I'm not an investor, mainly because in addition to the fact that I barely have the money to invest in such luxuries as, say, food, I also possess the same fiscal planning skills as a bucketful of wingnuts.

But if I did play the market, I can't imagine I would find an investment opportunity attractive that promised to bring me hours of unbridled emotional happiness, but which, at the same time, frequently left large, predigested meat stains on my living room carpet.

This, however, is the agreement one enters into when one voluntarily purchases a cat.

My parents are into this kind of investing, which yields lots of neat stuff in the love and affection department, all of which becomes entirely irrelevant the moment the animals begin staking out their household territory with regular fits of spontaneous vomiting.

Being on my own for six or seven years, I had forgotten what it was like living amongst these creatures, until a recent visit to my parents' home in Vermont. Since their children's departure, my mother and father have felt the need to occupy our former place in the house by doubling the amount of cats from two to four.

To me this seems not unlike those people who can't stop at only one tattoo. They're always in the process of considering another one, despite (and sometimes because of) how much it hurt the last time. Cat owners have the same masochistic tendency; the only difference is that your new Chinese dragon tattoo is unlikely to destroy half your furniture and hoark a slime-covered wad of wet fur onto your chest in your sleep.

But that's not all! If you invest now, there's also the shedding! For sheer, unadulterated inconvenience, you can't beat madly vacuuming the house for an hour before company arrives or applying three rolls of scotch tape to everything from your earmuffs to your underwear.

And it's more than being slightly perturbed; owning a cat can take inconvenience to a whole new level. My parents are considering building an addition onto the house, a new living room that would have a door to keep the cats at bay. In other words, the cats would gain control over the original living room, where actual human beings once lived, and my parents would be, in essence, evicted by their own animals.

And oh, what specimens these animals are! As I mentioned, there are four cats, two of whom have at least enough fur to build another three. The lineup is as follows:

Floppy: So called because he finds it easier to simply fall down rather than expend unnecessary muscle effort in a controlled descent. This falling rarely hurts him, since he weighs 17 pounds, 14 of which is fur.

Lucky: So called because she has one lone functioning brain cell more than the other cats. Formerly of good disposition, she has become a raging bitch with the recent addition of:

Baby: Floppy's younger sister, and a barn animal until a month ago. If it were legal to hunt cat, an Eskimo could clothe his entire village with the fur from this thing.

Stupid: Okay, his name isn't really Stupid. But what else do you call an animal who is smart enough to know he's supposed to scratch something after defecating, but not smart enough to know it isn't the wall next to the cat box? This is also the animal that, for no apparent reason, will stare blankly at the kitchen cabinet and meow for upwards of an hour and a half. Don't tell me this guy isn't hitting the catnip a little too often.

But cats, these once-fierce jungle animals that ruled over their domain with power and grace, cannot handle outdoor threats anymore, and have been reduced to nothing more formidable to predator or an automobile than a day-old Fluffernutter sandwich.

So until these pet stores start selling domesticated jungle cats the size of pickup trucks that can do their shedding and vomiting and excretory voiding in the out-of-doors, or until scientists can engineer a hairless vegetarian housecat capable of using the toilet, my investment portfolio will remain devoid of any feline holdings.

And if I were to give you some advice in this arena, it would be to invest in children instead. A child's love and affection lasts about the same amount of time as a cat (16 years) but the constant excretion of uncleanable fluids and solids generally stops after the first five years (usually not starting up again for another 70 or so).

The downside is that when kids get to be five, they start asking for a sibling, which my daughter Marie has been doing a lot lately, so you should be aware that with this investment comes an option on a second. Should this not be viable for you at the five-year mark, there are other alternatives. If your child requires the love, affection and companionship of another family member, but you are not capable of taking on the responsibility of a second child at that juncture, you can always do what we did for Marie.

We bought her the cutest little kitten.

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