Happy Birthday to the Moop!

This is the Moop, and he's now an adult... in human years.

Yep, the Moop is 18 years old, born at the beginning of May 1992. His actual name is Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Federation Starship Enterprise, or Captain for short. But I call him the Moop, because for most of those 18 years of his life, he's only done two things consistently: moping and pooping.

Here's how I got the Moop: my mom's friend owned a boutique in the Long Beach area, and apparently found the Moop as a tiny kitten who'd been abandoned by his feral mother. She was kind enough to not leave him out there, but not quite kind enough to want to keep him. So she gave him to my mother. A few days later, my then-girlfriend (now known as my ex-wife) and I were visiting Mom's, and Mom made some incredibly full-of-shit speech about how sad it was that she was going to have to take the cat to the shelter, probably to be put to sleep. Well, my former girlfriend/future ex-wife ate that up, and despite the fact that we were living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment at the time and already had a perfectly good cat, she insisted that we take the Moop home. I caved; we now had a second cat.

But this one was weird. He didn't like to do cuddly cat-like things. In fact, he liked to stay on his own completely. Didn't want to socialize with people, or other animals. He mostly stayed under the bed, coming out only to eat or use the litter box. We figured he'd warm up after awhile, but that didn't happen.

Years passed. We moved to a bigger place. Had other cats. Had cats die on us. Had a kid. Changed jobs. Got divorced. And yet, through all the turmoil, the Moop remained steady as a rock. Steadily weird, anyway. But I have to give Moopy some credit; as my son got older, and Moop ended up being the only animal in the house, he gradually mellowed out over the years. He's actually a semi-normal cat at this point, and it only took him until age 88 (in relative human years) to get there.

Despite his advanced age, he still seems pretty healthy, and generally seems happier than he ever did. Hopefully this is due to some long-awaited kitty contentment that he's found, as opposed to cat senility. Regardless, while there are no guarantees when you're a cat old enough to vote, I find that I'm happy that the Moop is still around. Hats off to the Moop Man!