The Origin of Catheism
“Oh mama, it’s weed that I love!” shouted Davey while exhaling a mouth full of smoke. “Used to worry, but I don’t worry anymore!”
Jeremy and Nathan cheesed at Davey’s eruption. Neither of them could match Davey’s enthusiasm for anything, let alone his unabashed love for marijuana. The blunt was almost past the roach stage, but Davey passed it over to Nathan anyhow.
Like a catatonic automaton, Nate mumbled something unintelligible as he raised the fiery roll to his mouth and the last puff of smoke seeped past his lips. He shook the remaining bit of blunt off the tip of his finger into the ashtray on the coffee table.
All three of them sunk into the cushions of the old couch they had salvaged from the curb outside a 7-11 a few years ago. It had been the final piece for their mock living room in Nate’s parent’s garage. Together, they drank their first beer on that couch sophomore year of high school after Nate’s parents had fallen asleep. They smoked their first joint on it junior year. A month ago, Jeremy lost his virginity on that couch, though neither Davey or Nate ever knew.
They sunk into it deeper each day as its springs lost their strength.
Amply stoned, Jeremy nodded his head to the Jimmy Page guitar riffs ringing from Nate’s old boom box—he was still playing CDs. Nate found a comfortable position and closed his eyes, and Davey looked at cat pictures on his phone.
The pictures were endless. It’s like the internet was made for cats to have their pictures taken and posted there, he thought. How else could there be so many?
"What if the internet was made for cats?” Davey interjected into the calm garage air. “What if the internet was made by cats?”
Even with his eyes closed, Nate let out a tiny snort. Jeremy only turned his eye and went back to the music. Davey was at it again.
“I mean, honestly, how many cats do you know that have cameras?
"How many cats do you know that own computers?
"But, look! There are cats everywhere on the internet.”
A long pause was only interrupted by Davey’s confused huffs and gasps at this cat-pictures-on-the-internet phenomenon.
“That’s what makes you think cats made the internet, that there are pictures of them on there?” Jeremy wasn’t yet persuaded.
“C’mon, they’re everywhere, man. I mean, if just a few made it to the internet then it wouldn’t be such a big deal. But there are millions, probably billions really, who have managed to get their picture taken and posted on the internet for any computer, tablet, or phone-owning human to see. What if they made humans do it and we didn’t even know?”
“And how did they do that?” Jeremy was at least into the entertainment.
“Um, I mean,” Davey was trying his best to uphold the leaping conclusion, “maybe they’re kinda like gods! Like, you know how the Egyptians worshipped cats like gods? They’ve been around forever, and like, yeah, what if they were gods and they controlled us and to prove their powers they made us make the internet so we would take their pictures and post them on it to exert their utter dominance over us, but we’re too stupid to know that they did that and they just lie around despising us because we’re so stupid?”
Davey was almost out of breath, but he continued.
“Like you know how Jesus is God incarnate? Cats are maybe like Cat-God incarnate. All hail Cat-God! What else could explain this paradox of no cats owning cameras and computers, yet their images have made it all over the internet, a space that is kind of, like, everywhere, like God?”
“If cats were gods, we would do more for them than put their pictures on the internet, bro.” Nate was awake. “There would be hella scratching posts all over the place and shit. We wouldn’t be smoking weed, dude. We’d be smoking catnip.”
“Nate has a point,” Jeremy said out of pure nuisancery.
“Well maybe, but you ever heard of those rich people who buy apartments just for their cats? Like, they just buy a whole floor in a Fifth Avenue high rise and their cats live there and they have maids and everything. I don’t know, you guys, but I think God is a cat.”
Nate grunted and got up for a snack. Glued to his seat, Jeremy stayed put in anticipation of more absurdity, but out of nowhere a booming, echoing MEEEOOOOWWWWW shook Earth from the sky. Buildings quaked, streetlights and billboards whipped, and mice and birds hid in holes.
Jeremy clutched the armrest and his chest heaved like he had lost his virginity on that couch again. Nate streaked back to the garage, his mouth still full of cheesy-roos.
Simultaneously, Nate and Jeremy yelled, “Did you hear that?”
Unfazed, Davey took pictures of Lucy, Nathan’s orange and white cat. He posted the best one to his Instagram, and captioned it #meow.
“Davey, did you hear that?” Jeremy wheezed.
“Lucy, you’re so pretty.”
Nate and Jeremy turned to each other with a befuddled glance.
"What if when a cat purrs it’s actually like when God speaks to priests?” Jeremy didn’t believe this, but he wanted to see if Davey could even hear them.
“Exactly, dude.” Davey could hear them, but was entranced all of a sudden by Lucy, by taking her photograph and sharing the image for all the internet’s universality to witness.
Davey could not be trusted, thought Jeremy and Nathan. Yes, the sky did boom with the sound of a quaking MEOW, but the extent to which each of them ought to unwaveringly worship Lucy hadn’t been thereby revealed to them, like it seemed to have been revealed to Davey. Jeremy and Nathan backed themselves slowly into the house and left Davey there in the garage with Lucy.
Years later, as the founder of the Catheist Church, Davey (no longer called Davey, but now referred to as Big Lion by the believers in Catheism) led prayers, which, rather than requiring one to put one’s hands together and close one’s eyes, involved performing a kneading motion into a pillow and purring. Only the most devout Catheists could purr convincingly. And of course, Big Lion encouraged photography during all Catheist services.
Neither Jeremy or Nathan ever became Davey’s apostles or anything like that. After the feline revelation the three of them witnessed, no one in the world reported having heard the thunderous meow, and Jeremy and Nate just attributed hearing the noise to their being high as, well, cats on a two-story roof. Davey continued, however, calling the incident his burning bush moment. “Of course no one else heard it, for we are the chosen ones,” he would say.
Davey still joined his friends on the couch in Nate’s parent’s garage for a smoke from time to time. After all, it is the place where everything began for Catheism. That couch in that garage was his Horeb or Hira. During his visits, he made sure Lucy, in all her godliness, got all the pictures she apparently demanded to be taken, and then posted them all across the internet. The whole thing never really changed Davey at his core—his path in life had forever been altered by the feline revelation, but the wild conjectures his unique mind was capable of creating while under the influence of marijuana hadn’t been dampened the slightest amount.
One day, Davey proposed one such conjecture: “What if, you know, all the songs ever written and recorded still existed, but only one singer ever existed, and that singer was Randy Newman?” Nate and Jeremy rolled their eyes, but helplessly hooted their approval of Big Lion. Then Davey sang Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” in the clumsy, gulpy, hiccupy style of Randy Newman’s singing voice, and they were all as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree.