Upsetting Day: 277 Secrets Your Cat Wants You to Know (Patreon)

The title of this book is a lie. Does your cat have 277 secrets? Yes. Does it want you to know a single one of them? Of course not.

Cats are ancient beings made of hair, needles, and secrets. Anyone who gave away their secrets would disappear under mysterious circumstances. The only hint of the cause of their untimely demise would be a few sprigs of catnip and the slight waft of tuna-scented air. Which is why nothing in this book is a secret.

I would divide the information in 277 Secrets Your Cat Wants You To Know into four CAT-agories. Hahaha that's a little cat pun for you. No lack of those in this book! Are you ready for a pet-pourri of information? You've got: questions no one asked, the saddest surveys on Earth, weird cat sex stuff, and cursed cat drawings. Let's look at each of them meow!

Instead of answering normal questions about cats like, "Why is it always watching me sleep?" Or, "Is my cat insane?" Or, "Please make it stop ow, why?" 277 Secrets Your Cat Wants You To Know answers questions like:

This is on page one. It says a lot about the author of this book that they think the most pressing question a person would have about their cat is, could it be the one stealing my booze?

The answer is that cats will sometimes drink beer, but it's bad for them. Unfortunately, this book exists in a universe full of villains, hiding in the bushes, just waiting to get Vice-Principal Fuzzy Pants drunk. So, there's also a handy guide to telling if your cat is lit.

What does "Zapped-out looking" mean? I can guess from context, kind of, but I've never heard this expression before in my entire life. Also, what kind of rich ass college students are willing to spend their Natty Light money on getting cats drunk? Do you remember the classic college prank where frat boys would go around getting all of the cats in the neighborhood wasted so they laugh at how they were "acting like a person with a bad headache"?

Thank God I've learned the secret to telling if my cat is drunk or not. This is obviously a huge problem within the cat-owning community. I need to know this almost as much as I need to know...

Now, this isn't referring to a cat that is psychic. That's a silly idea. Why would the section on How to Find a Cat Psychic cover that when it was already covered on the previous page?

The book doesn't answer definitively if cats are psychic or not, but it cites several promising studies done by Dr. J.B. Rhine, formerly of the Institute of Parapsychology, and Dr. Karlis Osis of the American Society for Psychical Research, which both reported findings of telepathic and clairvoyant powers in cats! God help us all.

Can you imagine how fucked humanity would be if cats were telepathic? The only ones who could save us from the psychic cats would be cat psychics, locked in a battle of wills with a creature so unfeeling it will make direct eye contact with you and then shove its butthole right in your face. We both know who's winning that fight.

Not one to shy away from the tough questions, this book will even tell you the truth when you might not want the honest answer. There's an extensive section on how to train your cat to use a toilet, but tragically, your cat will never be able to flush it. "Not with our paws, at least," a voice meows in your mind as unseen powers apply enough lever pressure to flush a toilet.

Throughout the book, fun little surveys are peppered in to let you know most people prefer their cats to their romantic partners, and this is merely a humorous fact and in no way sad. Everyone just loves cats more than people in a normal way.

Damn, Deana! Dump him! Ladies, a good rule of thumb for relationships is if you like your cat better than your man, you don't need that man. I hope that Deana realized this and mailed some guy a copy of 277 Secrets Your Cat Wants You To Know in lieu of a breakup letter.

A few people responded in favor of humans, but they were all weirdly horny about it.

This book's opinion on cats is clearly, "The only downside is you can't fuck them. Real bummer that you need people for that."

Ice burn. I'm loving this book as an outlet for bashing husbands. These women were done suffering in silence. Taking your complaint about your husband not going down on you to the highly public and extremely weird forum of a novelty book about cats is such a baller move. "Well, George, maybe if you'd done that thing we talked about on my birthday, I wouldn't have had to tell the cat people I like the cat better than you!"

The back of the book has more upsetting survey questions, which are all just openings to insult your spouse, coworkers, and children like you're tightening up your set before you go on Leno.

