It’s an old myth that felines can “cheat death” because of their agility (especially their ability to land on their feet while falling), their quick escape response time from dangerous situations, and because they are curious by nature and love exploring new situations and scenarios, some of which clearly are not good for them. This is how one cat lived its nine lives in nine different eras, and how it skirted and suffered its 81 brushes with mortality:
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First incarnation: An anonymous stray born in ancient Egypt:
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1st life: Was marked for take-out by a scaly beast as he was chasing frogs along the Nile. Wasn’t featured on the menu because the carnivorous reptile was temporarily distracted by a pale little wrinkled thing floating by in a wicker basket, allowing time for the cat to slink safely back into the reeds. The humiliation and shame the dagger-toothed predator suffered for letting its prey get away, will, in future millenia, also come to those who wear the shoes that bear its name.
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2nd life: Padding behind a sand sled hauling a building block to Kufu’s pyramid to see what the lowly, inferior Sapiens were up to now, his tail got pinned underneath when the limestone cube overturned. After amputation, lost his curiosity about their big build and spent the rest of the construction snoozing under a date palm, waking up only for naps.
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3rd life: Wriggled free from the tiny clutches of a prepubescent whisker-tugging, tail-pulling, spoiled-silly, Tut, and fled to Alexandria.
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4th life: Barely missed becoming roadkill because an enamored chariot driver had his eyes peeled on the passing tricked-out coach carrying Nefertiti Kardashian instead of on the two-laned sand path straight ahead.
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5th life: Worshiped as a deity, he was nearly pulled apart by devotees wanting a fur relic, just like the popular quartet from Thebes, the Scarabs.
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6th life: Straggling behind Moses to enjoy an endless smorgasbord of fresh, dry fish, nearly drowned when the Red Sea went whole again.
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7th life: Was meant to have been target practic for the poisonous asp that aided in Cleopatra suicide, but the serpent re-targeted its warm-up strike towards Marc Anthony, an annoying chap who kept egging his clingy girlfriend to go ahead and do it. “Carpe diem, already, for gods’ sake!”
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8th life: While digging about in his expansive litter box on the Giza plateau, came upon a giant stone cat wearing a man’s head and almost s**t himself to death.
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9th life: Died of natural causes at 13. Mummified and buried with the head librarian. (rats!, had he endured just a couple more years of “tutfoolery” and not slinked off in a pissy kitty-fit, he could have been entombed and immortalized with the boy-king!).
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First reincarnation, Babylonia, 1842 BCE:
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1st life: Nearly eviscerated early on by an Amorite scythe. (The tribe that wandered here from Syria farmed barley, and herded sheep, goats, and kitty-cats.)
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2nd life: Chasing birds in their own environment atop the Tower of Babel, made a leaping miss. Meowed in terror all the way down in 2,439 different languages, but landed safely todo cuatros, à quatre pattes, ny efatra, barcha to'rtlarda, all véier, kaikki neljä kättä, бүх дөрвөн хөл, אַלע פיר, και τα τέσσερα, her çar, nā ʻehā a pau, të katërt, सभी चौके, sve četiri, 네발, kabeh papat, gach ceithre, все четверки, amin nga uppat, e fa uma, चारो गोड़ के बा, všetky štyri, tutti e quattro, төрт буту боюнча, kwa nne zote, četrrāpus, op handen en voeten, nakadapa, на сите четири, le afɔ eneawo katã dzi, a catro patas, auf allen Vieren, i runga i nga wha katoa, ke pali zawng zawngah, på alle fire, trên tất cả bốn chân, kuzo zonke ezine, ar bob pedwar, dörtlüginde, in quadrupedibus, kuri bine, na všetkých štyroch, လေးခုလုံးတွင်, a gatas, sou tout kat, négykézláb, ntawm tag nrho plaub, á fjórum fótum, iti amin nga uppat a saka, lau hanketan, na sve četiri, on all fours.
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3rd life: Chastised for using the leg of a statue of Ishtar, the goddess of love and sex, for a scratching post, was tossed from the premises, ironically, after being neutered.
