Yesterday morning, on Doug’s birthday (He’s my son, my youngest child, now a quarter of a
century old — fancy that!), I woke very early and then drifted back to
sleep.  I then dreamed that I went to the door to put Koji out on
his chain.  When I opened the door a bear cub rushed in, climbed
into my arms and wrapped its arms and legs around me.

Startled and shocked, I reached for the .44 magnum revolver right there
by the door, but quickly realized that I didn’t want to shoot the
little bear.  It wasn’t hurting anything and shooting it would
make a mess I’d have to clean up.  Then, just as I began wondering
where its mother was, I woke up.

I understood immediately what the dream was about.  Many years
ago, someone walked me through a guided “meditation” procedure
involving a path, a wall, and an encounter with a bear.  I was
asked to describe the surroundings as I walked the path, what I did
when I encountered the wall, and my reactions to the bear.

My path wound through a wild wooded scene, which I was told indicated
that I preferred doing things my own way, but not necessarily
alone.  That made sense to me then and still does.  When I
came to the wall, I didn’t turn back or go to the left or the right to
go around, nor did I immediately try to climb over it.  I went up
it to get a higher perspective on its extent and to see what was on the
other side.  I was told that the wall represented death.  My
response to that symbol also made sense to me.

The bear was supposed to represent fame.  In that little mind
game, when I saw the bear in my path, a big, towering thing just
standing there, I neither approached it nor ran from it.  I
stopped and observed it to see what it was going to do, prepared to
interact with it if it seemed friendly or to fight or flee if
necessary.  That, too, seemed at the time to be typical of my
particular style of relating to unknown situations.  The person
interpreting my responses seemed intrigued, never having met anyone who
didn’t have an immediate and definite reaction, either positive or
negative, to the fame bear.

I didn’t know at the time how I’d feel about fame, never having
experienced it.  Now I have some small fame, about the size of
that little bear cub embracing me in my dream.  A day or two
before the dream, I had been going through my Xanga footprints,
backtracking to see where my visitors were coming from.  I 
had been startled to find that most of the hits that weren’t from
signed-in Xangans, came from Google image searches. 

The particular images that were most popular sorta creeped me out and I
briefly considered removing them.  Then, I decided not to shoot
the little bear.  It’s the softest of soft-core, after all. 
I’m not ashamed of it.  That was my conscious reaction. 
Apparently, though, as the dream pointed out, I’d been unconsciously
uneasy about it, wondering where the big mama bear was.  Having
had a day to reflect on the situation, I’ve decided to let the little
bear move in to stay, and not to worry about its mama unless and until
she shows up.

---

For Doug’s birthday, I gave him an outing.  We both tend to get a
little stir-crazy here.  He’s in a bureaucratic loop over his
driver’s license, needing his official social security card to get
one.  The original we got for him when he was born (to qualify him
for the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend) has been lost.  He
downloaded SS forms to apply for a “replacement original” but that
requires a driver’s license or other official picture ID.  His own
laziness, aversion to bureaucratic BS, and some ambivalence about
driving born of childhood experiences, have kept him from trying
very hard to break out of the loop.  I’m determined not to do it
for him, just because it’s not my job and I, too, have an aversion to
bureaucratic BS.

The plan we went with for his outing was a mutually-acceptable compromise.  He
would have preferred a day of museum exploration and mall-browsing in
Anchorage, which would have been way expensive and too exhausting for
me.  We ended up going half as far, to Wasilla, where he got to
browse a pawnshop for a “new” used copy of Tony Hawk’s Underground 2,
and Waldenbooks where he got the d20 Modern Core Rulebook and the d20
Modern Apocalypse splatbook, both of which he had already downloaded
but wanted the convenience of hard copies.

We also saw a movie, Pirates of the Caribbean, Dead Man’s Chest. 
We had high expectations for it, and it exceeded them.  We laughed
our asses off.  In one scene, Doug ever-so-appropriately started
humming the Katamari Damacy theme and cracked me up.  Leaving the
theatre, Doug was cracking himself up practicing his Jack Sparrow
drunken sailor’s walk.  I carry in my mind the image of Captain
Jack Sparrow, cutlass raised, entering the Kraken’s maw.  Ooops!  Was that a spoiler? 
  We sat through the entire closing credits, until there was
only us and one other couple there, and were rewarded with another big
laugh at the final scene, which resolves a dangling plot thread. 
I won’t spoil that one.

