RUSH: I got some good sleep last night. You know, I’m getting all kinds of advice on what to do about Punkin. Wednesday night she started head butting me right between the eyes, for like an hour and a half. I mean, it was a combination of head butt and nuzzle. She wants me to get up and feed her. So people say, ‘Why don’t you feed her before you go to bed?’ I guess I need to give you people the routine here so you understand what’s so odd about this. I do feed her, whether it’s midnight, two o’clock in the morning, 11 p.m., I feed her before I go to bed. I feed the cat three times a day, once when I get up, when I get home in the afternoon, and then when I go to bed. A bad habit has evolved. She will not eat out of the bowl. Sometimes she will, if she’s really hungry, but she will not eat until she sees me pour something in the bowl, whether the bowl’s full or not.
Now, I put the food in these Ziploc bags because there are two or three different kinds for urinary tract infections, to make sure she doesn’t get them. Some days she won’t eat one and wants the other, but I don’t know that ’til I open each bag and let her figure it out. It’s gotten to the point now where she won’t eat except out of the Ziploc bag, so I have to open the Ziploc bag, I have to put it on the floor, open it up and then stand there, make sure she doesn’t strangle or suffocate in the Ziploc bag while this is happening. The cat is totally running my life here. I have a bunch of women e-mailing, ‘I want to be Punkin.’ (Laughing) Not many, Dawn, but just a few. So anyway, I fed the cat, went to bed last night about 1:30 a.m, and I went up there, and she had not come down to see me all day. From the time I got home yesterday afternoon until two o’clock in the morning, 1:30 a.m., whatever it was, I had not seen her. She generally comes down to the library and starts running around my feet and legs and so forth and demanding some attention. She didn’t come down. I said, ‘Okay, she’s mad.’
I’m sitting here in the library, ‘Puuunkin, where are you?’ just trying to get her, and she totally ignored me. So I got up there at 1:30 a.m., and she’s just sitting there in her bathroom waiting. She has her own bathroom and sitting room, folks. She’s just sitting there waiting. So I went and I got the bag, she didn’t want that bag, I had to go get another bag, open it up, bam, dug in there like crazy. Did not head butt me today, but when I got up to feed her, bam, right back in the same bag. I know what you cat people are saying, that I’ve lost control here and the cat’s running me. ‘Don’t feed her all the time. Put the food in the bowl. When she gets hungry, she’ll eat it.’ Yeah, but you’re forgetting the head butts at 5:30 or six o’clock in the morning.