Back before we had a child, when we had enough emotional energy to spare for several bloodsucking, freeloading cats, we used to get a chuckle from watching one little bastard in particular use the litterbox. She'd step in there so precisely, and then turn around and hike up her tail, and while she was releasing her poisonous fluids she'd get this fixed expression on her face, as though listening to a distant inner voice. She actually looked quite thoughtful.

It didn't take being caught on the pot more than once or twice for Jack to note that, in a similar position, I assumed a similar expression of blank concentration. To this day whenever he catches sight of me through our always-open bathroom door, he says "Kitty" to me in that gentle, aw-c'mere-sugar-here's-a-little-tuna-water voice.

So yesterday I was at the office, which has a separate entrance around the back of my boss's house, and I stepped into the house to use the bathroom. Unfortunately, Boss had been away for a week, and his housesitter had spent the previous three days at a bachelorette party, and Boss's Partner's assistant hadn't been real enthusiastic about getting after each and every itty bitty dried-up pool of neurotic Abyssinian cat shit that dotted every slate or tile floor of Boss and Partner's $3,000,000 dollar house.

And I'd be goddamned if I was going to scrape it all up with a butter knife.

So I picked my way through this minefield of an expensively tiled bathroom, and I was sitting on the toilet, in deep negotiation with my colon thanks to some new and slightly constipating liver-cleanse herbs, when I caught sight of a big yellow pool of cat piss in the corner by the shower, and I realized that I actually was shitting in a cat box; I had reached the nexus of my expression; I had finally achieved hypostatic Cat union.