On the way out of town, before we got to Greyfox’s place, I pushed down
the clutch to downshift for a red light.  Suddenly there was no
resistance and the pedal was lying on the floor.  Broken linkage,
I’m assuming it is.  I put on the hazard flashers, raised the
hood, and in a few minutes a pleasant young man named Mario stopped and
let me use his cell phone.  I called AAA and Greyfox, in that
order.  The tow truck driver stopped at Greyfox’s place to let me
drop off some cat food he’d asked me to purchase for him, and to pick
up some things he had for me, then we rode home in the wrecker with
Streak Subaru riding behind.

As Doug and I were starting out yesterday, before we’d even gotten to
the mailbox out by the highway, I had said to him that I need a
vacation.  He wanted to know what I meant, and I explained that I
had cabin fever, and that for months the only times I feel less than
wretched are when I get myself psyched up and out on the road.  I
said I needed to get away from here for long enough that I’d start
feeling relieved to get back home.  Oddly enough, that little
outing to Wasilla yesterday did just that.  Funny how those things
work out, isn’t it?

ANGEL

The lead-in to this story is here.

After about a month and a half in the Boulder County Jail awaiting
extradition to Oregon for parole violation, I was set free with a full
pardon.  I lived for a few weeks in a third-floor apartment in a
big hillside complex on Broadway, largely inhabited by university
students, where Stony had been living while I was in jail.  Then
we moved into an old yellow wood frame house on Arapahoe.  We had
pooled resources with two other couples and four single men to rent
this ramshackle, creaky old place that appeared to have been built in
stages with sections added at various times.

The second story had several small bedrooms under the steeply sloping
roof.  Beneath that were two big rooms that might once have been a
dining room and parlor, with a single-story bedroom addition off the
“dining” room in back and a big lean-to kitchen off the side next to
the driveway.  A tire swing hung from a big shade tree outside the
kitchen door.  The stairway’s placement suggested that the second
floor hadn’t been part of the original construction.  The bedrooms
were divvied up, and since it was the only room with a solid door to
confine our pet raccoon, Stony and I took the front parlor as our
bedroom.  One
of our roommates moved his old upright piano into the dining room,
and that became our common living room.

While I had been in jail, Stony had lost Ladybitch, the puppy who
followed me from Anaheim, California to Boulder and grew up along the
way.  After he’d gotten the apartment, he had gone to the dog
pound and adopted another dog as her replacement.  Smoky was a Siberian husky,
gorgeous and full of life.  He was too full of life for me, needed
more rough and tumble play and vigorous exercise than I could give him,
and he was bonded with Stony.

He was also undisciplined, without a trace of training.  After an
incident in the park when Smoky tore my shirt off trying to get me to
run and chase him, Stony decided he should get me another
dog.  On my 28th birthday, one of our roommates took us in his
pickup truck
to the animal shelter on the edge of town.  Such places are always
bittersweet experiences for me.  I love the animals and feel bad
because I have to leave so many behind when I go home.

I don’t remember how many dogs were in the long rows of
concrete-floored pens in the big metal building.  Most of them
were small:  puppies, adult  lap dogs, spaniels, beagles,
etc.  Since we were sharing a house with so many people, plus Mr. Coon and two
other dogs (one roommate had a Rhodesian ridgeback and Stony had
Smoky), and I planned to go to work, a puppy would need too much
attention and make too much mess.  I was only looking at adult
dogs.

My first requirement was a dog big enough that I would not have to bend over to
pet it.  That narrowed down my choices to eight
candidates.   I borrowed a leash from the attendant and took
the eight large-breed adults out into a small grassy enclosure, one by
one.  Smoky had never had even basic obedience training, and I was
hoping to find a housebroken dog that knew how to sit, come when called, heel,
lead, and stay.   My walking trials eliminated all but three
of the big dogs.

It wasn’t an easy decision.  In the end it came down to a choice
between looks and the more intangible blend of intelligence and
temperament.  The dog I finally took was a big ugly yellow
mixed-breed male with a black muzzle, tail docked short, a torn ear and
some other scars, who instantly obeyed every command I could think of
to give him and watched me attentively with apparent affection, waiting
for the next command. 

His age was estimated at between three and five
years.  He had been picked up on the street wearing a collar and
New Jersey tags, including immunization tags.  I gave back the
borrowed leash, took his collar in my hand and walked him out to the
parking lot while Stony paid the fee and did the paperwork.

Four of us had gone to the pound in the cab of the pickup, leaving no
room for the dog.  I climbed into the bed and he jumped in beside
me.  Stony decided to ride back there with us, and we headed 
into Boulder.  Stony offered to hold the dog’s collar and I let
him take a turn to rest my wrist and hand.  He asked me what I was going to call my new dog, and I
started thinking about an appropriate name.  Nothing came to me at
first.

Then the dog saw a little black spaniel trotting along beside the
road
and almost pulled Stony out of the truck.  My new dog was halfway
out of the truck
when  I yelled, “No!” and grasped his collar.  I said,
“come… sit… stay,” and he backed up and settled beside me, growling
softly deep in his throat.  I was ready for it the next time he
saw a dog, and the time after that.  He ignored passing vehicles,
human pedestrians and every other distraction along the road, but
jumped first and then started growling every time he saw a dog.

Something about his
aggression and belligerence, along with the vulnerability and warmth in
his eyes, made me think of some men I had known, bikers, Hells Angels,
and I named him Angel.  I held his head between both of my palms,
looked into his eyes and said, “Angel,  your name is Angel.” 
Then, I let go of him, looking around first to make sure no dogs were
nearby, and said, “Angel… down… stay.”  From then to the end
of that ride he lay still in the bed of the truck with his head resting
on my leg.

Stony and our friends had planned a birthday party for me. 
Boulder’s freak subculture knew me before most of them ever set eyes on
me.  A few of them had cycled in and out of the jail while I was
there, knew my story and told others about me.  Stony was the
gregarious type (which I’m not), and even though he’d been living with
his new young girlfriend while I was locked up, everyone he knew also
knew that he was waiting for his pregnant lady to get out of
jail.  The old house was rockin’ and shakin’ that night.

I introduced Angel to Mr.Coon and explained to each of them that the
other one wasn’t prey, wasn’t food, nor a chew toy.  I sat on my
mattress on the floor of the old parlor with the lights out while
music, light, and laughter leaked in from the rest of the house. 
With one arm around Angel lying beside me, and the other hand grasping
Coon’s collar on my lap, I did my best to project the idea that they
were brothers.  It must have worked (projective telepathy is the
form of ESP on which I score highest in tests), because neither of them
ever attacked or offended the other.

I wasn’t sure enough of their compatibility to leave them alone
together, so when I joined the party I took Angel with me.  That
night we broke up several dog fights each with Smoky and the
ridgeback.   After three fights, Smoky never again tried to
be dominant with Angel, but the ridgeback never gave up, nor did
Angel.  For as long as the Rhodesian’s owner lived with us, we had
to keep the dogs apart or pry them apart.  Thinking about them
now, I just recalled the image of their jaws locked together and their
faces being stretched out grotesquely as the roommate and I tried to
separate them.

After a while, weary of the noise and crowd, I took Angel outside and
sat in the swing talking to him, letting him relax into his new
surroundings and get used to my scent, the touch of my hand and the
sound of my voice.  As the party was breaking up, Stony followed
some of his friends out to their car as they were leaving.  He
asked me to come say goodbye.  With his arm around my shoulders
and Angel heeling beside me, we stepped up to the driver’s open window.

After a brief exchange of good-old-boy BS and friendly insults, the
conversation turned to my dog.  The man remarked on his
ugliness.  Stony pointed at the driver and said, “Get ‘im!” 

In one smooth move Angel sprang through the open car window.  I
yelled, “No!”  Angel dropped to the ground and held in a “down”
position, tongue lolling out and eyes focused on the driver of the car
as he rolled up his window without another word and backed out.  I
looked from Angel to Stony and said, “That’s one command I just didn’t
think to try.”

