Crazy Cat Neighbor, week-end report

As many of you may recall, I have a Crazy Cat Neighbor (CCN) who, along with his equally cat-obsessed wife, feeds and houses countless feral cats to the annoyance of all of the rest of us around him. On Friday, a construction work truck showed up at their house and local unlicensed handymen Larry, Darryl and Darryl got out and started slapping an addition onto their house. The addition: a new room just for all the feral cats so that the cats can have more access to food and shelter and room to breed more litters of feral cats. And hey--what spreads cat diseases better than creating a single structre where all of the diseased cats can go and co-mingle?

Yep, they actually spent thousands of dollars to put a whole new room on their house just for stray cats. And since the work is being done by three hillbillies who seem to be getting paid in cases of beer (in advance), I'm sure that it'll be a great addition that'll add so much value to their home. Of course I've been in their house, and the large quantity of indoor cats that they have (not to be confused with the outdoor cats) has the whole place reeking of cat pee probably permanently. When/if they ever move, that place is just going to have to be demolished because no one with a nose will ever be able to live in it.

But now I'm thinking that the CCN and his wife should have saved their money because it looks like he's going to need it to hire a lawyer. You see, the other night, Murphy and Belle began barking out on the deck. It wasn't the usual "I see a cat" bark, which, frankly, I just tune out. No, this was their "something strange is going on and we don't like it" bark, and that one drew me out of the back of the house in time to see the CCN engaged in yet another dispute with his arch-enemy, the Old Hippie Neighor (OHN), an unreconstructed sixties flower child who is now in his 80's but still just as weird and liberal as he ever was. The OHN lives across the street from CCN and they get along about as well as Iraq and Iran. If they aren't actively fighting over something, give them a bit of time and they will be.

By the time I got a shoe on my (broken) foot and hobbled down there, the main event was pretty much over and the parties had retrated to their respective domiciles, but the story that I got was that this one started when OHN's dog got away from him and ran up in CCN's yard to chase the cats around. Now my dogs have been known to do this from time to time, and CCN just calls me. But there's bad blood sufficient between these two such that CCN grabbed a hammer and ran down to the street where OHN was trying to re-gain control his dog, and CCN began trying to hit the dog with the hammer. Well OHN stepped in to try to protect his dog, and he snatched the hammer away from CCN and pitched it off into the woods, only to have CCN pick of a pretty big stick and commence to whacking on OHN.

Did I mention that OHN is in his 80's?

No arrets was made that night, despite the fact that an old man was beaten bloody by a man thrity years his junior, but I've heard through the grapevine that one can be expected shortly. It looks as if my Crazy Cat Neighbor is going to wish that he'd saved the money that he and his wife are spending on that cat room because now he's going to be needing a lawyer and it's liable to cost him a pretty penny to work through this case, especially if he wants to avoid jail time.

Give him a day or two and I'm sure that he'll be knocking on my door and asking me to take the case for him, at no charge, of course. It's a pity that I can only tell him no and crush his hopes just once.