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4th life: Just had to traipse over several blank clay tablets because it looked like fun! The ensuing claw marks were indistinguishable from cuneiform writing, causing great consternation and confusion among the scribes trying to decipher the gibberish. Escaped his critics’ wrath and turned his tail on the publishing business.
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5th life: Reborn female, her cushy palace life was short-lived when the unabating stress of being grabbed by the pussy, and then wriggling free from the tiny clutches of King Nebuchadnezzar and his son, King Nebuchannezzar, Jr., became intolerable.
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6th life: Nearly died of food poisoning when Hammurabi’s wife, Scewdriverrabi, accidentally fed it rancid goat cheese during the New Year festival of Akitu.
7th life: The biblical story of Daniel in the lion’s den?—hyperbole from a scribe with a flight of fancy. In reality, it was just old Danny Boy, the ‘angel’ … and an ordinary tomcat whose jaws were ‘wrestled shut’ by said ‘angel’. A story punched up just to get published in the Hebrew’s Old Testament. Sensationalism sells!
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8th life: Tossed from the palace for defecating in the Hanging Gardens. Escaped serious injury after caroming off a statue of Nabu, the Mesopotamian god of literacy and scribes; ironic, in that the cat once longed to be a writer.
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9th life: Oblivious to everything but the impressive, huge winged kitties incised on the city’s Lion’s Gate, he was stampeded to death by a band of backwater Hittites, excited for their first-ever trip to Sin City. What happens in Babylon…
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2nd reincarnation, Rome, 753 BC:
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1st life: While nursing Romulus and Remus, was threatened and chased off by a she-wolf, who then took over feeding the twins. Had the arrogant and pretentious canine not happened along just then, Rome might have been a peacenik city/state founded by non-war-mongering titty-tats, changing world history forever!
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2nd life: Was padding around the Forum one March 15th and suffered superficial stab wounds when Brutus, being farsighted and having a bad aim anyway, missed the guy in the purple robe who smelled like a salad, and nicked his kidney instead.
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3rd life: Reborn female again, wriggled free from Donnum J. Caligula’s tiny clutches as he grabbed her by ersa pussium, and fled to the safety of Pompeii.
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4th life: Had to—just because it looked like fun!—traipse across the fresh pour of wet cement, a material of great strength and flexibility mastered by the Romans. Would have been “Julius Hoffa’d” if caught, though.
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5th life: Got a commiserate “thumbs-up” from Caesar after losing a mismatched battle in the Colosseum. The crowd was expecting a felis a bit more ferocious–a lion, tiger, cheetah, panther–any ravenous cat who could make mouse-meat out of the human gladiator–but was bitterly disappointed in seeing the brute, in full armor chasing round a common domestic. Because the spectacle wasn’t as death-defying as advertised on the mosaic billboards, many in the ballpark wanted their denarii back.
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6th life: Almost dropped from exhaustion at Circus Maximus because cats pulled the chariots before horses came along.
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7th life: Old, and with cataracts, he became catatonic this time for chasing a mouse through the catacombs and getting hopelessly lost. He wouldn’t have gone down there in the first place had he not misread the sign over the door as Cat ‘n Combs, a popular chain of feline beauty shops.
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8th life: When he heard that Nero Trumpanicus was grabbing pussy to be used for extra violin strings, fondling and fiddling and exhorting while the seat of power burned, he fled a ransacked Palatine Hill for the cooler climes of Britannia, cat-paddling across the English Channel to reach the far-away island.
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9th life: Died from a massive kitty thrombosis trying to leap Hadrian’s Wall.
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Third reincarnation, the European Dark Ages, 642 AD:
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1st life: Ignoring all the warning signs of a collapsing society because his obsessive focus was trained on a tick-tocking ball of yarn from dawn til dusk, the Fall of the Roman Empire kerplunked hard on his tail, needing amputation again.
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2nd life: This era would have been a great time to pull the curtains for an eight hundred year nap, but no, he had to be reborn in the unsifted litter box of western Europe. Almost died of disgrace and remorse for paying more attention to a tick-tocking ball of yarn from dawn til dusk than to a society in collapse.
