I swear to God I am stealing a pitchfork to use on our cat. Last weekend definitely had its drunken low points, like getting rejected on Friday night when I asked a girl to our date party... At 3:30 in the morning....... On Facebook. Man, reading that the next morning left me cringing and screaming into my hands. But Sunday night, the cat dished me a low point of his own.

For those who are new, I am illegally subletting the basement family room of a shanty in the woods. Well maybe not a shanty, but definitely the lovechild of a rustic wooden hunting lodge and a horsebarn. One loose spark and the firemen may as well just show up with dustpans. We have mice, and recently they have begun making a toilet of our silverware drawer. Our cat is a whiney bitch that is completely worthless except as an irritation.

Have I mentioned that I'm a light sleeper? I usually sleep with a box fan next to my head to drown out the sounds of roommate sex and our creaky haunted-house wooden floor above my futon, but since our landlord was coming the next day, I wanted to be able to hear her if she came over earlier than planned. I got to sleep around 6 AM (porn isn't going to find itself) and had been asleep for about an hour when all of the sudden, it happened.

Some small miscellaneous sound caused me to open an eye, just in time to see the bird flying across the room at my face. Two things then happened before I could finish the words, "JESUS FUCKING CHRIST." The first, being jerked from a dead sleep by angry chirping and wing flapping, was narrowly avoiding the packing of my long-johns with feces. Then, when the bird was about halfway across the room, our cat came out of nowhere and jumped a full three feet in the air to smack the bird away from my face and into the wall. That's when the real fun began.

Initially I tried to go back to sleep. I pulled the covers over my face so I wouldn't catch a random beak or claw to the eye while the two duked it out. Sorry Mr. Bird, but it looks like this is your stop on the circle of life. From under my blanket I would hear a loud thump or bang as the cat tried to climb the miniblinds, and then the fluttering of wings, and the scurrying across the carpet. Long silence, repeat. I got up to go throw his ass outside to be done with it and go back to sleep, but the second we locked eyes he let me know his plans otherwise.

Covering him with a towel to grab him didn't work, so for a good 15 minutes there was a bird flying around the basement being chased by a cat getting whipped with a towel as I yelled at him to stop playing with his food. Meanwhile the bird started running out of steam - probably due to massive internal bleeding. The cat grabbed him one final time and darted under my futon. I spent the rest of the night staring blankly at the ceiling until the sun came up, trying to fall asleep to the sound of him chewing a twig sandwich two feet from my ear. People, don't take your doors and walls for granted.