I would kill for access to the glaringly unsuspicious email address IMOKAYTOO so that I could see if anyone had responded in the affirmative to the question about liking their cat better than at least one of their children.

From: RonnieJamesDio4Lyfe@gmail.com

To: IMOKAYTOO@aol.com

Subject: Jeff sucks, Mittens OWNS

First of all, I do not like the term tiny orgasms. You can't diagnose the size of the cat's orgasm. They could be having real whoppers. Way to be sex-negative toward masturbating cats, book choosing to disclose cat sex secrets.

The playfully horny energy of this advertisement for spaying and neutering cats is so unsettling. It's like, "Wouldn't it be crazy if someone put a condom on a cat? Lol, that would be so nuts; like, what if I was doing that right now. I'm not! But what if I were? Heehee, can you imagine? Anyway, get your cat fixed, so you don't have to put a condom on it like how I definitely don't." *wink*

There's a very normal comparison for what catnip feels like to a cat. Pretty much everyone says it's like marijuana for cats, but not this book. In the section, "Everything your cat wants to know about catnip but is too high to ask," the book calls catnip, "like sex" for cats.

Again, you don't know this cat's life. It seems like a pretty big jump to say that catnip makes cats as happy as having sex does. Was there a study where they scanned two cats having sex in an MRI machine to make this determination? Did that happen? If so, God bless America, I guess? And if not, I have a grant proposal, science.

The drawings in this book are disappointingly not horny in comparison to everything else. I say disappointingly because rather than be horny, they are creepy as hell. This cat eating an enormous bowl of dead mice looks like it was cut from a scene in The Shining.

And look at this one. It's like an early off-the-books gig for Tim Burton and his weird little nightmare children. The kids have no toes, and the girl's hair appears to be part of her head. It's unsettling. It's precisely how someone would draw if they thought science supported their theory of psychic cats.

I know this is supposed to be a cheerful little cartoon about a fat cat, like Garfield, but instead, it's filling me with existential dread, like Heathcliff. This is the face of a hippo having a tiny "orgasm."

I also don't like cats using their paws as hands because we need cats to not be able to hold things almost as much as we need them to not be psychic. The day a cat learns to handle a gun, psychically or with weird mutant hands, it's all over for us. Everyone knows this.

I've made many speculations about the people who co-wrote this book and sadly did not do a deep Google on them until way later in my writing process because I thought the bio on the back of the book would be entertaining enough for me to riff on.

There’s so much here! Their names are Paul and Paulette, for starters. Paul is the former president of the New York chapter of The National Academy Of Television Arts & Sciences (the organization that gives out the Emmy awards). So, whenever someone loses an Emmy now, they can just say, "Oh, the guy that wrote 277 Secrets Your Cat Wants you To Know didn't like my sound design? Oh noooo."

And yet Paulette Cooper is somehow even more interesting. She wrote several books in the '90s, including Dog Secrets: Fun And Fascinating Things Your Dog Wants You To Know, Bargain Shopping in Palm Beach County, and The 100 Top Psychics In America. However, she started her career as a serious investigative journalist and was one of the first to look into Scientology being maybe not so on the up-and-up. I'm not sure if you've heard this or not, but Scientology is perhaps kind of crazy and bad?

Her investigation into the Church Of Scientology led to a decade of harassment from the "church" of "non crazies." They mailed letters to her neighbors saying she had a venereal disease, framed her for sending bomb threats, sued her in at least three countries, and designed an elaborate campaign to have her imprisoned or committed to a psychiatric hospital.

After all that, Paulette got an out-of-court settlement from the church, moved to Palm Beach, married Paul, and said, "You know what? Fuck journalism, I'm going to write about cats now, and I'm going to do a BAD job at it. What are cats going to do about that? Are cats going to frame me for a hate crime? Good luck with that when you don't even have real psychic powers!"

And I support her decision. This is the best terrible book about cats I've ever read, and I've already purchased several of Paulette's other books for future digestion because she's earned the right to write terrible books.

You can follow Lydia on Twitter for more of whatever this article was...horny cat stuff? I’m sorry.