People can seem unfascinating.
People can seem entirely too fascinating.
CAT’s fascinometer is a far more precise instrument than ours.
We have all felt the weight of the unfascinating: Costco zealotry over 55-toothbrush multipacks. Turn-by-turn descriptions of conversations with one’s podiatrist. Unsolicited oral histories of the Hamburglar.
We have also found ourselves flung into the excessively fascinating: deep dives into your blind date’s penitentiary stays, plural. Overheard commentary on your own career choices. That time you found yourself in the basement of a guy named Wombat with brownies of unknown origin.
And let’s not get started on how brilliantly we can bore and blister ourselves, all within a single hour.
Human beings. They talk at each other, and past each other, over each other. They natter on, they splatter themselves across the canvas, they don’t know when to stop or where to start.
Fortunately for our species, CAT just can’t stop loving us.
CAT is the cat you choose when you want a safe deposit box for your story. I do not mean that he will keep it secret — he most assuredly will not — but that he will keep it safe, which is what we all really want anyway.
CAT will listen to you, those exceptional ears leaning in like twin Anderson Coopers, and value every jot and tittle of your tales. Not a comma will be lost, not an exclamation point will seem excessive, when CAT is savoring your story.
In his YEARS years, CAT has presumably known no fewer than two hundred of our kind. But he has the forgetfulness of the saints and angels, because the moment you burst upon the scene like creation’s first dawn, he is captured and captivated and captain of your fan club.
Do tell him why you chose the maple cookie instead of the ginger cookie.
Do tell him about your high school zine called Socialism Is Sweet, and why that didn’t delight your grandfather.
Do tell him about your prayers and your poetry and your pants that got shrunk at the dry cleaner.
Do tell him about your childhood ceiling, covered in posters of persons hurling balls into hoops. Tell him the name of every one.
Do tell him about the line at Wawa.
Do tell him about the lines on your forehead.
Do face your full self, fascinating and flattering, flustered and flat, to CAT’s face. And do know that you will see nothing but the face of wonder itself.
CAT can scarcely believe he gets to be the keeper of our chatter. Stories taste better than salami. Chitter-chatter is gooier than cheese. CAT’s only wish is that you take the time to make the sauciest Sloppy Joe in sandwich history. Just keep talking. Just keep being. Just keep storytelling. Slather it all on.
You cannot be too self-indulgent for CAT, not too precious, and certainly not too long-winded. CAT loves wind. CAT wants to leap aboard your sailboat and bliss himself in every breeze from your mouth.
The moment you open your mouth, CAT’s fascinometer is already spinning wildly.
You are just that fascinating.
And yet — let the reader understand — you are magnificently incapable of being “too” fascinating. No more than pasta can be “too” Alfredo nor cheese “too” extra, you simply cannot be too bold or too gabby, too loud or too shocking. It’s not possible to be too much when CAT can’t get enough. Not even a Costco-sized vat of you would suffice. Not even close.
CAT wants to get close, and then closer. CAT wants to lift your stories — the pebbles and the emeralds, the ripsnorters and the humdingers, the dust motes and the stardust — over his head like a trophy.
Which, in his Costco-sized heart, they are.
Your very willingness to share with CAT is the prize.
Your presence is the power.
Your every revelation heightens his fascination. You cannot lose his interest.
You can, however, tune your own fascinometer accordingly.
When CAT listens to us, he accurately hears living creatures, fashioned from the same neon mystery as nebulas and narwhals, longing to be accompanied.
We want our stories to be savored.
We want someone to nod and say, “you were here! It counted!”
We want kind ears to gather all our stop-start stories and nervous novellas, painstakingly paste them onto parchment, and declare, “this is a good, good story.”
CAT hears the good, good story under all the stories.
CAT hears the heart under the harrowing or humdrum.
CAT wants everyone from Will Smith to Wombat to you and me to feel safe, savored, and fascinating.
And the next time someone tells me about their trip to TJ Maxx or their dream about riding a narwhal with Pete Davidson, I want to be CATlike.
We are all exactly as fascinating as we should be. But we’re only as fully alive as we are fascinated.