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3rd life: Pincushioned with arrows while pheasant hunting.
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4th life: Pincushioned with arrows while peasant hunting.
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5th life: Temperamental, angry at the world, and fur-bished in black, he fit right in with the Goths, but their collective unhappy happiness was ruined when they were chased out of Germania by color-loving Huns and their kitty-hating hundogs.
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6th life: Was an amusement for fondling in King Charlemagne's castle–until she was tossed in the moat because wife Melaniamagne developed an allergy to her husband grabbing any pussy that wasn't locked behind her chastity belt.
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7th life: Survived the Black Plague pandemic that killed a third of Europe by lapping up cream infused with bleach.
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8th life: With incredibly poor luck, came back as a feisty intellectual female in a very superstitious, deeply religious era. Accused of being a shape-shifting witch, she was sentenced to death by a citizenry of sanctimonious, semi-illiterate extremists easily fooled and inflamed by the mass propaganda pumped out by Johannes Gutenberg’s younger brother, Rupert. She was almost burned at a little kittie stake, but peed the fire out (from fright, and for the first time not in a litter box, ever!) and escaped with just a few singed whiskers that extensions helped hide.
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9th life: Reborn female again—but with black fur this time. She again suffered the stings of discrimination, fear, and hatred when systematically and repeatedly singled out, demonized, and diminished. Hanged by an angry mob on All Hallows Eve.
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Fourth reincarnation: born a Siamese on the steppes of Asia:
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1st life: Learned his lesson the hard way about trying to leap too high from his exploding heart episode in Britain, so took the Great Wall of China’s elevator, instead. Caught his butt in the car’s brick doors leaving, smashed a tail that needed to be amputated, again.
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2nd life: Made a warm and snuggly lining for Ghengis Khan's favorite hat–until he was punished for failing at his day job–keeping mice out of the big guy’s palatial two-story yurt. The cat, licking his wounds, was exiled to Outer Mongolia, only to die seven more times from boredom.
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Fifth reincarnation, now going by his fancy binomial nomenclature classification, Felis catus, the Renaissance:
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1st life: Tossed from a three-story tower and Newton discovers gravity. Scooped up off the cobblestones to celebrate their success and he discovers sutures!
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2nd life: Tail caught in Gutenberg’s printing press and had to be amputated again, but, all in all, a handy, labor-saving invention. Certainly less back-breaking and exhausting than having to scratch out copies of clay tablets one by one out in the baking sun, like back in the day.
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3rd life: Anger almost consumed him when a persnickety Leonardo Da Vinci wiped him from the Mona Lisa. Brought in as a prop to lounge in the arms of the enigmatic maiden, he was threatened with a palette knife and banned from the studio for traipsing across the paint-by-number while the oils were still tacky. Had to—just because it looked like fun! (Future art restoration experts are shocked when a spectrograph reveals the ordinals underneath the paint layers and paw prints meandering across her forehead). Got revenge on Mr. Prissy Da Vinci by sneaking back into the atelier, hiding underneath the tricked-out picnic tables, and munching on pilfered wafers offered up by the model posing as Judas, while the artist was designing the numbered color scheme for The Last Supper.
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4th life: Could have died from disappointment when given walking papers by sculptor Michelangelo. Kicking around ideas for his statue David, and less interested in authenticity than in drawing oohs and ahhhs from his upper class patrons, the artist decided that his oversized marble effigy seemed ‘more heroic’ with a slingshot and a rock chiseled into the underdog’s left shoulder, as opposed to the true, not-so-gallant story of the shepherd boy smiting the giant Goliath with a flung cat.
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5th life: as a kitten, was a calming writing influence for Martin Luther — until accidentally tipping the inkwell over with his tail that keeps growing back, spilling squid juice all over his laboriously calligraphed, only-copy-in-the-world-wouldn’t-you-know-it!, Ninety-five Theses. Luther was so upset, he banned everything in Augsburg that started with the destructive letters “C-A-T”: cats, Catholicism and catechism, among them.
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6th life: Imprisoned with Copernicus for being heretics—one for arguing that the world revolves around the sun; one for arguing that the world revolves around the cat. Over time, both theories prove correct.
