Dumb, lazy cat much fitter than owner

Image by Guvee via Flickr

Why is my cat in better shape than I am? I go to the gym six days a week and torture myself there with fake skiing machines and iron maiden-like devices for hours on end. I eat all sorts of healthy food and pay attention to whether my fat is saturated or not and whether I am getting enough stuff like omega-3, whatever that is. And he just sleeps all day and eats whatever crap I feed him, plus bugs. Will I have to eat bugs? I don’t want to. — Nigerian Business Executive, Africa (or maybe Spain).

Let’s not perpetuate a crude stereotype. Some cats are not fit and trim. Indeed, many cats are ill-tempered bloated globs of fur and disease. If you’ve seen the hilarious new comic strip, Garfield, surely you know what I mean.

But your cat is apparently one of the “healthy ones,” even though the creature doesn’t exercise in the traditional American way of buying a $1,500 fitness machine in seven easy monthly payments and then sticking it in whatever forgotten room in the far corners of the tract house, with the boxes of old computer magazines.

What dark magic is the feline demon practicing to keep so taut? Italian-American Strong Man Charles Atlas devised his “dynamic tension” home fitness course by watching lions and tigers stretching at the Brooklyn Zoo. Apparently, cats both large and small can stay fit by simple resistance, pitting muscle against muscle. Also, cats go completely insane for no reason at all about four times a day, trying to run up vertical walls and smashing into sliding glass doors. This is how they achieve aerobic exercise.

It is from this New World blend of big cats at the zoo and a Long Island muscleman’s comic-book ads that we get the modern practice of “Yoga.”

Does he burn her furniture at the end of “Norwegian Wood”? Also, why doesn’t my stomach digest itself? — Katy in CT.

John Lennon famously composed the pop song “Norwegian Wood” to conceal an illicit sex affair he was having with some wood. But his wife, an angry Swede, discovered the infidelity by hearing the song on the radio all the time for the next forty years. You are right to wonder if arson was involved. As for your stomach, it begins digesting itself — i.e., “you” — in old age. This is what causes death.

Send your important questions to ask.layne@gmail.com. But if you have a REAL problem, call the police or something, as Ken Layne will not really help you at all. This is just a web page on the Internet.