Meet Luka. All 18 pounds of him. Sure, go ahead and blame the owner for allowing him to reach such portly proportions. However, ask yourself: how many fat yellow cats you’ve encountered in your life. I bet it’s more than a few. Baby, they just seem to be born that way.

Luka’s gluttony drives him to such persistence and that can make him a difficult cat to love. For a good laugh, we’ve been known to set a new bag of food in front of him just to see how crazy temptation drives him. Every week when I refill the automatic dispenser he goes ballistic and I’m sure to let him shove his face into the big tupperware container where the cat food gets stored. For a brief moment he will gorge on the fresh food before I snap the lid back into place.

Notice that we feed him a hairball formula. If you were as fat as him and had to labor to clean around all that fatness, you would produce some hefty hairballs. I must admit, we could stand to brush him more often. Yet, he doesn’t get hair mats often. For a fat kitty, he’s usually pretty adept at grooming himself. That is until made our cross country move from Idaho to North Carolina. Thankfully, we had kept the long hair on his hind legs trimmed. Otherwise we would have had a lot more cleaning up to do. I’ve lost the count of the times we’ve had to get out the wet wipes and literally wipe our cat’s ass. Not pretty.

Believe it or not, Luka was pretty svelte back in 2005.

Enter the hairball of doom. Maybe I should make that plural because Luka offered up two gargantuan ones shortly after we settled into our new place. “You know Matt, Luka really needs brushed…” How many times has that been uttered since we moved? Poor kitty. But cats are like kids. They occasionally puke and you clean it up. Life goes on. His ongoing case of the runs seemed hairball-related, so I just wanted to bide my time and let nature take its course. That is until the mysterious intruder pictured below appeared in the extra bathroom.

Looks pretty scary, right? Since moving to North Carolina, the cat box just seemed to smell more than it ever did in Boise. Maybe it’s due to the higher humidity. It didn’t help either that Luka went through a spell where he stopped burying his waste. So the best solution for the stinky cat box became an automatic air freshener. Glorious apple and cinnamon now lingers in the air. No longer does the smell of litter waft throughout the entire downstairs area.

With a fresh-smelling house all seemed on the up and up. Luka even wretched up the biggest hairball I had ever seen. Usually both of our cats produce tube-like ones due to the way they must pass though their esophagus. But no. The present left on the bathroom carpet was a shapeless mass of nasty yellow kitty hair. Surely, Luka had to feel better after expelling such nastiness.

Otherwise known as Jabba, Roly-Poly Kitty, Fatso, Lardo, and Mr. Piggy to name a few.

Matt went on his merry way for a week of training in Dallas and the next day Luka became a monster. Meowing, scratching at the door, and spraying piss all over the dining room. I later discovered a pile of runny poo on the bathroom floor by the tub, as if he had been going and walking at the same time. The next day as I was drinking coffee Luka also preceded to spray again, only this time on the opposite wall of the dining room than before. It does no good to scold a cat after the fact, so I picked up his porky body and lugged him to his box. I had to take off the lid and he did end up going.

Luka kickin' back with Matt.

And the next day? Not a drop. Nothing left in or out of the litter box. He did whine a lot to go out onto the screened porch. Sometimes I think he acts more like a tomcat than a neutered cat. A neighborhood cat likes to hang around and a bunny also likes to taunt him from the other side of the porch. In any case, Luka acted like a supreme A-hole all day. That was also coupled with another gigantic hairball he had left for me to discover in the morning. Thrice I put him in the box and thrice he ran away.

Image via mightylists.blogspot.com

Everything started to fall into place. He wasn’t dying, although that is a fear that runs through my mind now since I’ve had to put two pets to sleep when Matt has been gone on business. No, it was simpler than that. Luka was afraid of the bathroom, more specifically the Airwick Automatic Freshener. And the new habit of not covering his waste once his box was put in the new bathroom? He’s been in a hurry. For some reason, he has always been afraid of the toilet, always lurking in the bathroom door of the old house, but never really approaching it. Whereas our other cat will walk on the counter when we’re getting ready, Luka never even set foot in the master bath at our old house.

"Om nom nom nom nom!"

But at least putting the kitty box in the extra bathroom made him need to go in there. I guess the pssst of air the auto-freshener lets out was just too much for him. It must strike fear into his heart the way squirted water does or a pump from a can of air. I pushed the box into the extra bedroom. Curiosity and nature calling got the best of him. Luka went.

Such joy. I sent Matt a text message: Luka pooped! In the box. It wasn’t runny and he covered it up!!!

I’ve now moved the box closer to the bathroom door. Now Luka doesn’t have to walk past the air freshener or the toilet. Maybe now my stupid kitty can just go back to being his usual annoying self, sans hairballs, sans the runs, sans spraying.

Do you have a stupid kitty story? Tell me about it in the space below.