“A moderately bad man knows he is not very good:
a thoroughly bad man thinks he is alright.
This is common sense really.
You understand sleep when you are awake, not well you are sleeping.”
C.S. Lewis
(Percy assumes the throne is his…it is not / Julie Cook / 2018)
No, Percy’s name is not Autumn and no that is not Percy’s chair,
it is Autumn’s chair.
Yet Percy thinks that what is Autumn’s is actually and naturally his…
because he was the first baby here in this house and therefore anything that is
for a baby is his by proxy.
In Percy’s brain, that all makes sense.
So the stroller is his…
That’s him underneath.
He prefers to be up top but at the time it was unfortunately occupied.
Autumn’s finnbin is his.
(That Scandinavian baby box I ordered so Autumn can snooze comfortably after her
workout on her play mat…of which is also Percy’s…as in his playmat.
When I’m busy folding clothes on the bed and Autumn is busy snoozing, Percy snoozes too.
So I really don’t understand why Gregory got so upset the other day when one of his very
expensive hearing aids disappeared and he naturally assumed Percy took it.
Years ago, poor Gregory was involved in a hunting accident and is now totally deaf in one
ear with considerable hearing loss in the other ear.
He gave into hearing aids about 8 years ago and has fussed and cussed them ever since.
They don’t work, despite costing a small fortune.
He’s lost one in the ocean.
He’s lost one someplace else that we can’t remember, otherwise it might not be lost.
Replacing them is a pain and another small fortune.
And so obviously, if Percy sees them say sitting on, say the counter, or by Gregory’s chair or
on the shelf by the shower when Gregory forgot that they were still in his ear when he got
in the shower and had to quickly get them to a dry spot…
Percy just assumes that Gregory has laid them out for him to happily take.
If you are not familiar with hearing aids…they are these tiny, yet expensive little
contraptions you shove into your ears.
They have tiny little batteries and tiny volume controls and they work by amplifying sound.
Unfortunately, Gregory claims they amplify the wrong sounds.
If you’re in a crowded restaurant, they amplify the noisy background chatter rather
than the true target, that being the person sitting across from or next to you…
as in me with whom he’s trying to communicate.
The waiter asks “Sir, how would you like your steak cooked?”
“I’ll have blue cheese thank you.”
With me then having to interject
“he’d like it medium and the blue cheese goes on the salad…”
this as he looks at me as though something happened but he’s just not sure what.
And whereas it can be quite comical and funny…
In actuality, it is very frustrating and equally maddening.
And can, more times than not, make his life just darn miserable.
Anyone who wears hearing aids will certainly testify to such frustration.
As can anyone living with said folks who suffer from hearing loss…
There is simply an awful lot of repeating, yelling, screaming, exasperation
and hands simply being thrown up in the air.
“WHY ARE YOU YELLING AT ME???”
BECAUSE I SAID IT THREE TIMES AND YOU STILL DIDN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT I SAID”
“WELL I’M SORRY BUT I CAN’T HEAR, REMEMBER!”
“AND DON’T SCREAM AT ME CAUSE YOU’RE HURTING MY EARS!”
It’s a vicious cycle
So I think the real reason as to why Gregory gets so upset when the hearing aids go missing
is not so much because they work, but rather because they cost a small fortune.
And here is where our real story continues…
The other evening Gregory went to take a shower and took out the hearing aids,
placing them on the counter in the bathroom.
One of them mysteriously disappeared.
I say mysteriously because two were there, and then two were not.
It wasn’t until after his shower that he’d come back to the den to watch TV that
he remembered he needed to go back to get his hearing aids.
If he doesn’t put them in while watching TV, the television is turned up so loudly,
I have to leave the room.
Suddenly I heard my name being called in a not so pleasant manner.
I race to the back making certain everything was okay.
“Julie, I can’t find but one of the hearing aids.”
“Percy got it.”
“How do you know Percy got it?”
“Who else would have gotten it?”
“Maybe you didn’t have both of them with you when you took a shower and the other
one is by your chair or still in your pant’s pocket.”
“I already checked the pants and I remember plain as day putting them here on the counter…
plus I remember seeing “him” in here.”
I did not like the way he had said “him” and I wasn’t too keen on how this was going.
I will admit that there have been a few occasions that Percy may have actually taken one
of the hearing aids, thinking of it as some small squeaking creature. And he may have
actually played with it as he would, say, a small creature…
Batting it wildly across the floor and tossing it up in the air as if it was a poor living
creature to be toyed with before a slow torturous death.
