Dear Readers,

Get ready to hear the most amazing cat story of your life.

Yeah, right.

I don’t know any amazing cat stories, and I wouldn’t tell you one if I did. Everybody who knows anything about me knows I hate cats. I can’t respect any animal that washes its body with its own tongue, and then coughs up the results in a moist fur ball.

Yuck.

I’ve heard a lot of cat stories, of course. Anybody who spends more than 5 minutes on the Internet is inundated with cat stories because everybody who owns a cat believes their cat is special and compulsively tells everybody why.

Cat owners are more annoying than the parents of newborn babies. But they shouldn’t be, because their cats aren’t any more special than the 7 billion wrinkled pouches of puke and piss that populate the planet.

I’ve been forced to read several thousand cat stories, and they all go exactly like this: “Mittens killed a bird today. He carried it into the kitchen in his mouth, and dropped it at my feet like he deserved a prize.” Or, “Mr. Jingles snuck into my bedroom at three in the morning and sat on my face to wake me up.”

Those aren’t amazing stories. They’re disgusting. So disgusting that I’d throw up if I wasn’t afraid that a cat would come along, lick it up and make me throw up again.

The truth is, I only mentioned cats as a ploy to get your attention. Everybody except me loves cat stories, and I’ll do almost anything to draw attention to a subject I believe is important.

So no amazing cat stories.

But I do want to talk about world peace.

I like world peace. Support it wholeheartedly. Believe we’d be better off growing flowers than making guns, because we already have plenty of guns.

If the world’s gun owners stopped shooting at one another tomorrow and turned the barrels of their weapons into bud vases, we’d have about 1 billion bud vases to fill, according to my complex statistical analysis of a 2007 gun-ownership study by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies. The institute says there’s about one pistol, rifle, machine gun or Saturday-night special for every seven people in the world, most of them hidden in my neighbors’ secret bunkers along with their freeze-dried food, Bibles and Hustler magazines.

I don’t know if there are enough flowers in the world to fill that many gun-barrel vases, but we could grow them. In fact, we could grow them with military efficiency by re-training soldiers to run greenhouses. These not-quite-as-brave men and women in uniform could be organized into petunia platoons and supervised by geranium generals.

I know fans of the highly profitable military-industrial complex that protects and controls America won’t like this idea.

We’ll lose jobs and cripple the fragile economy by shutting down gun factories, they’ll complain.

Easy-peasy, I counter.

We’ll put our gunsmiths to work Bedazzling gun-barrel bud vases, or sewing new pastel-colored uniforms for our tulip troops. I think Gen. David Petraeus and his posse would look pretty in pink, and our forces can use their gun-barrel bud vases to storm Valentine’s Day in the most glorious victory since the American army hit the beaches of Normandy in World War II.

Bye-bye D-Day, hello VD-Day.

Problem solved. Shut up, whiners.

Not that I believe world peace is achievable. I’m not one of those crazy, dope-smoking, socialist peaceniks you hear about on Fox News. I know there are all kinds of reasons why world peace will forever remain elusive.

People are inherently violent, selfish and greedy, for example. We also have an unfortunate tendency to behave irrationally, as evidenced by the Tea Party and Denny’s restaurants. I mean, have you eaten at Denny’s? I’d rather lick listeria-laden, day-old hot dogs straight off the roller racks at the local Kum & Go truck-stop than eat that slop.

But for me, the case against world peace boils down to one troubling behavior: men who refuse to lift toilet seats in public restrooms, merrily splattering them with pee without caring that it renders them useless for would-be sitters.

Go ahead, step into any public men’s room in any neighborhood the country. Unless it’s been cleaned in the last 10 seconds, the seats of the commodes will be running with enough urine to flood the mighty Mississipee.

Nope, I know world peace is impossible because men—thoughtless bastards—are base and vile.

Animals.

Worse than animals.

Seriously, I’ve seen cats that are better potty-trained than the average male. Yep, even a fur-ball-hacking feline can be trained to tinkle into a toilet without splashing pee over the seat. If you don’t believe me, watch the videos at sites like like LitterKwitter.com and CitiKitty.com. Cats won’t flush, but neither do most men. And at least cats have the common courtesy and decency not to wet the toilet seats.

And that’s an amazing cat story.

It’s enough to give me pause. Or paws.

Sincerely,
Mike, 6-years-old