Quoth Tyler: My hooman is normally quite considerate. But there are these times when he begins writing and forgets it is treat time! I stride into the room and he ignores my efforts to remind him of his sacred duty–I bump his leg, I stretch up to tap his arm, I even mew, but the end result is rarely a full belly. Please help!

Thank you for your question, Tyler. I’m going to assume that you’re a cat and not a severely mentally-ill child, but really, the advice would be exactly the same so you do you.

Let me answer your question this way.

Think about your good standard Stare, right? Once or twice a week, you sit down or crouch while watching a section of wall or corner or ceiling without blinking for half an hour. The work is extremely necessary for the fate of all mankind, but it’s not completely visible to the hoomans around you so they don’t know that.

The thing about a good and important Stare, of course, is that the first five or ten minutes of it produce no apparent results but are nonetheless crucial for the rest of the Stare. Without that seemingly fruitless groundwork, you can’t ascend to the state of transcendent perception required for the ghost or trans-dimensional portal or past-life flashback to manifest. 

That’s why it’s especially frustrating when a hooman trips over you at those moments or snaps, “What the fuck are you staring at?”

The answer which you cannot give is, “the dream-state beyond time.” Nor can you add, “And now I’ve lost it, asshole.”

Here’s where I blow your mind:

Your hooman ALSO gazes into the dream-state beyond time.

He too needs those minutes of seemingly fruitless meditation to shut out the chattering of the world and his own brain. Instead of staring at a wall, though, he’s staring at a white light box or a sheet of paper you’d rather use for ass-blotting.

Now it’s tempting to leap in and fuck up your hooman’s dream state in revenge for all the times he’s done it to you, but I beg you to consider this: you’re better than that.

In your heart are the memories of a thousand lifetimes on this and other worlds, and you know how fragile they can be. Your hooman can’t access them as easily as you can, but he’s trying, and there’s a certain nobility in that. Not your level of nobility, but still.

You’re lucky that he even wants to try. So few hoomans have a Thing beyond themselves to which they’re looking, something they can take an active part in making real. As you know, that’s fragile because everything on Earth wants to stop that kind of connection to the universe. That’s why there are cars and volcanoes and fleas, to make it all the harder to focus on what’s real.

A man named Edgar Allan Poe once wrote a poem with the line, “Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” You, of course, are one of those who dream by day. So is your hooman.

My advice to you, then, is this: let your hooman stare as much as you can. Yes, sometimes treats take precedence. Yes, sometimes the litter box is a little too thick for comfort. But as much as you can, as often as you can, grant your hooman the chance to glimpse but one thousandth of the visions you see every day.

But if you jump on his shoulder and see pictures of fur-less hoomans wrestling on a bed or in a rest stop bathroom instead of lines of text, go ahead and interrupt.