The Luv Doc: Probably a Rat

Dear Luv Doc,

My girlfriend doesn't respect my opinion. I know I am partly to blame for this situation because when we first started going out I thought it was cute when she would argue with me about my choice of clothes or the foods I like, or the beer I drink ... or just about anything. I knew things were getting bad when about a month ago we had an hourlong argument over my belief that Hannah Gadsby isn't that funny. Then last night we were sitting on my couch watching Mindhunter and my cat was staring at the same spot on my wall for a long time, so I paused the TV to see what was going on and we could hear little scratching sounds inside the wall. My girlfriend said, "You have ghosts!" and I said, "It's probably a rat," because my cat has killed at least one rat in my house already, but she insisted I have a ghost and said we had to go to her house to spend the night. We argued about that for 30 minutes and then she got mad and left to go back to her apartment. I don't know if she was being serious about the ghost, but either way I wasn't going to give in because if I did we would end up sleeping at her place every night and she has a really small condo Downtown. So what do I do? Admit I have a ghost in my house to make peace, or hold my ground and hope she comes around?

– Doesn't Believe in Ghosts

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Look, I will be the first to admit that Gadsby is a bit of a slow burn, and mental illness, family dysfunction, and autism don't always yield the treasure trove of comedy we expect them to, but make no mistake, she's funny. She may not be funny to you, though, and that's perfectly OK. Jay Leno hosted The Tonight Show for 17 years. Seventeen years. The only way that seems even remotely possible is if Jay Leno somehow has a graphic porn video involving a roomful of naked, Vaseline-lubed NBC executives squirreled away in some safe deposit box in the Caymans. If that really is the case, you sort of have to admire his opportunistic pluck, right? I'm not sure Gadsby wants it that bad, and that's part of her charm. She does a really good job at selling that IDGAF vibe. Leno, on the other hand, oozes desperation from his pores. I bet his entire classic car collection smells like flop sweat. It's too bad Jeffrey Epstein never thought of getting his own late-night talk show. That might have been a game-changer. Sure, Ghislaine Maxwell is no Ed McMahon, but my guess is that if she and Jeff ever got chatty it would have been a highly entertaining bloodbath – sort of like Ricky Gervais hosting the Golden Globes.

You're not wrong about the ghost thing, though. Well, at least you're not entirely wrong. I'm no expert in paranormal behavior, but pretty much all the paranormal behavior I have ever witnessed involved cats. Here's how you know you've become a crazy fucking cat person: when anything you witness a cat do seems normal. Yes, I know that people who are already Toxoplasma gondii meat puppets think cats are adorable, but imagine if a human being – say, your roommate – just randomly hopped into your lap and stuck their bare asshole in your nose, placed a rat corpse at your feet, threw up hairballs on your carpet, or randomly plopped down in front of you and started licking their junk while pausing occasionally to look you dead in the eye. Yeah, don't even pretend you wouldn't try to get back that security deposit.

What I am saying is that it really doesn't matter whether cats can see ghosts. Fuck, they probably can for all we know, but the thought that cats can see ghosts isn't nearly as scary as the thought that your cat is basically just waiting around until you die so it can eat off your corpse for a few weeks. If ghosts actually do exist, they are no doubt terrified of cats. Can you imagine being a newly minted ghost and having to hang around and watch your cat eat your corpse? Ick.

You're right though. The most likely scenario is that you have a rat ... well, actually, no one ever just has "a rat," just like no one ever just has "a ghost." If ghosts actually do exist, there are easily billions of them whizzing around us all the time. I am not even going to try to calculate the number of rat ghosts, but given the fact that a typical female rat births six litters a year at roughly 5 to 10 pups a pop, we can assume that the spirit world is basically a sea of rat ghosts. If cats got all wound up about rat ghosts they would literally never wind down, and we all know cats can be chill as fuck, so chances are your cat was focusing on living rats – the ones in your wall – and probably thinking, "These little guys are small enough that I can kill them myself instead of waiting for them to die like those big people over there arguing on the couch."

So here's my advice: Hold the line. Insist there are rats in your walls, then hire somebody to kill them to prove your point. Habeas rat corpus, if you will. If that doesn't earn your girlfriend's respect, I doubt anything will, so you should probably ghost her.