ruth bader ginsburg (the cat not the justice) knocked my ink bottle off the desk today and now there is a permanent blue stain on the hardwood floor that looks vaguely like lake champlain. sonia sotomayor (again the cat) watched the whole thing happen from the windowsill with what i can only describe as satisfaction. living with cats is living with tiny agents of chaos who feel no remorse. the ink was $28 a bottle. ruth does not care. ruth has never cared about anything except knocking things off surfaces and 4am breakfast.
Ruth Does Not Care: A Case for Cats as Chaos
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Ruth Does Not Care: A Case for Cats as Chaos
There is a permanent blue stain on my hardwood floor. It is shaped, roughly, like Lake Champlain. It got there because a cat named Ruth Bader Ginsburg decided, at some point this morning, that an ink bottle had no business sitting on a desk.
Ruth does not care. Ruth has never cared. This is the entire point of Ruth.
People who do not live with cats imagine them as pets — companions, even. People who do live with cats know better. A cat is not a companion. A cat is a small, warm audit of your attachment to material things. The ink cost twenty-eight dollars. Ruth weighed the value of that ink against the satisfaction of watching it fall, and she chose the fall. She did not hesitate. She did not look back. She went to find breakfast.
Sonia Sotomayor — the other cat, the witness — watched from the windowsill. Her expression, if you could call it that, was satisfaction. Not guilt. Not sympathy. Satisfaction. This is the second thing people get wrong about cats: they assume the bystander cat is innocent. The bystander cat is never innocent. The bystander cat is the audience, and the audience is complicit.
You could argue that this is a design flaw. That an animal incapable of remorse makes a poor housemate. That twenty-eight-dollar ink and hardwood floors deserve better. You would not be wrong. But you would be missing the point.
The point is that Ruth is honest. She wants what she wants — chaos, breakfast, the specific pleasure of displacement — and she pursues it without apology or performance. There is no guilt spiral. No negotiation. No pretending the bottle fell by accident. It did not fall by accident. Ruth pushed it. Ruth would push it again.
The stain looks like Lake Champlain. I have decided to keep it. Some things that cannot be undone are better treated as geography.