When I adopted my cats, my intent was to give a home to them as a means of preventing them from living the life of a stray. The stray life is a tough life and looking back, I highly doubt either Scuffles or Snuggles would have survived very long. With that in mind, it’s about time the three of us started pulling our weight a bit more from a financial perspective. Unfortunately, two members of our trifecta aren’t entirely interested in contributing to the household income.

Individually, Scuffles, Snuggles and myself aren’t exactly the most enticing of employees (which we’ve been made well aware of after numerous rejected job applications). However, when combined we’re equal to at least an employee and a half, maybe more. Knowing this, I figured it’d be a great idea to start a business that would utilize all of our abilities, thus taking full advantage of the combined force that I like to call “Scuggthan”.  That business would take full advantage of my ability to put together low to mediocre video content and their ability to act like hooligans with little prompting. We were going to take our squad straight to Youtube, a place where monetizing videos of cats being cats is a one way ticket to success town.

Being that I already have a Youtube channel set up, we decided to focus entirely on content for the last month (which more or less explains my absence from writing, though some heavy drinking didn’t help matters). I started out with a couple scripted ideas but seeing as the most popular videos were unrehearsed, I decided to just start filming and see where that took us. As evidenced by the lack of viral cats videos on our Youtube page, it’s quite clear that we more or less failed right out of the gate.

As much as I’d like to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the stars of our proposed cat show, I need to take responsibly for my portion of the production. It’s obvious that I took on too many roles and because of that, I was spread thin. The concept got watered down and any sort of cat video innovation was thrown out the window. I found myself sacrificing originality for ideas that while sure fire paths to success, were derivatives none the less.  The fact is, I became Hollywoodized before I’d even created one single video. That being said, Scuffles and Snuggles still deserve way more blame to me.

In my eyes, I wasn’t asking them to do anything that was outside their comfort zone. In fact, I wasn’t asking them to do anything that was that much different from their usual routine. All I needed was ten to fifteen minutes of them 1.)being cute 2.)being zany and 3.)being sassy. From there I’d be able to cut the footage into three videos titled “Cats Being Supes Cute”, “Cats Being Supes Zany”and finally “Cats Being Supes Sassy”. Piece of cake right? Apparently not.

Despite showcasing all three of the aforementioned traits on a regular basis, for one reason or another they were unable to “perform” once I started filming. They just sat there and looked at me like a couple of big ole dummies. I did my best to motivate them to just “act naturally”, but they apparently decided to go on strike or something without even letting me know. It’s as if they didn’t listen to a single thing I said, including the inspirational speeches I gave them as a warm-up for day 1 of filming.

I’d have written it all down for them, but they can’t read which some may say is my fault as their guardian. While true, you can’t just make someone learn things, they have to be self motivated in the first place. It’s obvious that neither Snuggles or Scuffles were ever motivated enough to put in the work to become Youtube sensations, instead thinking it’d be a quick cash in to excuse them from finding real jobs. As much as I hated being the one to explain this to them, it was better than them getting blindsided by reality.

Because I didn’t want to be the kind of father that tries to make up for the failures in their own life through their pets, I put the idea on the back-burner and went back to the drawing board. Perhaps they’d eventually be in the right state of mind to cooperate, but in the meantime it was going to be on me to get other projects rolling.