I have this really bad habit of watching television while I eat. I know they tell you not to combine certain things with food, such as eating in front of the television or eating in bed, lest it lead to horrible scarrification of daily rituals and routines, such as craving food in bed, eating mindlessly while watching your favorite sitcom or just getting nasty stuff like pesto sauce or queso encrusted on your favorite comforter.

If you have a psychotic almost full grown kitten who likes to run laps around your tiny efficiency apartment like I do, avoiding such behavior is futile anyway cause you end up curling up in bed after a long night of work to find yourself nose deep in a poopy pawprint from one of the sprints through the litter box.

This evening I noticed for the billionth time that I immediately flipped to Spike TV to watch reruns of CSI and as I was digging into my ziti with marinara I looked up to see Gil Grissom and the Coroner examining the eviscerated entrails of a 14 year old gunshot victim. Yummy. The best part was the slow motion internal rendition of the pressure from the tires of a taxi splooshing the kids guts out through the knife wound in his belly. Let me tell you how glad I was to be spinning some cheese around a sauce covered piece of ziti and spooning it in my mouth at that very moment.

The kicker is that I do this almost every night. I get home from work, put CSI on the television, zap a dinner in the microwave, sit down to eat and end up almost tossing my cookies about halfway through as I watch the good people of the Las Vegas Crime Unit get elbow deep in soupy human remains or pick apart blood soaked human shrapnel. You’d think by now I’d've learned my lesson, but much like my cat, no matter how many times I get reprimanded or whacked with the proverbial newspaper, I keep coming back for more.

For future reference, this is the kindred spirit of a cat, whom I named Rex (initially it was supposed to be like the latin “king”, e.g. Oedipus Rex, Tyranosaurus Rex, etc. Little did I know that my cute little kitten was really the incarnation of a canine with the appetite and shitting capacity of equal or greater magnitude to that of a Saint Bernard)