I know this because I must confess, I’ve caught him doing such.
My fear being he’d somehow get the battery out and swallow it.
So imagine my then having to fuss when Gregory obviously and carelessly forgets to
securely put away the hearing aids when he takes them out. This in turn potentially allows
for Percy to potentially get a hold of the hearing aids which potentially lead to his swallowing
a battery and potentially having to have some sort of emergency surgery.
Talk about a small fortune.
Plus as his mother, I have to defend this baby.
And so I spent about an hour that night scouring the house looking for said hearing aid.
All the while Gregory kept looking angerly at Percy,
demanding Percy tell him what he had done with the hearing aid.
All the while poor Percy was simply looking innocent as a lamb.
I crawled on the floor, looking eye level across the rugs, peering underneath the couch,
the chairs, the tables.
I didn’t remember the house looking, so, well, dusty and dirty…hummmmmm.
Finally, I gave up for the night because I knew tomorrow was another day.
So…for four long hours the following morning, I looked high and low.
I vacuumed the entire house, I dusted, I swiffered and I carefully looked, while on all fours,
investigating every inch of the house.
I opened closet doors.
I looked under cushions.
I flipped over every pair of shoes.
I debated calling the vets telling them I needed to x-ray Percy’s stomach…
and I even considered the unthinkable…sifting through the litter box.
I called Gregory who was at work, only halfway hearing.
“Gregory, I can’t find it anywhere…”
There were a few choice words I can’t repeat.
So I did what I always do in a crisis.
I prayed.
I prayed earnestly to God…explaining that I knew He knew how expensive the stupid
little things were and that I really needed to find it.
I decided to check under the couch in the living room one more time,
despite having already looked, dusted and vacuumed there twice this
particular day and once the night before.
With flashlight in hand, I got back down on my hands and knees, bent way down
almost on my head, lifted up the kick pleat and shined the flashlight into the far recesses
when low and behold…there it was.
Despite my having already looked three times total under that couch.
Ecstatic, I called Gregory and explained my answered prayer.
His reply was “Good, and when I get home, Percy will be tried in a court of law, my court.
He will be tried to the full extent of the law, my law.
He will be tried and found naturally guilty and punished…better yet, banished.”
Donning my best defense attorney hat, I proceeded to explain that since no one had actually
seen Percy take the hearing aid…let alone seen him take it to his favorite hiding spot
under the couch…the same hiding spot he goes to when, say a “stranger” comes in the house,
and he is afraid…or the same hiding place that his favorite toys often rest.
There is simply no clear-cut obvious explanation…only mere conjecture.
It is therefore only presumption that he is guilty as there was really just no way
to prove that Percy took it as there were no witnesses.
Peaches, the other cat…did not count.
I even threw in the fact that had
Gregory taken better care, putting the hearing aids in their case, it never would have
disappeared in the first place.
I was beginning to walk on thin ice.
But in the end, it’s all really pretty darn obvious is it not?
Who else would have, could have, taken it??
Especially given Percy’s proclivity and track record demonstrating his lack of restraint with
hearing aids, there is a pattern to his madness.
Yet I was simply running with it…to the far reaches of the absurd.
And thus my far out over-reaching is no more absurd then what you and I are hit with on a
daily basis flowing from our progressively insane society.
A society that is happily playing fast and loose with all things truth, common sense and
downright obvious.
I was running with it just like our own politicians, our legal eagle justice system
and even now our entertainers are running off with the obvious as they thrive to live to
shuffle and distort, to rile and defile.
They twist and turn the obvious and the truth around in such a way that they first convince
themselves while wielding their charms to twist the obvious into the oblivious for
everyone else.
And should you or I dare to question or think otherwise…questioning their form of the
“truth” …then you will be punished or even better yet, exiled…
much like Gregory decided to do with Percy…banished.
And I for one have grown weary of it all.
So this little tale about a cat and his hearing aid fetish serves not merely to
entertain us but rather to remind us…reminding us of the absurdity of that which
is currently circulating around us.
It reminds us of the lack of common sense and the twisting of the blatantly obvious
as the culture gods have taken the ultimate Truth and created the absurd.
Because remember, there’s no better way to ellude the average citizen than to
confuse him or her…so that way, no one really cares as to what is really what.
Now how did that stuffed mouse get in my shoe…?
The sins of some are obvious, reaching the place of judgment ahead of them;
the sins of others trail behind them.
In the same way, good deeds are obvious,
and even those that are not obvious cannot remain hidden forever.
1 Timothy 5:24-24
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