The absolutely true (in as much as I am ever entirely truthful*) story of how I got to be me.
I am Charles and I was born some forty years ago in Northern California. I had brown hair and brown eyes, and my family seemed very odd to me. Much has changed since then.
Today, I live in Northern California, have brown hair with a lot of gray in it, green eyes (I don’t know how that happened), and I’m used to my family (although they still strike me as odd).
I work at a job that is dull and is almost never mentioned on this blog, which might seem unusual, but you have to understand that I used to watch reruns of “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.” You have no idea what that means, do you?
It was a 1950s sitcom (for those too young to know) and to the best of my knowledge, never in the series’ run did they show Ozzie going to work, or even mention what he did. The audience didn’t seem to mind and I kind of figure if it worked for Ozzie, maybe it’ll work for me.
Now that’s all settled, you are asking yourself why I call myself Cat Boy? (If you aren’t asking yourself this, I guess you can skip this part.) At some point in high school I wore a cat collar on my wrist, and I mentioned to my Civics teacher that I liked Cat Stevens, so sometimes she called me Cat.
I liked it far better than my actual name, but trying to get people to call you something new is a hard sell. When I joined a few online groups, I decided to use the name Cat since it was unlikely strangers would object to calling me that in the way the people I actually knew had.
Eventually, I revealed my given name, but the people who already knew me as Cat, still think of me as such to some degree. As far as the boy portion of the title goes, I think someone sarcastically called me Cat Boy once, and when I started the blog, I knew it was the only choice.
I have since learned there are Cat Boys all over the net, including a few who claim to be (usually in bold type) The Real Cat Boy. Control issues, perhaps?
What else? I drink enormous quantities of tea, but very little liquor since I have become a compete lightweight (and I am a very boring drunk). I eat too much, cook too little, and ramble incessantly about the most insignificant things.
Before my online life began, that last quality seemed to be a problem, but I have since discovered it is a quality valued by many people. “Hooray for me,” he says, sticking his tongue out at the fourth grade teacher who said “Someday that mouth of yours will get you into trouble.”
After a lifetime of minor mental maladies—minor as compared to a great many people in the entertainment industry, it would seem—paranoia, reclusiveness, and just generally not seeing the point, I have discovered that life might just be worthy of note after all.
That’s not to say that I am well-balanced, or organized in my thoughts, or looking to the future with a clear plan; it’s just that I am now a lot more comfortable in my own skin, though I still have a long way to go.
* In high school I wrote a report on Samuel Adams (the guy, not the beer) and couldn’t get the first paragraph to work based on what I had read about him, so I ended up fictionalizing it slightly in order to make it more believable.
I got an A on that paper, no longer remember anything at all about Sam Adams, and still fictionalize the things that need to be.
