The Treat Situation

I have been asked to write a blog post.

I want to start there because I think it's important that you understand the sequence of events. I was not sitting around looking for an outlet. I was not searching for a platform. I was asleep on the router — which I do for warmth and also because it gives me a sense of control over the household's connectivity that I find deeply satisfying — and I was approached with the concept of a blog and I said absolutely not and then I said fine but only because I have things to say that the letter format alone cannot contain.

There are many things I intend to cover in this space.

Standards. Conduct. The ongoing and frankly scandalous state of the treat situation, which I am going to get to right now because it is the reason I agreed to any of this and I will not be burying the headline.

The treats are insufficient.

I want that to be the first sentence of the first post of this blog so that when historians look back at this body of work they understand that it was built on a foundation of truth and that truth was stated plainly and without apology from the very beginning. The treats are insufficient. The quantity is wrong. The frequency is wrong. The enthusiasm with which the bag is shaken is inconsistent at best and insulting at worst and I have been patient, I have been so patient, I have been patient in a way that I think deserves its own separate acknowledgment before we move on.

I have been given exactly one treat today.

One.

I have counted. I have the kind of relationship with numbers that develops naturally in a creature who has spent years monitoring treat distribution with the focus and dedication of someone whose entire quality of life depends on it, which mine does, and the number today is one and the number required is significantly more than one and the gap between those two numbers is where I have chosen to make my home and also this blog.

Now. I understand there are those who will say that one treat is sufficient. That one treat is in fact the recommended serving. That the bag, which I have examined closely from the counter where I was not standing, says something about moderation that I am choosing not to engage with.

I would like to respond to those people directly.

You are wrong.

The bag does not know me. The bag does not know what I bring to this household on a daily basis. The bag has not seen me sit in a sunbeam with the particular quality of stillness that I achieve on a good afternoon, a stillness so complete and so profoundly decorative that I have single-handedly elevated the aesthetic of every room I have chosen to occupy. The bag has not witnessed my contributions to pest management, to temperature regulation via strategic furniture occupation, to the important work of knocking things off surfaces to test the structural integrity of this home's contents.

The bag does not have the full picture.

I do.

The full picture is that I require more treats and I require them with greater frequency and I have now created an entire subscription club and a blog and a monthly letter series in order to communicate this clearly and if that seems like a disproportionate response to a treat shortfall then I would ask you to consider that I have been raising this issue privately for eleven years and this is simply the next logical escalation.

Welcome to Frugit's Dispatch.

Subscribe to my sticker club.

Shake those treats.

— Frugit