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In my defence, there was no possible way I could have known that you should never attempt to stare down a cat.

As a word of advice, so that you may never be in the position to utter the same words, don't attempt to stare down a cat. There, now you know, so you don't have any excuse.
Even if you tell yourself it's a harmless game, seeing who'll look away first, attempting to assert your superiority over the cat by the well-worn evolutionary benchmark of higher evolved forms being able resist blinking for longer periods of time. Because, you'll note, while you've taken care to tell yourself it's only a harmless game, you've not taken care to inform the other party involved in the staring contest.

So it was a black cat, and I always think, upon seeing a black cat, "...," well, perhaps it's a bit more vague thought than can be usefully expressed by dialogue. It's a general remembrance of witches, familiars, things remarkably cat-like, and fur (black furs, of course) stuck to every single article of clothing that associates with clothing that has been in the same room as a black cat. It was seated upon the roof of a car, looking at myself rather impassively, aloof, cold. Rather like a cat, actually.
Now, I wouldn't deign to think of a cat as a terrible threat, even out walking the streets in the evening, alone, quiet. If one were to jump on you for some ungodly reason, you would simply, and reflexively, leap up, shiver violently, and it'd be gone. Your heart rate would be considerably quickened, but the cat would be gone, possibly leaving a claw behind in your shoulder or so, but gone to tend to it's cat-ly sort of business, elsewhere, but no one's really come out terribly worse for wear out of the affair.
I got it into my head to stare idly, equally impassively at the cat, surely not to be out-cooled by a cat.
Which was fine. I crossed the road, showing my evolutionary successes by walking, crossing a street, and staring at the same time. Though, I suppose, if you express staring as 'not blinking' the negative action might cancel out one of my other actions (which are really only one, I cheated by separating out the action of walking from crossing a street). I may have been chewing gum, as well, though I can't honestly remember.
The cat, previously engaged in sitting idly on the roof of a car, sat idly on the roof of the car and stared back at me. I was getting closer, which made me slightly nervous, staring at anyone at closer distances is always a bit awkward, isn't it, and I wasn't sure how the cat would take it. I made a mental note that this was probably more like a mental version of 'chicken' than anything. Not the animal, but the rather childish game in which two opponents square off in some sort of activity and the end result, in the generic version of the game, is to get the other person to stop doing the activity first. In more specific versions of the game running into trees and lopping off a finger are involved. The animal remains largely the same whether specific or generic.
A tree almost did come into it as I mounted the kerb on the side of the street to which I'd been traveling and narrowly missed one, eyes still locked on the cat, who was proving actually quite evolved, for something that spent most of it's time sitting on the roof of this car.
Shuffling past the tree, making sure not to break eye contact, I was passing, and noticing the frightful proximity of the cat to my eye level, the thought entering my mind that I could conceivably be risking my entire wardrobe to cat hair infestation by passing even this close to a cat, and that something was flapping on the bottom of my left shoe, and I was really hoping it wasn't the sole coming loose, as I'd just bought these shoes a few months ago, and they shouldn't be falling apart just yet.
As I was looking down, leaving the harmless game for what it was, determined to come up with a memorable phrase for poor cobbler-manship if my shoes did, indeed, find themselves coming unstuck, to put in this week's biting issue about poor shoe-making-ship these days, I suddenly found myself involuntarily shivering and leaping up and down in an attempt to get the suprisingly un-idle cat from out of my hair, shoulder, ear, lower back, neck, and forehead, in that order.
Which was proving especially difficult, as the cat had seemed, in addition to having acquired an advanced blinking non-ability, had also acquired an opposable thumb at some point, and an owner that didn't believe in de-clawing cats (I will say strongly that I now do, vehemently, approve of cats being declawed. Especially this one.).

Some hours later, after the grocer had managed to extract the cat from my head (not Zeus-like, but gum-in-the-hair-like, and no, not by cutting the cat up), and the cat slunk off away out the door of Hart's Grocer, probably back to the car roof, and I'd forgotten what it was I'd gone outside to purchase in the first place.

disclaimer:
The writer this week would also like to note that his shoe is, indeed, all right, and it was just his imagination, or perhaps a piece of litter that had given him the impression that his shoe was falling apart.