In following months, I learned that Angel responded to both verbal
commands and silent hand signals.  I never found any standard dog
commands that he didn’t know.  I advised all our friends and
roommates that “No!” would work on Angel in any circumstance except for
a dog fight.  I could keep him from attacking other dogs by
commanding him with no/down/stay, but if the dog attacked him the only
way I could end it would be to pry his jaws open with my hands. 
If Stony tried to pry Angel’s jaws open, he’d just hang on and growl,
and the clear message was, “When I’m through with this dog, you’re
next.”  It wasn’t the strength in my hands, but the strength of
our bond that gave me control over Angel.

Stony thought it was cool having an attack-trained dog, just as he
thought it was cool having a pet raccoon that would ride on his
shoulder.  The problem was that if he took either of them out
without me he risked having someone get hurt because he couldn’t
control either of them.  That really wounded his ego.  I’d
handed him a few other ego-insults, such as the time when he was drunk
and started to hit me with the plaster cast on his broken arm.  I
just took hold of the cast in both my hands and hit him with it.

That was before we got Angel.  He hadn’t tried to hit me again
after that until one night when someone had given him a pint of
Everclear and he was completely out of his head, in an alcohol
blackout.  He raised his hand as if to hit me, and without any
command from me, Angel went up on his hind legs, grasped Stony’s wrist
in his teeth, pulled it down as he sank into a “sit,” and looked at me
for further instructions.  I just told him to “hold,” until Stony
got tired of thrashing around and passed out on the kitchen floor.

Our friend Zeke loved Angel and it was mutual.  Zeke’s respect and
affection for Angel were clearly evident and I didn’t hesitate to let
Zeke take Angel out for long walks in Boulder.  We had determined
to our own satisfaction that his previous owner had used Angel as a
fighting dog.  That conclusion made sense of the docked tail, as
well as the torn ear and other scars, and Angel’s tendency to attack
any passing dog he saw if not called down.  Those who knew about
the following incident didn’t tell me about it for months afterward,
until we had moved out of Boulder.

There was a dope-dealing pimp who liked to promenade on the Hill, the
business area adjoining the University of Colorado campus, with two
attack-trained dobermans, a matched pair.  He was semi-legendary,
I suppose, though I never got out and about enough to have encountered
him.  On his home turf, he was some sort of a demi-god, using the
dogs for intimidation with his customers and his ladies, and
occasionally releasing them to attack a stray dog or someone who had
offended him or who owed him money.

Zeke told me that the pimp sicced his dogs on Angel without
provocation.  That may or may not be the true story.  Only
Zeke saw the start of the fight, but enough people were around to see
the end of it that I had no doubt of that part of Zeke’s story. 
Zeke opted not to step in and try to separate the three dogs, and Angel
ignored his commands to stop until one of the dobermans was dead and
the other fled with its tail between its legs, and the pimp running
shouting after it.

After we left Boulder and moved up in the mountains to Breckinridge and
then to Alma, Zeke, Stony and our friend Bruce would exercise Angel in
a big field of several acres.  One of them would walk far out into
the field and another would tell the dog to go get him.  Angel
knew it was a game, and nobody ever got hurt.  Even so, each of
them got at least one good scare when Angel’s jaws closed (gently,
really) around his arm or leg before he was called off.

When I left Alma headed toward Alaska, Zeke already had Mr. Coon and he
asked me to leave Angel with him.  Knowing how uncertain my future
was and how hard it is to explain a lack of funds to a hungry dog, I
left Angel with Zeke.  If I knew the end of the story I’d tell it,
but I don’t.  If you know Zeke, ask him.

I had a memoir segment almost finished, a dog story.  I had
already grown tired and muscles had been cramping from sitting here,
when it was obliterated by a brief power outage.  That’s all for
me for now.

I have been writing about our cats a lot lately.  oceanstarr,
a “dog person,” wants to hear about “the dogs.”  Greyfox saw the
comment and mentioned his favorite picture of our dog Koji.  Koji,
AKA Doctor Snewt, was barely more than a pup four or five years or so
ago when this pic was captured.  He is hairier now, and meatier,
but still just as nosy as ever, or even more so.