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7th life: Shakespeare, battling writer's block, hurled crumpled parchment and writing materials down to the hand-woven carpet in frustration, barely grazing his head with the pewter inkwell. Seeing the puddle of a liquid that wasn’t going to wash out anyway and channeling Nabu, he stamped out the immortal lines, “To be or not to be'' in ink-stained paw prints while batting around Bill’s quill.
8th life: Diagnosed with high cholesterol from repeated grabbing by the greasy little clutches of gluttonous (and falsely crowned monarch because his birth was rigged) King Henry the Eighth, and his overfed brother and wannabe usurper, Prince Donald the Zero.
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9th life: Lost his head by guillotine after licking Marie Antoinette’s cake and then eating it, too.
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Sixth reincarnation, the old American West:
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1st life: Born in Deadwood, South Dakota, under the crawlspace of the No. 10 Saloon, the little ball of fur was anted up as a fuzzy, breathing poker chip in a 5-card stud game, won with a pair of eights and aces. Was taken home, doted on, and nearly squeezed to death with love by the winner and his wife, Brenda Hichock. The truth that wasn’t told in dime novels — “Wild” Bill was a pussycat when not out with his drinking buddies.
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2nd life: The dusty trails leading cattle from the Texas pastures to the railroads up north were slow-going, the catboys rather bitchy around the campfire, until they finally gave in to modern progress and traded saddling kitties for horses. Unfortunately, while wrangling a longhorn before the transition, a catpoke’s spur got tangled in its matted fur and surgically removed his spleen.
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3rd life: Got bounced from the Birdcage Theater in Tombstone, Arizona, for stroking the fur of a delectable young manx and not paying for it.
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4th life: Survived the bite of a rabid Bat Masterson.
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5th life: William Cody’s early Wild West shows were far less successful than the ones that he later staged, and were bleeding money. The entire original production—nicknaming himself “Puss-n-Boots” Bill, having Indians circling a herd of marauding cats, the grand finale of the kitty stampede—was a marketing nightmare. The cat was chewed up and spit out by the fickle acting bug when his contract was not renewed after the now-famous “Buffalo” Bill changed the show’s format and sent him packing.
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6th life: Wriggled free from the tiny clutches of Butch, Sundance, and their unsavory band of thieves, chiselers, and grifters dubbed “the Hole in the Wall Gang”. (In 2016, they would rebrand themselves as “the BUILD THAT WALL!!! Gang” and became the leaders of the Republican Party.)
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7th life: Knock, Knock. Who’s there? Wyatt Earp. Wyatt Earp who? Wyatt Earp up a hairball on our just-raked soddie floor?
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8th life: Almost cut down with Custer because of his not-so-genius strategy of a rampaging blitzkrieg on the Sioux while the June sun was blazing. Had the 7th Calvary saddled up their kitties for a stealth nocturnal attack instead of their thundering mounts in the daytime, his stand at the Little Big Horn might have remained opened—might have even been franchised!
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9th life: Died old, starving, defeated, and forgotten underneath a dilapidated shed on the Rosebud reservation in 1925.
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Seventh reincarnation, LaLaLand!:
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1st life: Born in a barn near Waterloo, Iowa, and still reeling from the bitter disappointment of one of his past lives (cast and fired by Cody as the puss that Sitting Bull war-whooped into the arena on), the downtrodden, determined, reincarnated thespian strayed west and landed, feet-first, in Hollywood. Fighting and clawing his way to the top, he eventually got cast as the opening logo for the new-fangled magic lantern company called MGM. The acting stretch gave him a hernia.
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2nd life: Learned an audition lesson, early on: let movie bigwigs pat a little fur to get parts. Later, after being carressed to no end, and feeling used and abused, became part of the #MeowToo movement.
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3rd life: TinselTown’s glittered litter boxes were to die for!
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4th life: Reborn a pampered Exotic Shorthair ingénue, came close to dying from relief when a two-bit celebrity she can’t name because she signed a non-disclosure agreement, took his little clutches off her privates, preferring to grope a porn star, instead, because: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
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5th life: Crashing hard to the sound-stage floor while rehearsing his part for “The Wizard of Oz,” his pain went all for naught when the producers decided that kitties fitted with cardboard wings were not half as scary as flying monkeys.
