Dear readers, this is neither joke nor exaggeration: I believe I have discovered the worst place on earth. Fortunately, I only had to spend one weekend there. Hopefully I won’t have to return ever again. Joyfully, I will get my revenge on Mommy and Daddy. Oh, yes, the places I will poop!

Mommy and Daddy took a vacation. A vacation is the ultimate example of how dumb humans are. It’s time a human doesn’t have to spend at work, school, or otherwise employed. That time would be the perfect opportunity to spend in one’s home with the most important people in the world — like me. But no, Mommy and Daddy want to go to the desert, where I am not welcome. So what to they do? Rather than being civilized beasts-of-labor and obtaining a substitute slave to visit, scritch, and feed me, they deliver me to a house full of ÔǪ I can’t even get into it yet. It’s too disturbing.

Getting there required locking me in a portable cat-jail and transporting me in abject misery across a bridge to some foreign land. When I arrive and finally travel inside, the humans in this strange place speak with funny accents and keep the skull of a dead cat in their home. From the barbaric home decorations, and accents vaguely reminiscent of that Monty Python thing Mommy and Daddy watch, I immediately presumed that I’d been taken to England, a barbaric island halfway around the world, where the weird diet includes eating cats.

It was only after I’d been here for a few hours that I realized why the lead thumb-beast seemed so familiar. She’s my editor. For those of you who don’t work in journalism, editors are people who can’t be writers; as a result, they spend their lives telling those of us with talent we’re doing it wrong. Normally we just exchange email, so as a result, she’s easy to ignore. But now that I’m living here she can make demands. "Blah blah blah, contractual obligations," she demands. "Blah blah blah, deadlines," she fumes. "Blah blah blah, withhold paycheck until you provide the required word count." What is her problem?

You have to understand: A talent like mine can’t just be turned off and on like a light. I don’t just sit down and develop a topic and then a post magically appears. Rather, I stick my face in a bowl of gravy and slurp that stuff up until I’m dizzy, then brilliance erupts out and you eat it with a spoon. My editor wants me to fact-check, but doesn’t she understand this is an opinion piece. I don’t have to fact-check my opinions. They’re all brilliant. I know they are because I came up with them.

My living quarters are wanting. I am trapped in a single room, not permitted to wander the house, and when I get scritchies, they are inferior English scritchies, which cannot compare to the scritchies I have conditioned Mommy and Daddy to provide.

There are other cats in this home as well. One reminds me of the Russian Blue I made my bitch back in Houston, and another seems a tad on the old and curmudgeonly side. We sometimes communicate via the crack under my door, but how I long to cross the barricade and teach those furry little wimps who’s boss.

But here’s the weirdest part. They don’t give me a privacy cabin over my litter box like I have at home. And then they watch me poop. And they take my photo when I do it. I have a rule: You don’t walk in on me when I’m pooping, I walk in on you when you’re pooping.

After I finish pooping, they collect my poop and take it away. I can’t help but wonder whether it’s a sacrifice to their strange English gods, whom they worship instead of me. Perhaps next time I should do my business under the chaise lounge.

I will say this: These humans make me miss my thumb beasts at home. But don’t tell Mommy and Daddy; they’ll think they can take advantage.

[Editor’s note: Let’s talk after work, shall we?]

Need more Mina? Of course you do. Browse the Mina archives for some high-grade feline contempt.