Granny Mousebreath, the catriarch, asserted her dominance over Koji
when he was just a toddling, waddling furball, so he doesn’t poke his
snoot into her business.  Hilary, the mother of all our current
kittens and young cats, is a very aggressively protective mother, so
when she is around he tries to restrain the sniffing, but the instinct
is hard to suppress.  A cold dog nose in private places is just
part of life for anybody around here.  For Koji, the hisses,
growls and swats of offended cats are part of life.

A couple of weeks ago, Doug and I stopped at a neighbor’s yard sale and
overheard some talk about someone who had rented a cabin nearby, stayed
a whille, then left and abandoned nine dogs.  A female who had
been left running loose had been taken by Animal Control.  One of
her puppies was found dead, and another neighbor had taken four more of
them to his place to try and find homes for them. 

That left a husky tied up in the yard without food or water and an
unknown number of dogs inside the cabin in undetermined
condition.  Neighbors had fed and watered the husky and called
Animal Control.  Animal Control couldn’t enter the house without
permission, so they left a tag on the door and went away.  The
neighbors were observing the legal formalities, standing around
listening to the barking and whining from inside the cabin and
commenting on the fact that they could smell the dog shit from
there.  The owners hadn’t been around for several days.

I went in and Doug followed me.  We found two small thirsty dogs,
and a floor with many scattered piles of feces.  The dogs were
evidently housebroken, because they eagerly ran outside and did their
business.  A neighbor, who had trailed along with us but didn’t go
inside, found a container in the yard with dirty rain water and the two
little dogs drank it eagerly until Doug found a jug of clean water and
I found a pan to put it in.  We petted the little lap yappers and
accepted their wagging, licking gratitude.  Then we shut them back
inside and continued on our original errand after filling two shallow
pans with water enough to last them a while.

Their affectionate, affiliative pleasure at seeing us kept nagging at
me.  They weren’t just thirsty for water.  They were starved
for human companionship and attention.  I went back and got them
and took them home with me.   I don’t know if it was a
misdemeanor or a minor felony, and frankly, the dogs and their
well-being was more important to me than that issue.  I also
didn’t know how well they would get along with Koji and our cats, but I
felt I had to try it for their sake.
Koji with Hilary when she was a kitten.

As soon as we brought the dogs in here, the cats left.  I saw that
as a problem but felt I could deal with it later.  Koji was
overjoyed to see the dogs.  He couldn’t get enough of them. 
His big wet black leather nose was going nuts trying to smell two
moving objects at once.  Several times I observed one small dog or
the other apparently being propelled across the room like a wheelbarrow
with Koji’s snoot under its hindquarters.  The smaller one
retreated to the shelter of my ankles, but the bigger little guy tried
to assert some dominance.

He charged at Koji, yapping and growling, biting and scratching. 
That elicited snarls from Koji, and I finally decided I’d have to take
the dogs back to their house before Koji broke his training and did
some damage.  A few hours after that, I got a call from my yard
sale neighbor, saying that Animal Control had contacted the dogs’
owners.  The dogcatcher told her not to feed or water the dogs so
that he could monitor whether the owners were doing as they had said
they would.   It has been a while since I’ve heard any
barking from over there, so I’m assuming the owners took their dogs
away, or Animal Control did.

Koji kept sniffing around where the little guys had been, looking at me
as if wondering where his new friends had gone.  The cats still
sniff around suspiciously, but I’m sure they are glad the little
yappers went away.  I’m neutral.  They were cute and sweet
and I would take them in to keep them safe and would feed them and give
them affectionate care, but I wouldn’t go out shopping for a dog if I
didn’t have one.   The same goes for cats:  they come to
me and I respond.

When Doug was four years old, a neighbor picked up a tiny husky puppy
from the parking lot at Sheep Creek Lodge.  He called it Anak,
which means shit in one of the Circumpolar Native languages.  It
wasn’t old enough to have been weaned, so young that it was sucking at
everything it encountered, at most four weeks old when the man found
it.  One night as I sat in my neighbor’s trailer talking to him,
Anak sucked on my anklebone so much that my sock got wet clear down to
the bottom of my foot.  When he was about four months old, the man
moved back to Anchorage, leaving Anak and Tami, an ugly and
ill-tempered long-haired black and brown cat.

