favorite thing in the world, i.e., go outside and be in it. I have a few defenses, chief of which is that Hana spent her formative years living with a very old lady who had not yet got religion on the subject of keeping your cat indoors, meaning that when she doesn’t get to go outside she becomes absolutely, maniacally fixated on getting out. She lurks the door 24/7, seeking to squirt out between my legs every time I go in or out; she yowls and scratches; one time she took a flying leap from a window that was a good 10 feet off the ground. It is her idée fixe, and she won’t be denied. But further, I think that keeping cats who want desperately to go out just locked in all the time is a symptom of our overly-safety-obsessed culture of helicopter dads and 24-hours-a-day supervision and kids not walking to school until they’re 12. Sometimes I think we’re sacrificing our pets’ quality of life for their quantity of life.

Anyway, I’m off track. So, Hana hasn’t been pooping in her box. In reality, I think she’s probably been pooping in the barkdust at the foot of the stairs and burying it, in her prim feline way, but she’s acted out before, usually by pooping in the bathtub to let me know she isn’t too happy about having strangers around. (Every time I start dating somebody new, Hana poops in the bathtub for a week. Bet on it.) In an overreactive tizzy, I began to search for her secret pooping spot. Was it under the guest bed? (No.) In the closet? (No.) In the coat closet? Under the couch? Behind the bookshelf? (No, no, no.) And then I remembered: one of her favorite places to hide out when the scary strangers are around is in the bathroom, behind the washer and dryer.

Let me try to paint you a picture. This bathroom is quite small — not New York small, but small enough that I can touch the east and west walls simultaneously with my elbows crooked. The entranceway is crowded: on the right hand side, the vanity, complete with a huge mirror that I’m fairly sure adds about 20 pounds. On the left, a nook, where the washer and dryer are stacked, washer on bottom, dryer on top, the whole shebang about six feet high, possibly a little more. The door opens inward and, when open, obscures the washer and dryer completely. I’m not complaining — I have an in-unit washer and dryer — but it’s a bit of a mess, in the way that apartment living always is. What Hana likes to do when there’s one of those terrifying new girls around is worm her way around the edge of the washer, and hide in the 6-8 inches of space between the washer and the wall.

Now. Let’s be clear here — I have no specific reason to believe that Hana has been pooping back there. In fact, I have a whole bunch of reasons not to believe it: the bathroom doesn’t smell like poop; she’s never done it before; she could be doing it outside; why would she poop in a place where she likes to hang out? But at about 6.30 this morning, I couldn’t convince myself that she wasn’t doing it. I tried. Believe me, I tried. I sat on the back porch with a cup of coffee and my book and I tried to have an excellent, late-spring, sun’s-just-up, it’s-gonna-be-hot-but-it’s-not-yet kind of morning I had been planning all week on having this morning. But I couldn’t concentrate on the book or the coffee or the refreshing bath of sunlight on the leaf-green hills of southeast Portland. No, I was sure that Hana was pooping behind the clothes washer.

What happens next is a little absurd. So, first, I got my stepstool from where it lives, tucked next to one of the bookshelves (like I said, apartment living) and tried to climb up over the stacked washer and dryer and see behind it. This did not work — they were too big —, but it came thisclose to working, so I was tantalized by what might be back there, just beyond where I could see. So the first thing I did was — actually, the first thing I did was wash off the top of the dryer; it was fucking filthy. But the next thing I did was try to wedge myself sideways around the unit, the same way Hana gets in, but I’m a grown-ass man and I could barely get my shoulder in there, let alone my head or (ahem) my stomach. (Those 20 pounds the mirror adds? Literal. Your actual stomach actually swells. I swear.) No, the only solution was to go over the top. But how?

What I needed was something that was about a foot taller than my stepstool. I looked for things to balance on the stepstool, or upon which to balance the stepstool, but there was no solid candidate that I thought would hold my weight. I glanced at the dresser, which is a surprisingly-solidly-built Ikea thing, but decided against it. This is when I thought about the mirror on the stick. If I had a mirror on the stick, I could look back there and see all the poop that Hana had been leaving. So I began looking for a mirror — you know, one of those little portable ones, like a makeup mirror or a shaving mirror? But (of course) I don’t have one of those. I don’t wear makeup, and — hey, I live in Portland, you think I spend a lot of time shaving? Yeah, no, I don’t.

I kept finding myself drawn back to the dresser. It was exactly the right height. But it was covered in shirts that need buttons sewn back on them, and winter bundlements that I haven’t quite got around to putting away for good. And it was full of clothes. No way. Right? No way? Or maybe . . . maybe it would be fine. Maybe, in fact, it would be perfect. So I took all the stuff off of it, crammed it all in weird corners that I’ve now forgotten about (apartment living, redux), and began to slide it toward the bathroom.

This went really well. For as long as I was on the hardwood that covers most of my apartment floor. But the bathroom is tiled with textured slate — rough, ridged, and not conducive to, you know, full-dresser-sliding. It became a sweaty, sweary, ugly game of push-and-pull as I walked my dresser, full of clothes, into the bathroom. After a while, I decided I needed to get to the other side of the dresser, but discovered that I couldn’t get around it — so I had to climb up on the vanity and kind of ape-walk into the bathroom, where I then discovered that the task wasn’t any easier from that angle. This operation took probably five minutes, but it felt like 45, especially when I tried to close the bathroom door — remember, it blocks the washer and dryer — and realized I was going to have to pull the dresser until it was practically flush with the bathtub in order to get the door closed. Then I was going to have to push it back. Then I was going to have to pull it flush with the bathtub, re-open the door, and get the thing back out onto the hardwood.

Did I mention that I’d decided it was paramount that I run some clothes in the dryer during this operation? Well, I had decided that, meaning that, once I got the dresser situated in front of the washer and dryer, I had to climb up on it and then lean over a molten-hot, rattling machine in order to get a look behind it. And once I did that, do you know what I found down there?

Nothing. Some wires and a floor.

And so you see why I need a mirror on a stick. It would save me so much trouble. And now I’m kind of curious about what’s behind the refrigerator.