Existentialist and nihilist views of a sleepy cat being tormented by the meaninglessness of life during her nap time by Keegan Crawford

                Keegan Crawford travels. He goes to India. He lives in Arizona. Apparently he likes cats. 2012 may be the year of the cat, even though the Chinese New Year says it is the year of the dragon. Cats surround me. I can’t escape. One of my friends from long ago had 11 cats in his house when he was a kid. You generally smelt him before you saw him. That’s just the 11 cats (crazy cat house) life. That’s reality. 

                For this chapbook, Keegan appears to have stalked a cat. I doubt a cat can give permission to any photojournalist. Each photo shows the cat in a different state of anguish. Cat suffering from anguish is well documented, from Garfield’s indifference towards life and hatred to Heathcliff’s terrorizing the local community in a fit of anti-social behavior. Why do cats feel the need to lash out at humanity, a species that has generally pampered them? Don’t cats have it lucky, lying around and doing nothing? 

                Well Keegan stands up and says ‘No, no, no’ to this terrible indifference. He explores the psyche of the cat, their inner most worries and fears. Cats don’t contribute to GDP or do any work. Thus it makes sense they would become existentialist, due to a limited range of options. Philosophy classes at accredited online schools can teach you what the philosophical movement of existentialism is all about. Maybe if I didn’t sleep all the time I might not have enough ‘blog-worthy’ material.

                The first photo shows the cat staring at its feet. Clearly the cat is morbidly depressed. Staring at your feet means you’re not looking at the sky. Your limitation becomes the ground instead of the sky and its lack of oxygen several thousand feet up. We come closer to the cat’s face. Now it is uncomfortable, we feel the cat’s anguish up close. 

                ‘Free will is an illusion. I am so fluffy.’ This is the best line in the entire book. I cry every time I read it. For the cat feels so comforting. We pet it without realizing how much it suffers each and every day. Its mind tortures it. Sure, it could start a blog but blogging doesn’t always bring happiness. Besides it has no opposable thumbs yet opposes everything (as stated later on in the chapbook). 

                Slowly it gets up from its place of torment on the couch. The couch is thought to be such a comfortable place. Yet this is the place where the cat must face its deepest worries, those thoughts that make it sleep to an unhealthy degree to a human, or a perfectly normal amount for a cat. How do cats deal with anxiety and depression? Are scientists working on cat Xanax? I wonder. 

                At the end of the book we see some hope for the cat. It seems to be getting up. But what is the point? The cat is only going to go back to sleep again because it is a cat and needs to sleep for most of the day. I wonder what happened to this cat. The last words are perhaps the most haunting of all “Meow Meow Meow”.