A Tidy Tale of Litter, by Bruce Buschel
Your cat needs litter. It’s Saturday night and your usual outlet is closed until Monday, so you go to King Kullen. You better hurry. King Kullen closes at midnight on Saturdays, unlike the rest of the week when it’s open round the clock. You’d like to think that Bridgehampton is the only village in America that can support a Starbucks, a Gap, a T.J. Maxx, a Kmart, a 24-hour supermarket but can’t get mail delivered by the United States Postal Service.
Your cat has been a resident of Bridgehampton for 20 years. (She has never received a letter.) She deserves a kitty litter she can appreciate, and by appreciate we mean soil, freely.
You start to peruse the well-lit lineup of cardboard boxes and plastic jugs along a long shelf dominated by Purina products. The first TIDY CAT litter is called Instant Action. Sounds reasonable. The next one is called Breathe Easy.
All right. A third is MULTIPLE CATS and that abuts 24/7 PERFORMANCE. Then there’s one made for “Small Spaces” and another guaranteeing “TIGHT CLUMPS.” That’s a half dozen kitty litters without moving a step. The words are not just footnotes, nor mission statements, they are proud titles, front and center, in large and loud letters, in several fonts and several hues, upper and/or lower cases, willy-nilly, boldfaces and slender script and crazy promises. Innocent that you are, you thought any decent litter would combine all of the above — instant action and 24/7 and easy breathing and tight clumping and all effective in a small space.
Now, on a cold dark Saturday night in January, you find your human self in a metaphorically tight space where breathing is labored and answers are not instant. Your instincts stink. You never realized that 21st-century kitty litters have become, like doctors, so ultra-specialized.
There’s more. There’s CRYSTAL and there’s DUAL POWER and OCCASIONAL and POWER BLEND and a big yellow bucket called SCOOP that screams, in orange letters, “Now! TIGHTER CLUMPS For a CLEANER Litter Box.” It yells, in white, “CONTINUOUS Odor Control.” It exclaims, in aquamarine, “With the Power of ODOR ERASERS.” Odor erasers? Whatever. As you reach for SCOOP, you suddenly notice PREMIUM SCOOP. Above the silhouettes of two black cats, PREMIUM SCOOP says: “Antimicrobial Action Helps Inhibit Growth of Bacterial Odors in Litter.” Antimicrobial? Bacterial odors? Inhibited? I’m sold.
Wait. Right next to PREMIUM SCOOP is 4-in-1, a somber-looking jug with blue lettering and dark gray images against a yellow sky. It says: “4-in-1 Attacks and Neutralizes the 3 Key Odors + Powerful Clumping. TARGETS AMMONIA ODORS, URINE ODORS, FECAL ODORS.” Now we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty. And 4-in-1 is 99.6-percent dust free. And 4-in-1 weighs seven pounds. And your forehead is spinning. And your saliva is clumping.
You look around sheepishly. A well-dressed woman is buying little cans of grilled cat food down the aisle. You ask her how she deals with the mind-blowing variety of kitty litters. She smiles and rolls her eyes and moves along. She thinks you are putting her on or picking her up. You scratch your chin, much like your old cat does. Feels nice.
Although the kitty litter tubs are festooned strictly in English, your first language, the same language by which you make a living, occasionally — but let’s not get into that right now — you are confounded by the excited and descriptive lingo and designs. You assume they all have been chosen with great care, or no care at all. Gives new meaning to hypertext. You have to figure that Purina is pulling your leg. Who could tell the difference between “neutralizing fecal odors” and “24/7 odor erasers”? Who knows the difference between litter for multiple cats and the litter you have been using for 20 years for your singular feline?
Do humans have anything vaguely equivalent in the realm of toilet paper?
NEW! LightWeight. Your search continues. This one has a gray feather floating toward the ground, casting a shadow just above the words ALL THE STRENGTH, HALF THE WEIGHT. The plastic container with the handy handle is just under four pounds, which is far lighter than the seven pounds of PREMIUM SCOOP, but not really as light as a feather. It also costs almost twice as much. It could read Half the weight, twice the price, with only slight exaggeration.
How do they make kitty litter lighter? What miracle ingredient did they extract? Or add? Why isn’t there a Moore’s Law of Litter, where scientific advances would make it lighter and cheaper every two years? Why are you dripping with questions? You find a King Kullen employee and implore.
“Excuse me, sir, in your pet aisle, there’s like a dozen different kitty litters. Could you help me out?”
“I have a dog,” he says in a semi-haughty dog owner way and leaves it at that. You want to tell him that your cat is very affectionate and loyal and that the whole species gets a bum rap. You want to tell him that E.D. doesn’t hunt or gather much anymore, though the door remains open for her to come and go as she pleases, and she likes to eat grass and puke. She was named by your kids, who were, two decades ago, gender oblivious and named their newest pet after their favorite baseball player, Eric Davis. Their parents, far more gender sensitive, acronized the name to female-sounding E.D. As her scampering days have diminished, her need for a good kitty litter has increased. And by good, we mean easy to soil.
There is much research to be done. In the meantime, pressed for time, you grab the nearest box and head to the exit. It is Arm & Hammer Clump & Seal. You are a sucker for ampersands. And a fan of revolutions. “Clump & Seal is a revolutionary cat litter . . . with moisture-activated micro-granules . . . and a 7-day odor-free home guarantee.”
Hold on, E.D. I’ll be home any minute now. As soon as I can figure out this self-checkout system, this damn Semi-Attended Customer Activated Terminal.
SACAT!
Bruce Buschel is a writer, producer, director, and restaurateur.