Little Gray Cat

Look At Him

Little Gray Cat. You know him. You love him. He’s a little gray cat. Sometimes there's two of them. He even has a theme song. He’s a great little character to have kicking around the internet with us. I had not thought much of the little gray cat. Before this year I tried not to research the origin of memes too much, knowing that often, looking isn’t beneficial or all that rewarding. It is mostly detrimental to the meme, especially at the time. But after the fact, to give into nostalgia, and just submit to my own morbid curiosity about something I no longer think about that much? At the very least it's a fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon.  As Rizzo says in Grease, There are worse things I could do.

Imagine, if you will, Fall 2014. It’s early September and school is well underway. Our first papers of the year have already been written. It's not cold enough to wear a sweater and we all sweat through our clothes in Gym. College applications have started. People are hyping 1989’s release in one month. Things have settled. Most importantly, Tumblr is in it’s boom time. The memes are going crazy, everyone is posting at their height. One thing we can all count on, something we know we’ll all see over the course of our scrolling is an homage to the little gray cat. I would not say the Little Gray Cat was a particularly dominant or popular meme, more of a colorful well liked character who added to a rich landscape of an internet community at its peak. 

In those days we did as we were told. We just rejoiced in images found from various places. We loved a good creative use of the audio feature. The little gray cat theme song was a fun little sound that we could play while scrolling and focusing on the more important memes of the day. He was a welcome surprise every time he came across the dash. I wondered briefly where he came from or who he belonged to but not much more than that. In my memory the photos were originally from 4chan or craigslist but in reality they were posted solo with no origin to be spoken of. It was not like longcat or keyboard cat where we knew that the owner posted the cat and we could bother them if we wanted to see more. Little Gray Cat was mysterious. A gift brought to us that we should not ask questions about lest our access be revoked. More pictures would come but don’t question it. Be cool. 

And for the first time in our lives most of us were. Little Gray Cat did not blow up and the exposé that was written did not really get any traction. There were plenty of famous stories on tumblr of memes that seemed innocent until someone did some digging and their exposé got equally if not more famous than the original meme itself. We lived to debunk as the TikTok teens live to debunk now. Our teenage thirst for drama was fueled by an obsession with social justice. We were obsessed with morality and lived to take someone down. Of course a deep dive on the little gray cat exists. Of course we needed to know who, where, what, when and why about this little gray cat. Of course we did. 

Every meme has people that really take to it. People who put their heart and soul into it. They decide that this meme is their meme. Just like Paul is their Beatle and Blue is their color and turtles are their animal. It’s not about favorite it’s about being synonymous with their personhood. Especially online. A great way to get fame on the internet is to be the chief authority on one meme. Have everyone send you every version of the meme they find. All users come to you to get the latest iterations. Some people even take it so far as to create a whole side blog for the particular meme. That’s one reason tumblr memes have so much content. Teens fighting to carve out an identity for themselves claim the meme du jour and never stop making content. The joke hasn’t been funny for weeks but we need to keep making little gray cat theme songs. In this case, the memes become more and more divorced from the original. It’s no longer about the original little gray cat but any little gray cat. Any gray cat really. The chance to hold onto a silver of attention means more than the integrity of the meme. The songs get worse and more obviously from somewhere else. It doesn’t matter as long the notifications keep coming in. These people need every aspect of the meme. They need the cute fascination. They need the meta commentary. They need the call out post and of course they need the history. 

The history is not that interesting but it exists. The expose of the origin post is here. The post is written as if there is some grand mystery to be solved. The origin is simple: a woman in Moscow was selling cats. They were first posted on a Russian livejournal page looking for interested buyers. The cat is of course from a breeder. If you can identify that a cat is a breed and not just “orange” or “big” it is most likely from a breeder. This is included in the post as some kind of gotcha and I’m sure if I read this in 2014 I would have been shocked or morally confused but now I no longer care. I have no opinion on cat breeders and I certainly don’t care how people in other countries get their cats. There’s too many actually bad things going on that are worth thinking about or trying not to think about because they’re too upsetting. There’s some question as to the real origin of the post because there are multiple posts with different but overlapping photos. Again the person researching this meme seems to think this is some kind of mystery, rather than someone just posting the same information on multiple websites. If it is a lie, it’s a stupid thing to lie about. Why lie about selling cats… who is that starved for low stakes attention? 

The cats are Russian. They’re purebred with a great lineage. They were available in 2010. They have no dubious origin story and really no story at all. They were found while we were all scouring the internet for something interesting or amusing. I doubt the woman who took the pictures understands how great the photos of these little squinting cats are. How could one know? But she is a cosplayer and LARP-er in her spare time so she might. I wonder if she was on tumblr at the time of the meme and knows how far her cats have traveled. Did she ever think a throwaway post like this would result is something like this? Something so quotidienne that was only intended for other people in Moscow became a favorite and comforting image to so many. These little greybies are now well recognized in the wide world of internet cats. Did this woman ever think that they could be taken so far out of context that her connection to them could be doubted? 

Tumblr often functioned as a dumping ground for other stuff we found on the internet. It was a community of searchers looking for the weirdest thing they could find and bringing it back to show the other members of the community. Some days the world weary travelers would have nothing, sometimes they hit the jackpot, knowingly. Some days all we have is a good guess, a thrown out object as a way to make an attempt. I believe that’s what Little Gray Cat is. A good try. A B+ meme in a time of abundance. Even the B+ memes were better back then. Little Gray Cat has gone on a silly little journey to be the understated icon they are today. I’m happy to have them.