I fed and watered both animals at the man’s request.  When they
ran out of the food, I bought more for them.  When the weather got
cold, I bought propane for his little trailer to keep water in liquid
state for Tami.  He came back for her about that time, but didn’t
take the puppy.  That winter, the young dog began getting into
garbage and begging for handouts from neighbors.  One of the
neighbors started calling him Handout, which was better than shit, I
suppose.  Another neighbor threatened to shoot him if he found him
scattering his garbage again, so I took Handout to my place and chained
him up for his protection.

Handout was “our” dog for about 14 years.  Doug grew up with
him.  He was always too crazy, near-feral and rambunctious, to be
indoors or to be allowed off the chain during the garden season. 
When there was snow on the ground, I’d let him off and watch as he ran
free for a while.  He would run up to me, then race away, circle
around and come back.  In spring when he began to shed his winter
coat, I’d brush it out for him.  I’d talk to him and he’d talk
back in husky howls and songs as I worked in the garden. 

He grew old, arthritic and nearly blind by the time we came over here
to housesit.   His last winter here, he failed to grow the usual
winter coat, and he cried all the time but wouldn’t come in the
house.  If carried in, he’d creep to the door, scratch and cry to
get out.  Greyfox put him out of his misery and dragged his corpse
on a sled into the woods for the scavengers. 

The following year, Koji came along.  We had bought firewood from
a young couple who were getting ready to leave the area.  Their
dog had a litter of puppies they had to get rid of before they
left.   Doug and Greyfox and I could not agree on whether we
“wanted” another dog.  I did; they didn’t.  The couple came
by the day before they were to leave, with a box full of puppies. 
They said that they would have to kill any they couldn’t find homes
for.  Greyfox wasn’t home, and Doug was easily persuaded to rescue
a puppy.

There were seven pups in the box, all male.  Most were blonde, and
three were solid black.  The people said their mother was a
“husky”, which around here means a sled dog of mixed heritage. 
Their father, they said, had been a collie.  They said that the
puppies were six weeks old.  My guess is that they were about the
same age Anak had been when he was abandoned:  about three or four
weeks.  We took all the pups out of the box and watched them
wobble around the living room floor.

I knew it would have been absurd to try and save them all, but that was
my instinctive impulse.  Doug reasoned me out of trying to keep
two or three of them.  The blondes were very cute, but some were
obviously ill, with signs of diarrhea.  Some of the pups just sat
there howling; others shuffled around, sniffing and crying.  One
little bright-eyed black guy explored quietly on wobbly legs.  He
was the one we kept.  He must know I’m thinking about him, because he just came over and laid his head on my lap.

The people left us a sandwich bag full of “food” for the
pup.  It was a mixture of nonfat dry milk and instant
oatmeal.  I prepared a dish of it for him and he was hungry enough
to try to eat it, but all he could manage was a face-plant in the
gruel.  I fed him the first few days by letting him lick and suck
food from my fingers.  We bonded.

As
he grew, his bone structure suggested some doberman ancestry. 
When his guard hairs grew in, his coloration was that of an
Alsatian.  He has always tended to stand up on his hind legs to
see farther, causing one man who saw him to liken him to a bear. 
Like any good sled dog, he pulls.  He wears a regular neck collar
to which we hook the outdoor chain or his indoor tether, but if we
tried leashing him to it for a walk, he’d pull us off our feet. 
He wears a Gentle Leader head collar, his “snoot suit,” for
walks.  He outgrew one and wore out another and is now on his
third Gentle Leader.

He chews.  At first, he would chew on anything.  He ate a
sweater with which we had lined his bed.  We had to teach him not
to eat firewood.  We substituted rawhide, and we keep him supplied
with it so he won’t eat the furniture.  We trained him in bite
inhibition so he won’t hurt us or the cats or anyone else, but that
doesn’t keep him from doing threat charges after cats who act like prey
or snapping at us if we want to trim his toenails or put him on his
tether when he doesn’t want to go.  He has many traits of a
dominant alpha dog, which he might be in a dog pack.  It’s just
his bad luck that he ended up as the bottom dog in a mixed
primate/feline pack.

