I finally took Mak out for a walk last night. It was his first time out of the house, other than hanging out on the balcony, since he escaped while I was carving a pumpkin last Halloween. He needed it. He's starting to look portly and he needs some exercise.

Typically, there was tons of activity on my street, exactly what I didn't need with a nervous cat on my hands. After I carried him downstairs, I put him on the grass and he was freaking out at every little sign of movement. There were some people walking in the garage. There were some cars in the street. There were some guys playing hoops at the little court down the way. Any chance I had of coaxing him down the sidewalk was lost.

So I picked him up and carried him to the shoreline/mudflat/jetty thing that's at the end of the street. The whole time Mak is caterwauling like I'm taking him to the kitty abattoir. He only calmed down when I put him in the ice plant and let him explore, but just barely.

The whole time he kept his belly to the ground and slinked through the vegetation like the WWII in the hedges of Normandy. The sounds of the baseball game at the high school and the squawking birds and my shuffling feet would sent him for cover. He continued to meow like he was having a near death experience.

After about ten or fifteen minutes, he calmed down enough to do some rock climbing over the jumbled pile of concrete that forms the jetty. He wanted to poke his little head into every nook and cranny, nose constantly vibrating, sniffing the shit out of everything he could find. I think he might actually have been enjoying himself at that point.

When it came time to head home, he was a champ, more or less. Still with his belly scraping the pavement, he let me lead him right back to the apartment building, crossing the street twice and stopping only once to play around in the ivy. He flew up the stairs and when we reached my floor, he zipped down the hallway right to my door. Inside we cleaned himself for a few minutes and them crashed, hard.

I don't know if I'll take him out anytime soon. The whole experience was enough to give both of us a heart attack.