I could no longer accommodate spontaneous variables and was driven to maintain steadfast order in a way that could only be described as “fascistic.”

By Jude Crowner

At the beginning of 2026, I was determined to adopt a cat. I recently moved into a one-bedroom and had the physical and emotional capacity for a feline friend. I visited four shelters and rescues with strict stipulations. The prime candidate had to be at least two years old (by then, they’ve typically settled into their personalities, and they’re often more independent); had to approach me when we met (I didn’t want to force a match); no scratching or biting (because most buddies don’t do these things); preference to long-haired cats who could participate in outdoor adventures.

In the span of a weekend, I met approximately thirty cats, and none satisfied my iron-fisted standards. Losing hope, I reluctantly drove to a shelter nearby with few desirable options posted online. I was greeted by barking dogs, the smell of excrement on wet metal, and the clamor of rattling cages. When I walked into the sparsely populated cat area, a volunteer attended to me. When I listed my wants, he laughed and showed me a second option, his favorite of the bunch. A short-haired white cat with gray patches around his ears and a tail the same color, Willie. He looked absolutely devastated inside the tiny kennel and on the brief profile posted outside. Seven months old. Unneutered. Turned over several days prior. I asked about his temperament, and the man said Willie hadn’t stirred since his arrival. The three of us stepped into an adjacent room, and I met Willie outside of his five-by-two-by-three dwelling. He immediately came to life, chasing toys in hot pursuit, nudging against my leg, and eventually curling up onto my lap. He smelled rank, and the volunteer explained that because he hadn’t been fixed yet, his hormones ran wild. But the first step after adoption is castration. I would take Willie home; he would leave his testicles and offensive odor behind. Okay. I stepped out and anxiously paced, turning over my options. Did he like me? Yes. More than any cat so far. Was he cute? To some, maybe. Was he too young? Probably. I crept closer to the exit, edging away from any rash decisions. I had to think. This was all moving so fast. My hand reached for the door, and the volunteer approached, reading on his phone, an update:

“Willie’s family was deported by ICE. That’s why he’s here. He didn’t do anything wrong.”

My sugar-coated illusions of being a cat dad dissolved within the first hours of our relationship. I took work from home during the afternoon and taught a class over Zoom from my bedroom with a student whose parents sat in on the session. I prepared his litterbox, food, water, and toys to keep him accounted for during the hour. Due to the emasculating procedure, he wore a cone around his head, which I adjusted to ensure optimal comfort. Everything was situated. I closed the door, sat at my desk, and started to review homework with the student. Several minutes passed, then I heard paws swiping litter. Great, he’s going to the bathroom. Settling in nicely. I glanced over, and the pride that filled my chest turned to mortification as I was met with Willie, staring dead into my eyes, pooping on the floor next to the litterbox.

I sat paralyzed, fumbling through my lesson while Willie and his turd taunted me just feet away. The stench filled the air and wafted into my nose and mouth. I finally told the student that I had to go to the bathroom, and not to worry because we’d add the lost time onto the end of the session. I turned off my camera and microphone, sprinted to the bathroom, grabbed cleaning supplies, and swiftly resolved the mess. The toxic cloud lingered, but at least the ground next to my feet was no longer soiled. Crisis averted.

I resumed the lesson and felt Willie affectionately rub his coned head against my leg. An apology. I reached down and patted his side to communicate that all was well, we were on good terms. Everybody makes mistakes. I continued to explain the importance of putting commas before coordinating conjunctions, and he popped up into my lap. His claws dug into my thigh, and as I adjusted him, I realized that the rim of his cone was covered in feces. Instinctively, I jerked back, took him by the scruff, and placed him at the leg of my desk furthest from me, all while keeping a straight posture and explaining the highly touted FANBOYS acronym. But Willie was not to be denied. He targeted my slippered feet and wrestled them as I desperately nudged the stooly satellite out of my orbit. This continued for thirty overstimulating minutes.

I am consistently surprised at how he finds new ways to push me out of equilibrium. So far, after ten weeks, we’ve seen the vet twice (for different reasons). He ate an entire bird-shaped feather toy (with the help of nightly prayers, he was able to pass it). He has torn up a handful of catnip toys and left the stuffing strewn across the floors (the floors I clean two or three times per week). He finally has a high success rate using the litter boxes (!!!), but each time he visits the facilities, he swipes loads of litter skyward, creating geysers of pellets and excreta. It’s become a hobby — sometimes he tosses litter as he passes by. My carpets are butchered and frayed. I now wake up each morning at 6 AM to paws patting my face. His hormones have settled, so he doesn’t reek constantly, but the funk comes in waves.

These are all relatively trivial thorns in my side, but they feel incredibly substantial during times of weakness. It sounds crazy, but I had second thoughts about our future during our first month together. Constantly cleaning up messes and being badgered put me in a state where I had to give myself to another. I felt like I was overwhelmed enough by keeping my own life together. I couldn’t have a child, not at this point in my life. Surely a more established person would take the perceived whirlwind of chaos in stride and provide him with the life he deserved. The most insignificant inconveniences brought by Willie had a major bearing on my mood. I think it’s likely because I operated as if I had some control over my life after a prolonged period of instability. I could no longer accommodate spontaneous variables and was driven to maintain steadfast order in a way that could only be described as “fascistic.”