Koji’s worst luck came in January, 2005, while our computer was
down.  Greyfox left a bulletin here from the public library when Doug shot the moose.  When we got the comp back, I wrote first about my initial emotional reaction to the moose stomping my dog.  My next entry had pictures of us butchering the moose
in our front yard.  Koji still shows signs of PTSD.  He is
jumpy and quick to bark at any noise or strange presence in our
yard.  Before the moose-stomping, he didn’t mind if a cat ate a
bit of his kibble.  Now, he guards his feeding station and I try
to avoid filling his dish unless he’s ready to eat, because a full dish
is a cause of anxiety.  If a kitten takes a playful swipe at his
rawhide chewy, he doesn’t seem at all playful when he snarls, growls
and snaps at the kitten.

Nevertheless,
he has never hurt any of them, just scared them.  He growls
fiercely, shows his teeth and snaps his jaws, but on a couple of rare
occasions that he has accidentally connected with my flesh or Doug’s,
there has been no penetration and he always seems contrite if he hurts
one of us.  

It took a few years, but he has come to understand that we want the
garbage collectors to steal our trash.  He no longer barks at
them, but he barks at other passing cars — except for those of
neighbors he knows.  His discrimination demonstrates a certain
level of intelligence, but even though the trains run on schedule and
we’ve tried to reassure him about them, in winter when the sound
carries and they seem to be right outside our walls, he barks a them.

Sometimes when he catches some scent on the wind, he snuffles at the
bottom of the door and his neck hairs rise, and he growls.  I
assume then that he’s smelling a moose, but it could be a bear, a stray
dog or a fox.  I don’t know.  His nose is a lot keener than
mine.

The trip to Wasilla yesterday was enjoyable, productive and even
therapeutic, but I am impaired today as a result of yesterday’s
activities.  That is probably worse than it might have been if I
hadn’t spent the previous day moving furniture to rescue kittens. 
But I’m certainly not sorry I rescued the kittens, nor do I regret the
town trip.

One of the kittens already has a name that will probably stick with
her for life.  The calico that I found hanging by her neck is
Fancy, named for another calico cat I had at our old place across the
highway for a couple of years, a time far too brief.  The first
Fancy started out being called Fancyface by Mark, the man who gave us
this place after we’d been housesitting here for him for a couple of
winters.  Fancy was the daughter of Mark’s cat Sassy (now the
catriarch Granny Mousebreath), and the littermate of the cat Mark
called Prissy, whose name Greyfox changed to Muffin.  Fancy had
two more littermates, Tux and Penny (whom I called Pidney), but only
placid and not-too-bright Muffin survives.

The new Fancy’s littermates are being called Tabby (for her color
pattern), and Jonesy (after Bustifer Jones in White Spats from the
musical Cats).  Those names are likely to change as they grow and
show their characters, but I think Fancy is fancy, and she has caught
my fancy.  We bonded.  I am sure it had something to do with
our traumatic meeting.  The animals with whom I have bonded most
strongly throughout my life have been ones who had been weak, wounded,
traumatized, or abused, and then tended by me.  A cocktail of
adrenaline and oxytocin is probably involved in that process, and maybe
some other neurotransmitters I don’t know about.

Hilary has settled contentedly into the nest I made for her in the
corner of Doug’s closet.  One of us goes back occasionally to just
look at the kittens, or to feel their soft warmth.  I’ve been
resisting the urge to take a photo of Fancy in the palm of my
hand.  She’s photogenic enough now, but cries when picked up from
the nest.  When she feels more secure, I’ll get some shots of her
fabulous fancy face and post them.

---

I have a fridge and freezer
stuffed with enough food for a month or more, and supplies of cat and
dog food, dog biscuits and rawhide chews for at least that long. 
That was the productive part of yesterday’s town trip.