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6th life: Suffered third-degree paw burns while filming the drama, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”
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7th life: Dredging up painful memories from the ancient past, his gladiatorial scene with Russell Crowe was cut from the picture after receiving unexpected laughter and a definitive thumbs down from studio test audiences.
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8th life: Developed type-2 diabetes by overindulging in free food-for-life — one of the perks for starring as a company’s commercial spokeskitty.
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9th life: Turning his tail (that keep regenerating) on fame and fortune, he moved to Catalina Island, became a recluse (unusual behavior for a cat) and died of a catnip overdose at age seventeen.
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Eighth reincarnation, modern times:
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1st life: Curious about the three sapiens cramped aboard the high-in-the-sky smoking tube, he was accidentally sealed shut inside with them and shot off. On the trip home from the moon, Neil Armstrong, angry that the feline had used the precious sample of the dust they collected as a litter box, threatened him with an “untethered space walk”—one that turned out, thankfully, as empty as the atmosphere. (As a sidebar-the gray powder’s absorbability and cushiness on the behind was out of this world!)
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2nd life: Born in a Northern California valley so wealthy that the litter boxes were filled with silicon sand, she wandered into a young Steve Job’s garage and snoozed on his workbench while he was tinkering with computers for the masses. The stable genius’s references to a piece of peripheral hardware—what he called “the little doohickey that connects the user to the machine. You know, the hand-held interface pointing mechanism that detects two-dimensional motion relative to the surface, thingamajig”—was okay in the shop, but needed a shorter, more user-friendly name. The feline batted around ideas for the device that consumers could remember, and thought that the shapely bit of gray plastic with the tail-looking wire attached to it that the interface user grabs and drags along the tabletop—a cat fantasy—looked to her like a mouse, so the name stuck. Her contribution to tekkie lingo came to a driveway-scraping halt, however, when Steve kicked her to the curb for spilling coffee on his computer keyboard, the first in the world to do so.
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3rd life: Tripping at Woodstock, and in a panic attack because he was sure he was being chased by a giant stone cat wearing a man’s head, he swore off “magic catnip” forever. He was straight as I-80 From Chicago to Denver when he attended Kittypalooza, a three-day alley-fest opening with the delicious band, Ratt, and featuring Faster Pussycat, Cat Stevens, Katrina and the Waves, the Stray Cats, and Pussy Riot, the Russian feminist protest and performance art group.
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4th life: Reborn a hauskat in East Berlin, 1989. Tail crushed by a toppling concrete and cinder block wall. The needed amputation this time was sehr wunderbar!
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5th life: His deja vu dream of returning to show biz nearly came to a sudden end when Siegfried & Roy’s magic act in Vegas was canceled after only five performances. It seemed that making white Himalayans disappear just didn’t have much wonder to it. Bulking up on steroids, making himself twenty times larger (like the baseball players of the era), he returned to the Mirage and wowed crowds for 22 years, portraying a white tiger masterfully. He was fired soon after fans learned of the deception, and was banned from the casino for life.
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6th life: Millennia of human development and she was still being sexually harassed by Neanderthals in power — “Grab ‘em by the saber-toothed tiger!”
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7th life: Born under a rusty trailer house, he was lucky to have gotten roundworms, probably from a kill. Lucky because the veterinarian-administered medication also protected him from catching the fake COVID-19 virus, he overheard the occupants on the other side of the plywood floor gush.
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8th life: Reborn a Blue shorthair in a Red shorthair state during a very superstitious, deeply religious era. Accused of being a child-grooming, blood-guzzling adherent of Karl Manx by a citizenry of sanctimonious, semi-illiterate extremists easily fooled by the mass propaganda still being pumped out by a 666-year old Rupert Gutenberg, she was torched again– this time by the hosts of “Fox & Friends”.
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9th life: Paraphrasing poet, Carl Sandburg:
“Death came
on little cat feet.
The departing spirit sat looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moved on.”
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