In between writing triumphalist posts about the war, I am painting the basement a strange shade of blue-gray today and inhaling a lot of fumes, although I think what I just saw was real.

We have somehow ended up with three cats: one to replace a cat that was run over by toothless Appalachians, another a stray on death's door my son rescued from the vultures, and the third an aging dowager my father-in-law paid my wife a princely sum to take off his hands.

I had absolutely no say in any of this. I hate cats, in general. I don't hate individual creatures because I'm not cruel, but taken as a species, cats suck ass. Part of this animus was caused by living next to an insane cat woman in Redondo Beach who "had" about 30 unfixed cats she allowed to roam free, crapping, pissing, spraying, fighting, humping, and getting run over on a near-perpetual basis. Goddamn, I hated those cats, hated the woman more, and had dreams of the cats eating the woman.

So anyway, these three cats, though still cats and therefore inherently vile, are actually pretty chipper little freaks, and I have to admit to a slight fondness for them all - unless they're fighting, in which case they need to be kicked across the room.

So I was painting - concrete block requiring vast globs of paint and intense application pressure - when out of the corner of my eye, I saw the two younger cats meet in the middle of the room, pace in opposite directions to the corners like boxers, turn, charge like jousting knights, leap up in the air at each other from about 10 feet apart, wrestle around defying gravity like extras on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, land, then calmly go on their merry ways as if nothing had happened.

Damnedest thing I've ever seen, unless it was the fumes.