I had always assumed this was some extremist Christian book for kids. Turns out this is actually by a gay comic artist named Howard Cruse who passed away in 2019. This is from a 1980 short story called “Billy Goes Out” which tells the story of a man named Billy who is trying to move on with life after his partner’s untimely passing. It highlights a lot of the struggles of the LGBT community at the time. This particular frame is him remembering how he blamed himself being gay when bad things happened to him as a child.
Before the internet, librarians were the gatekeeper of knowledge. For your reading pleasure, the New York Public Library released a cache of queries and conundrums called in from the 1940s to the 1980s.
Roommate went out of town once, asked me to look after her cat.
Night one she comes down meowing at me. I go check her food/water, they’re full. Litter box empty. Make sure my roommate’s door is still open and she’s not locked out of her room or something. I try to pet her and she dodges me, offer her treats and she won’t have it, try playing with her but she won’t play, try just ignoring her and she won’t stop following me around meowing at me.
So I call my roommate, concerned maybe she was sick or in pain and that’s why she was being so insistent despite having all her needs met.
Roommate goes: “OH! She wants you to go to bed. Go upstairs to my room and just sit in my bed with her for a few minutes. She should curl up and get comfortable. Once shes laid down she usually lets me go back to what I’m doing she just can’t seem to go to bed on her own”
Sure enough, I go sit on roommates bed and she just happily jumps up, curls up on the blanket, and purrs herself to sleep.
I like when cats try to give their humans healthy habits.
Don Pierrot of Navarre always sat up at night until I came home, waiting for me on the inside of the door, and as soon as I stepped into the antechamber he would come rubbing himself against my legs, arching his back and purring in gladsome, friendly fashion. Then he would start to walk in front of me, preceding me like a page, and I am sure that if I had asked him to do so, he would have carried my candle. In this way he would escort me to my bedroom, wait until I had undressed, jump up on the bed, put his paws round my neck, rub his nose against mine, lick me with his tiny red tongue, rough as a file, and utter little inarticulate cries by way of expressing unmistakably the pleasure he felt at seeing me again. When he had sufficiently caressed me and it was time to sleep he used to perch upon the backboard of his bed and slept there like a bird roosting on a branch. As soon as I woke in the morning, he would come and stretch out beside me until I rose.
Midnight was the latest time allowed for my return home. On this point Pierrot was as inflexible as a janitor… Twice or thrice Pierrot sat up for me until two o’clock in the morning, but presently he took offence at my conduct and went to bed without waiting for me. I was touched by this mute protest against my innocently disorderly way of life, and thereafter I regularly returned home at midnight. Pierrot, however, proved hard to win back; he wanted to make sure that my repentance was no mere passing matter, but once he was convinced that I had really reformed, he deigned to restore me to his good graces and again took up his nightly post in the antechamber.
Cats : trying to make us go to bed at a Reasonable Time since forever (so they can wake us up at 3 am for treats)
[Image description: a tweet by @mixbecca “rebecca mix” which says “i love when pets just make up Rules and their humans are like "oh, fine.” my cat has a bedtime & he won’t go to sleep until we do. every night at 10:30 he starts trying to herd us up the stairs. & now we, two grown a[censored] humans, adhere to the bedtime of a 12 pound cat.“]
Don Pierrot of Navarre is an absolutely spectacular name for a cat.
you can tell this website is autistic as hell because someone posts a video with a mildly catchy phrase in it and no one shuts up about it for an extended period of time. or image even. image with a mildly catchy phrase in it even. we love phrases here on tumblr dot com love to repeat them. due to the autism
