I recently spent two days house-sitting and answering phones at a friend’s house while the family was gone.

I always enjoy doing this. It’s fun to stay in someone else’s house, pretend to be secretary and take messages, and of course, watch cable TV. But again, I was reminded of the vast wasteland therein. The cable TV, I mean.

Remote in hand I quickly settled down to watch a few hours of CSI on Spike TV. Then I flipped to the SciFi channel and immediately regretted it because some horrible zombie movie was on and it was very dark outside of the strange house I was in.

I began the frenetic channel surfing I tend to do when I have more than one channel as an option, stopping for a few minutes on some ridiculous show in which Sean “Puff Daddy Puff Diddy P Diddy Diddy Change My Name Every Six Seconds” Coombs sat and judged whether or not a bunch of very beautiful and talented girls were good enough for I don’t know what.

Has anyone ever stopped and looked at Coombs, sufferer of walrus-like permanent facial expression and teeth that serve as tusks, and wondered just what in the heck these girls were thinking in letting him judge them?

But really, the TV wasn’t the problem, beyond the creep factor. No, my friend’s cat was the problem.

I call the cat Mr. Hissy. He meows and hisses almost simultaneously.

“Here kitty, here’s your food.”

“Meowrhsss.”

I arrived at my friend’s house on Friday evening, found the cat, received no less than six unfriendly hisses while I gave him new food. Then he came into the room where I sat channel surfing, hissed at me, and I let him out. Right about the time I was trying to get over my zombie fright, I heard a rhythmic tapping on the glass patio doors, lost six years of my life, and let Mr. Hissy back in.

He let out a loud hiss and ran off somewhere in the house.

The next morning I put out food, went into the home office and set about answering phones and doing some of my own writing. Periodically I went into the house to see if the cat wanted to go out, but noticed all day that the new food hadn’t been touched.

Odd.

In the evening, as I prepared myself a delicious chicken pot pie, I realized I hadn’t seen the cat since yesterday. I assumed, naturally, that he was dead. He’d died on my watch.

“Oh great. He died on my watch,” I thought as I traipsed about the house calling for him.

I looked everywhere and could not find him. I even checked the litter box, and enclosed version, to make sure he hadn’t pulled an Elvis and died on the toilet.

No cat.

I could imagine it now.

“Oh, yes, the weekend went fine. I got your mail out the box and put it on the counter, locked up the office, the cat died, and the UPS left you a package. No problems.”

I went to bed feeling tremendous guilt for having killed the cat by proxy somehow.

The next morning I noticed the food still hadn’t been touched, and took as confirmation of certain death. Until I turned around and saw the cat, hissing at me, from the corner of the room.

And in other uninteresting and unimportant news that you don’t care about, Gerard Depradieu has given up acting.