I had this entry all ready to go last week, but I couldn’t help but defer it when I saw that Friday the Thirteenth was coming. So now that it’s here…

Imagine this scenario: you’re the parent of a child in seventh grade. In the evening, you casually ask them how school went, and are told that English class had featured some students doing book reports. Did any of them stand out as particularly interesting? Well, one kid gave a ten-minute presentation on a book called “The Satanic Bible by this guy Anton Szandor LaVey, the founder of The Church of Satan

Yeah, that was me at thirteen years of age. The same year that Mrs. Bernier read “The Hobbit” and “A Wrinkle in Time” to our English class, I was getting my kicks by introducing my impressionable prepubescent peer group to LaVeyan Satanism.

This was suburban Maine in 1976, so to this day, I’m still surprised that there were no repercussions… at least none known to me.

I clearly remember hanging out in Mr. Paperback on my way home from school one day, looking for anything that piqued my curiosity. And there’s not much that’d capture a twelve year old boy’s attention faster than a black book titled “The Satanic Bible”, with the inverted pentagram of Baphomet on the front and back cover, with the latter serving as background for a crimson portrait of its grim-looking, goateed, bald author with a piercing gaze. I hope my grammar school classmates enjoyed my book report!

The book – along with LaVey’s followup piece, “The Satanic Rituals” – continued to provide a unique conversation piece that followed me through high school, college, career, all the way to the present day. And it paved the way for several other infamous occult acquisitions, including Robert W. Chambers’ “The King in Yellow”, Aleister Crowley’s “The Book of Lies”, Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Monster of the Prophesy”, and the Simon “Necronomicon”.

As for our dear Anton, he provided a lasting final connection with me by passing away on my birthday.

Cue the “Twilight Zone” theme

Bookshelf with LaVey's Satanism books

Monday marks Grady the Cat’s first adoptaversary. I really haven’t written about him or posted any pictures since his first couple weeks at home. That’s partly due to my five-month travel assignment.

I have taken pictures of him, but he’s not as photogenic as I once hoped, mostly because he’s not a very patient subject, so few of them have made it to Flickr or my LJ. You can see the ones I have taken here.

How can I describe life with Grady? In many ways, it’s great. He’s not a fussy eater. He doesn’t scratch furniture. He’s usually not noisy or destructive. He doesn’t have litterbox issues. He doesn’t spray or mark. He’s a pretty good cat, in all respects but one.

Grady

He’s one aggressive muthafuxx0r.

You’d think a cat would enjoy spending time sunbathing in a south-facing bay window in a fancy Back Bay apartment, watching all the pedestrian activity on shi-shi Newbury Street. He’s even got sparrows, pigeons, and seagulls to stare and chatter at when he gets bored.

But no. My cat’s got ennui. No, not just ennui; my cat’s got ANGST. Angst like Arlo Guthrie on the Group W bench: he wants ta kill. I mean, he wants ta kill. He wants ta see blood and gore and guts and veins in his teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. He wants ta kill, Kill, KILL, KILL!

Unfortunately, the only other living thing in my apartment happens to be *me*, and I’m not about to become “prey” to any twelve-pound ball of teh fluffeh, even if he does have nasty big pointy teeth. It’s kind of a pity, because he’d be an ideal farm cat, where he could go out and run and hunt and kill all day and all night long.

So after a year, during which time I’ve utterly failed to train this behavior out of him, I finally called for an exorcist. Today a Senior Applied Animal Behaviorist came by—along with two veterinary student observers—and we talked about Grady’s “case”.

Basically, the diagnosis is boredom combined with an inhuman—or infeline—amount of energy. They played with him for ten minutes, the point at which point most cats will get tired and go for a lay-down. After 80 more minutes of vigorous, non-stop play the Senior Applied Animal Behaviorist got tired and declared that Grady is “ninety-ninth percentile”, and that he’ll remain this hyperactive for a minimum five more years.

Meanwhile, I got all kinds of advice. A lot of it is geared toward finding ways to entertain and exercise him, so that he has an outlet for all this satanic energy other than mad killing sprees. We also discussed deterrence, drugs, and acquiring other living creatures for him to disembowel, ranging in sizes from crickets up to fostered shelter cats. The idea is to redirect his persistent demands for human sacrifices.

In the end, only time is going to tell whether I can live with this killing machine or not. But at least now I’ve some well-educated support and some ideas to try. Wish me luck…

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