My cat almost burned down the apartment complex. Again.

Okay, perhaps that's a bit of hyperbole and exaggeration.

But, as they say on Pushing Daisies, the facts are these:

• On ball game Saturdays, particularly when we lose, I tend to over-pour my whiskey.
• In the midst of a drunken stupor, I'll see a Dominos or Papa Johns commercial, get an instant craving, and decide that the only thing to fill the empty hole where victory used to be is a pizza So I'll log on, and order a 'za.
• I continue to over-pour, the pie arrives, and I gobble it down while watching Granny Clampett and Mister Potato Head tell me how my alma mater sucks cock by choice.
• In the old days, I would take the empty pizza box out to the garage and put it in the rolling dumpster and be done with it. However, I don't have a garage now. Nor a rolling dumpster.
• Of course, all cats have different personalities and quirks. I have some dear friends who have a house full of felines, and they can set out a party platter full of fresh seafood and chicken fingers, and their cats will politely walk around on the floor, and not think once about jumping up on the table to treat themselves to a buffet full of people food.
• However, not my guy. Mulder is obsessed with people food. If I take something out of the microwave, set it on the counter, and turn my head for 3 seconds -- he'll be face first in the plate. (And it's not only food. If I don't pay attention to beverages -- diet Coke, orange juice, coffee, whiskey, whatevs -- he'll be lapping out of the cup like a bedouin stumbling upon an oasis after five months in the desert).
• So what to do with a bulky pizza box? The only place to put it where the cat won't knock it around the kitchen and dig into it all night is the oven. So I put the box in there, have a few more cocktails, and go to bed.
• Sometime the next day, I get hungry, and decide to cook something. In the oven. So I turn on the oven to preheat, and go about my business. (Yesterday, I also decided to take a walk, take out the trash, drop off the rent, and catch up on some podcasts while the oven was preheating).
• Well, I get about a quarter of a mile from the door when it dawns on me that there is still a cardboard box in the oven, which is preheating to about 450. (This being a shitty apartment with a knob, instead of a digital touchpad, to set the temp, it was plus or minus a few degrees. It could have been 451, which as we know, is not only bad for reading in a totalitarian future society, but also for pizza boxes with paper flyers glued to them).
• I run my ass back to the apartment and manage to pull out the smoldering pizza box while it was still only smoking, and before a blaze had erupted that would have put me on the local news, hungover, cursing and being the only person in the mid-atlantic standing outside a five-alarm fire wearing a "Go Dawgs" t-shirt.
• Believe me, nothing pleases the olfactory senses quite like a day-old smoky pizza box doused in the kitchen sink.

So, you see, it's really quite simple. If my team didn't get their ass kicked, or my cat could behave himself and not try to eat any morsel of food not locked away in a safety deposit box, I could have easily avoided almost burning my apartment complex to the ground for the second time in a year. Dammit.