I relocated to Los Angeles in January 2024 to work in the entertainment industry, and I can’t tell you how many empty promises and cold shoulders I’ve received. Anytime I have a conversation with someone my age (especially an assistant in entertainment), the first question is, “What do you do for work?” meaning, “Will our friendship serve me in the future, or is this a waste of time?” My first living situation was a sublet in Echo Park with an abusive alcoholic who frequently left the floors sticky from beer and crumby from midnight takeout. If I didn’t handle the mess, it would amass. The first day I moved in, I deep-cleaned, first scraping candle wax, bubble gum, and unknown residue off the floor with a sharp piece of plastic I found in the corner, all while my roommate watched YouTube in his room. After about an hour, he came out and said, “Oh, you don’t have to do that.” I stayed in a neighborhood next to the lake and strolled around its perimeter each day, taking in the views of downtown, watching the ducks and geese fly, the fiberglass swans drift. Every surface was covered in grime (in a cool, trendy way, though).

Most of the network I built in the fall went dark. I was meeting people in entertainment, some of them profoundly generous, but nothing stuck. To find work, I walked down Sunset Boulevard, stepping over litter and passing by graffitied walls, with a stack of resumes. I handed them to restaurants, hoping to become a waiter or host. I never got a call back. I applied to hundreds, possibly thousands of jobs online, no dice. I substitute taught, finding occasional openings around town. I was quickly running out of money. I’m a skinny guy, and I lost fifteen pounds in my first three months in Los Angeles.

When my sublet ended in May, a friend of a friend of a friend had an open room in Palms, a neighborhood of squat, concrete buildings and blistering sunlight. He told me that the situation was unconventional, as he lived with an older man who laid claim to the common areas of the apartment. I met the man, who I’ll call Bob Wrigley, a week before move-in. If I had to guess, BW was in his early 70s, had wrinkled, leathery skin, pale blue eyes, and a bleach-blonde mullet with thin, wispy hair that fell to his shoulders. He spoke like a laid-back surfer, using words like “duuuuuude,” and ending his sentences with “, man.” He also let me know that besides himself and the roommate who introduced me to the situation, there was a handywoman who was “integral to the whole system. Everything would fall apart without her, man,” and she hung around the apartment from morning to night. We will call her “Sweets.” Sweets was around Bob’s age, and she lived in her van out of necessity, often parking the ever-denting, paint-chipped hunk of scrap at a slant, taking up at least one extra spot in a crowded street. She twitched, stuttered, and stomped her way around, leaving a trail of sour smells. While Mr. Wrigley watched Fox News, sports highlights, and Victoria’s Secret runways on his leather couch (stained pale and impressed where he sat from dawn to dusk), Sweets found (created) ways to fix up the apartment. She painted my bedroom walls a dark brown, leaving streaks on the ceiling and blotches from uneven, lurching strokes. She gave the kitchen cabinets a similar treatment, except the paint dripped onto the marble countertop, where it remained indefinitely. She remodeled the bathroom over the span of a couple weeks, but I noticed no change besides persistent hammering and rubble under my feet when I showered. One night, I came home after a long day to find that Sweets had bleached and mopped the kitchen floors. Elated, I complimented her job well done, and she rewarded herself by making some sort of smoothie with ice and mixed fruit. I ate dinner, wrote, and watched a show in my room. When I headed back to the kitchen to wash my dishes, the entire floor was sticky from the reward juice, likely spilled without notice due to Sweets’ jerky disposition.

I found work as a part-time comedy podcast producer, a part-time teacher, a part-time caregiver for a boy with autism, and a part-time college admissions consultant. The podcast kept me afloat, as I met so many hilarious comedians, and my boss was the nicest person ever (we’re still friends). But I was laboring most days from 6 AM to 10 PM with a lunch break between gigs, all to have $2,500 in my bank account with rent due soon and a bedroom with nothing but a mattress on the floor, a desk lamp adjacent. I wrote during scraped-together time, and I was hungry and excited about the big project I had begun, but I often questioned what I was suffering for. I could live in another city in an apartment with creative friends. I could find a full-time gig and save money while writing. My post-college early 20s could be enjoyable. I felt swept away, at the tide’s mercy.

Blindsided by a stroke of luck one afternoon, I received a LinkedIn message about applying for my current job as an Academic Specialist for a Chinese education company, and I’ve been here since. It’s one of the best things to happen to me since moving to Los Angeles. I bolted out of Bob’s into a two-bedroom, two-bath in Brentwood with a roommate I met online. We lived together for a year, our relationship strained at times, but pure bliss compared to my prior arrangements. During the first six months, I often worked from 10 AM to 10 PM Monday through Friday and whenever necessary on weekends. It was a different kind of insecurity as I juggled the needs of so many stakeholders, but things eventually settled down. I lived five minutes driving from UCLA between Wilshire and San Vicente: a slice of town where most of my neighbors belonged to tax brackets less severe than my own. During evening strolls, I passed ritzy apartment complexes, high-end restaurants, and clean-dressed people with glossy faces. Squalor felt like a thing of the past, as the surrounding wealth provided assurance via osmosis.

