A Cat Named Garbage Wanders Into My Apartment Every Day And I Don't Know What To Do About It

Life has ground to a halt to the point that every day is a vanilla-pudding, grey-sky string of nothingness. I'm not complaining. In fact that's how I like it. The only problem with this pandemic is it's messing with my senses...not my sense of smell (thankfully), but my sense of what's newsworthy. So when a snowball cat with a feather duster tail and a Moon Pie face darkens my doorstep, you'll have to excuse me when it takes a second for me to realize that this is noteworthy. As regular happenings have ceased around the world, tiny oddities are the new headline news. The old adage used to go "if it bleeds it leads", but now, at the dawn of the age of cat-news, journalism professors on Zoom are now going by the new mantra "if it meows it wows."

Which brings me to this sterling beacon of hope, Garbage. Few people have taken advantage of the content vacuum as well as Garbage. With the YAK on a shoestring budget and desperate for contributors, Garbage hopped on the third mic and gave us a couple seconds of awkward silence, filling the KB role perfectly.

(Also, please excuse the optical illusion of a slanted television. I know what it looks like, but I promise my TV is not on a 30 degrees downward slope)

My question, however, is what to do with this cat. The facts are as follows: it is not mine. That being said, it seems like an expensive cat, I am not scared of catching disease from it because it comes in through a shared balcony rather than the street, and I do not have to tend to it or feed it. I am completely comfortable with the cat being around. I think it matches the aesthetic. But imagine if the cat's actual owner discovers us harboring the cat and calling it "garbage." I would surely be the pariah of the communal balcony.

So that's the crossroads at which I sit with Garbage. Should I close the proverbial (and literal) sliding door on this friendly neighborhood feline, ensuring my social standing and washing my hands of any culpability? Or should I let Garbage roam free, knowing that his curiosity could one day kill him?