My step-dad brought a homeless hamster to our house when I was in high school.
What looked like the cutest and cuddliest of creatures turned out to be a burden and sign of enduring evil and hardship for years to come. We took it in trying to be kind people, but we already had one pet that regarded us as his humans and no one else’s. Cobweb had successfully murdered one bird and one fish that had tried to come between him and “his” humans.
My brother took a liking to the hamster quickly. He attempted to pet him and hand feed the mutant what looked like mulch pellets for hours on end. The hamster returned Larry’s kindness by biting, scratching, and pooping in Larry’s hand. After cage cleanings the Hamster would set about to destroying his freshly cleaned domicile; moving his cedar sheds to one side, chewing bracings of his travel tubes apart, and it seemed like crapping and peeing excessively on spots in the cage we spent hours trying to clean. The hamster made no efforts to clean himself either. Often he ranked of sleeping in the same pile he conducted his business in regardless of the endless “clean space” located in his cage. As for exercise time, he would lie listlessly in his brand new roller ball and would only moved on his own when my brother would…err prompt him by scuttling the ball with his feet. Hamster tried to have jail breaks on numerous occasions by successfully chewing the brackets apart on the cage. During every break he ran to the same place, my Siamese cat’s food dish. There he would shove as much Meow-Mix as possible into his huge puffy jowls and for whatever reason wait to be rescued. Fortunately his jailbreaks were scheduled during Cobweb’s routine morning outside break.
One such attempt at 6:35 a.m. Cob Web was not outside and returned to his food bowl to find a live treat serving himself up like a Thanksgiving dinner. I’ll break the story a bit just to show that you never quite now how your day will end based on its beginning.
I knew today was going to be a bad day at 8:03. My skirt blew up in the wind and I inadvertently mooned one of my co-workers husbands. Who in turn rather than driving out of the parking lot decided to drive back around to wink AND honk the horn at me. In my state of embarrassed fury I dropped my cell phone, which rolled, completely under the bottom of my car, the cell phone was NOT in arms reach so I literally had to crawl under my car in my skirt to retrieve my poor busted phone.
Honestly I might have known the day was to be bad when room-mate did not even return my good morning which oddly enough she always seems to return one even in the worst of moods.
My email box is filled with messages of which 10 are congrats for my fantabulous presentation last week, 10 are of the “where are you” nature, 8 actual jobs and 12 concerning home mortgages, wacky lesbians, and penis enlargements. God I hate spam!
I take a bite into what was supposed to be a pickle-less onion-less masterpiece and find that not only are there pickes and onions but they are HIDDEN in my cheese on my quarter-pounder.
At the moment when hope is/was lost I receive this text message:
“So there is a bird eating his own butt on the hood of my car.”
The comment itself although jarring, made me extremely happy while I as picking gravel from my knees from the parking lot. Bless high school friends for finding humor in a moment of absolute regularity.
So now, I’m sitting in a huge bowl of meow-mix trying to see if something is going to devour me. Or maybe: I’m at another point in my life where I find myself trying to decide if I wanna take on another hamster metaphorically. A creature that despite other’s need to help it decides at as many times possible to engage in acts of self saboutage, a moment where I have to decide if putting up with this hamster may pan off into a huge karmic reward later.
In the kitchen a 3x3 triangle had formed; Cobweb, me, and hamster all 3 feet from each other trapped in an odd showdown. Although I despised hamster on some level, I didn’t think he deserved to be brutally mauled by the Siamese cat. Historically when trying to race the cat to rescue any animal from his clutches I always moved a minute too slow; the minute where he would lunge and carry the doomed creature to it’s grave beyond the cat door. This time was no different I bolted to grab the hamster, which in turn ran from me and ran directly to Cobweb. Cobweb trapped him with his paws growled at me and sniffed his doomed prey.
The hamster lived 5 years beyond this moment. He no longer attempted escape, just spent his days quietly sleeping in his waste festooned ball of cedar chips.
I can’t really say why the cat let him go. I think maybe because he sensed nothing to take from him. O hell maybe he just wasn’t hungry. I can’t really say why I wanted to rescue the loathsome ball of fluff.
Lately I’m thinking I AM a loathsome ball of fluff.
So I'm sitting here at my desk like a good little (big) working chump, trying to come up with compelling ways to describe a sponsorship for a show whose host I find ten kinds of grody, when an unexpected odor comes a-wafting into my office. 
