If you ask a cat, there are many bads that simply don’t exist.
Bad weather. Bad meats. Bad years.
If you get really brave and ask Mullet, you’ll hear that there are not even bad moods.
This is not to say that nothing is negative. We do live in a world containing jorts, death, and the song Achy-Breaky Heart. Theologians struggle mightily to reconcile such things.
But, by and large, we leggy glumlords are too quick to write life off.
Meanwhile, Mullet is writing a better story.
Mullet came from objectively bad circumstances, as Tabby’s Place cats always do. No red-blooded cat wants to be hungry and lonely outdoors, and Mullet’s veins run hot with confident marinara. (Confident Marinara is also Mullet and Malora‘s Van Halen tribute band.)
But Mullet just can’t call even that clobbering “bad,” not when it’s the toboggan that took him down history’s hill to today.
“This Here Place,” as Mullet calls Tabby’s Place, is the core of the earth, the gobstopper of unstoppable joy, the geyser of glory and gentleness and everything good except giblets (and he’s working on that).
This Here Place is also where Malora lives. Need Mullet say more?
Mullet loves Malora. Mullet loves Malora like the sea loves the moon, like the snow loves children, like our hands love fur itself. Mullet loves Malora enough to power cities. Mullet loves Malora enough to heal ancestral curses. Mullet loves Malora enough to replace the United Nations with the sheer force of two cats contorted into a single peacemaking tortellini-beast.
Mullet loves Malora.
Sometimes Malora gets nervous.
We dare not seek to explain. Perhaps Malora has been offered only the second most marvelous breakfast. Perhaps Malora has been subjected to encore recordings of A Very Kid Rock Christmas. Perhaps Malora has lain awake all night attempting to reconcile the existence of eggless nog with her faith in a merciful Maker. Perhaps Malora had that recurring dream of Mae running off with Paul Rudd, when everyone knows he is Malora’s inamorata.
Regardless, Malora has moods, which manifest as unfestive fears.
Mullet loves Malora through them all.
Mullet, although personally incapable of gloom, rigorously defends the right to feel less than fun and light. Skidding down the ramp on his invisible, inimitable snowboard, Mullet decrees: Malora needs her icy hours to glitter in the sun.
Malora needs to glump around to find her footing.
Malora needs to pull down the lights to festoon a better afternoon.
Malora needs to tell the truth to have true, true friends. And Malora will never find a truer friend than Mullet. (Not even Paul Rudd.)
The grump comes, and the grump goes, and the good, good cat in the middle grows larger all the while.
Malora’s moods are not bad. They are snowboards.
And Mullet and Malora want to meet us at their cozy cabin, too.
What do you say, kittens? If two cats who have been snowed in by desperate circumstances can feel everything and still feel unstoppable, is there hope for our Christmas blues, too?
“Hopeless” has hurled all one hundred Tabby’s Place cats like snowballs. But between the sorrow and the saving, the weird weather of mercy has made a sloppy mess of “bad.” Who can say that the inclement hours were awful, when they led to This Here Place, the grace place, the starry space where all of us honest aliens learn to be patient with each other’s moods?
Who can say that life’s been bad, when it’s plonked us here together, and today’s not over?
Who can disagree with Mullet?
Pour the nog. Feel it all. Ride the snowboard. Kiss Mullet. Kiss Paul Rudd if you see him. And — mood permitting — kiss Malora, too.