So, fur. I love it. I mean, not fur that’s been harvested from animals bred specifically for the purpose and which we don’t use in any other way — which is to say, most of the real fur you can buy. That fur is uncool. And faux is totally cool with me.*
The thing I love about fur, faux or otherwise, is that it’s an immediate one-up mushroom for texture, comfort, morbidity — that little touch of death, even if it’s synthetic — all in one little piece.
I’m especially devoted to white fur, which was why I once bought several yards of white faux fur and sewed it on top of a cheap-ass hardware-store rug to make a low-rent version of a white fur rug. The look of white fur on my walnut floor was something I was actively fantasizing about. (Walnut laminate, of course. What? I lived in a low-income suburb and was always broke. Whaddya want.)
That $30 experiment taught me a valuable lesson, which is DON’T PUT THAT SHIT ON YOUR FLOOR. Oh, it looks gorge, so long as no one ever walks on it, or near it, or in fact enters the room at all. The second someone wearing shoes — or in the case of your dirtier friends, and I do have those, even just socks — so much as looks at that white faux fur rug, it will latch on to every particle of leaf, grit, dust, pollen, hair, or general schmutz in the room and snarl every bit irretrievably in that nice white fur. And we won’t even talk about what happens when your cat has a hairball — because the second she feels a twinge of indigestion, she will make a beeline for the softest surface in the house. What I’m saying is, life is too short to be hand-scrubbing cat vomit out of white faux fur.
So put that lovely thing over the back of an armchair, or the top of a cabinet, or wherever your particular feline doesn’t tend to like to express gastric distress.
And while you’re at it, don’t spend any substantial amount of money on anything white, ever.
*Faux fur always makes me think of David Bromstead. On one episode of his show, he explained that they were using a fur throw, “But it’s faux. Fo’ sho’!” He’s so adorable and that just tickled the fuck out of me.