I’m no longer clawing my way through the days. My job feels secure. I enjoy teaching. I’m financially independent, debt-free, and saving money. I have a routine. But I see many of my peers scaling the entertainment ladder, cycling through assistant positions, making measurable progress. I’m envious because they’ll have so many open doors in an industry that runs on connections and nepotism. As an instructor, breaking in seems next to impossible. At twenty-five in Los Angeles, the pressure to have everything figured out can be debilitating, like a weight that’s constantly pressing on your shoulders, reminding you of what you haven’t achieved, taking the wind from your chest and sails. I grew up with a foundation of confidence based on rewards in the form of good grades, friendships, etc. But in the real world, worth is often tied to status and professional accolades and monetary abundance, and it’s so easy to have a mindset steeped in pessimism and failure. Everything is hopeless and without redemption if you don’t have the ideal job or a clear trajectory. In the past, friends and family have acted as anchors during spells of disillusion, but the people I love most live thousands of miles away. Finding community is so difficult. Compounded with the bleak present and desolate future of the US (political theater, renting forever, AI takeover, crushing cost of living, real wage stagnation, skyrocketing healthcare premiums, eternal debt… I could go on), insecurity is a unifying feature of the American experience. I often dwell on the lack of success I’ve experienced in my creative life, ambitions muted and overpowered by the desire to find as much stability as possible when the alternative (with luck) would be to work five or six years (maybe more) with a massive salary cut to (maybe) break into a writer’s room. Fellowships, labs, contests, and more “artistic”/”merit-based” routes to success are dwindling. It’s all about networks. The creative ecosystem is bone-dry.

To feel put-together, I get to work early. I keep my spaces tidy. I write most days. I exercise every day. I don’t do drugs. I take vitamins and supplements in the morning. I floss. I read before bed. Day after day after day.

Ironically enough, disrupting this borderline religious routine feels fatal; I’ve grown to latch onto its comfort without compromise. A few months ago, I was dating someone who asked me if she could stay the night during the week. Rather than thinking about the positives of having her over, my mind immediately went to how little sleep I’d get, how tired I would be at work the next day, and how my morning procedure would be broken. I also thought about my messy apartment, and how, with Willie’s stench and clutter, the state of my grubby apartment would be projected onto me, and I didn’t want to sacrifice the cultivated image of myself that I strived to create. I said maybe next time. She had other requests, some manageable and some imposing even by normal standards. Ultimately, it didn’t work out. One of the reasons I had reservations was because I want to be the best possible version of myself when I enter a relationship, which may seem unrealistic and perhaps unfair, but I don’t want to rely on others to solve my problems. I can’t bring a heavy load into a situation of shared baggage. But I could have (and probably should have) experienced discomfort for our/her benefit.

Willie, constantly throwing wrenches in my house of straw, the tenuous fortifications I’ve surrounded myself with to feel tethered to the earth, has made me realize how inflexible and pessimistic I’ve become. When I relax in my climbing gym’s sauna, I catch myself counting down the minutes. In traffic, I wonder why the cars in front of me move so slowly. If I can’t find my wallet within minutes of retrieval, I lock my credit cards, or else someone will empty my accounts and indulge in a spending spree on me. I stress about my future, I mourn the decaying state of the world. Maybe my reflexive response is panic because I had a hard time moving out here. Maybe it’s because I’ve been fairly isolated. Maybe it’s because the nation after the 2024 election has been a nightmare, and I’m too tapped into the news. Maybe I’m frustrated that I’m not Charlie Kaufman (who, as successful as he is, wears failure as a badge of honor).

Rewiring my brain has been an ongoing process. I still fall victim to knee-jerk preemptive worry, which takes me away from present contentment and future exploration. Reevaluating how I measure fulfillment and self-worth requires patience and mindfulness. I’ve always been incredibly critical, much of the brunt directed towards myself. For me, self-compassion doesn’t come naturally. At the very least, I’ve identified that I need to change, to adapt to new circumstances with aplomb, to focus on the positives rather than the negatives. You can’t swallow the canopied fruits born of daily life through clenched teeth, eyes always looking at your feet.

While I may feel like I’m in the pooping-on-the-floor phase of my life, turbulence is necessary for growth. If I can find immense joy in hosting Willie — scraggly, sullied Willie — on my lap, purring, nuzzling, and eventually sleeping, I can set aside the imperfections I see in myself, as they pale in comparison to all the good that I am and can become. As much as Willie may rattle me at times, he is not the worst cat in the world. In fact, he’s a great cat who has improved so much within the short time we’ve known each other. And as difficult as it is to fathom at times, I’m not the worst person in the universe. He and I will experience the character-building phases of our lives together, leaning on one another for support. We will forgive, we will forget. We will cut each other some slack, we will blossom together.

Jude Crowner is a writer and educator residing in Los Angeles, California.