The enjoyable part was being with Greyfox, lunching at our favorite
Mexican restaurant, talking about everything and anything.  We
left my car at his place, fetched heavy bags of cat food and other big
non-perishable items from the warehouse store on the hillside near his
cabin and returned to offload them into my hatch before leaving again
for town and the rest of our errands.

Both of us were tired at the start, he from unloading enough knives and
other stock from the car to make room for me and my groceries, and I
from the aforementioned busy, strenuous, stressful day.   I
reclined my seat for some of the cross-town travel, and sat in the
parking lot and let him fetch some things at one store.  We
shopped together at some others and he pooped out and returned to the
car midway through the next-to-last late evening shopping stop, at the
biggest supermarket in town, as I threaded all the aisles filling my
cart. 

Back at his cabin later, he nuked some dinner while I unloaded his car
and transferred all my stuff to mine.  This trip, I don’t think I
left any of my stuff behind at his place, and only brought one of his
purchases home with me:  a movie on VHS that he’d found in the
thrift shop where I got “new” pajamas and flowerpots.

The therapeutic part was the NA meeting.  It always does me good
to spend time around spiritually-attuned dope fiends.  The topic
was humility, and discussion included the usual attempts to
differentiate between humility, humiliation and “humbleness,” whatever
that is.  Someone quoted Mother Teresa as, “Humility is
truth.”  I can see that.  The reading from the daily
meditations included the cliched wisdom that we can’t save face and
save or ass at the same time.  Yeah, that one resonates with me,
too.  There were lots of laughs.  The newcomers who needed
encouragement got it, and the rest of us also got what we went there
for. 

There was even a bit of disagreement, which I always appreciate. 
Without some dissent and disagreement, the place starts smelling like a
cult and sounding like rote readings from the Book.  One person
with four years clean, whose spouse recently relapsed and is in the
“newcomer” category again, tried to reassure another relapsed newcomer
that clean time doesn’t matter.  I can see the logic in that, for
that person, under those circumstances, wanting to reassure the spouse
as well.  It might even have been a recent topic of discussion at
home.  Someone else, with 18 years clean, said he wouldn’t trade
his birthday for anything.    My sympathies lie with the
latter one.  There have been times I might have gone out and
gotten loaded if not for the thought of losing my clean time. 
It’s an investment, as I see it.  Why throw it away?

I was getting concerned because I was hearing tiny mewling voices from
under my bed and Hilary seemed unconcerned, content to lie there
letting her nearly-grown son, Sammich, suckle.  When I started
pulling out the 3 flat underbed storage boxes, Hilary showed some
interest.

Crawling under the bed was out of the question.  It’s a Hollywood
style, barely six inches off the floor.  Yesterday, after we’d
seen a bloodied Hilary come out from under there and suspected there
might be kittens there, Doug had pulled the boxes out and gotten his
head and an arm under, with a flashlight to investigate.  He found
nothing.

I hadn’t gotten down there to look, because the dentist warned me to
avoid strenuous activities for a week, and that sort of thing: 
reaching under stuff, stretching, triggers my M.E. (AKA
“fibromyalgia”).  But today after Doug had gone to bed and I kept
hearing kittens mewing, I decided to see for myself. 

It was immediately apparent why Doug couldn’t see anything.  The
unwoven fabric that once had covered the bottom of the boxspring was
hanging loose, torn and shredded around the edges.  I have
previously written here about the other two successive litters of
kittens getting up into the springs and twanging around, playing
pinball cat.

I could see some movement near the wall at the head of the bed, way out
of my reach.  The only way to get to what was there, or even to
see it properly, was to move the bed away from the wall.  That
required moving a chair and footlocker that were in the way at the foot
of the bed.  In my concern for the kittens, because I could hear
one strong voice and at least one other that sounded weak and
distressed, I forgot the dentists prohibition of exertion.

My first hard tug moved the bed far enough from the wall for me to get
my hand into the gap and feel around.  I felt a kitten weakly
struggling, entangled in the fibers from the shredded fabric.  It
took another hard tug from the end of the bed to move it far enough out
that I could grasp the kitten.  I started tugging on the fabric,
tearing it away from the framework, trying to free the kitten. 

When I had enough slack to move the kitten into the gap between bed and
wall where I could see it, I realized the strings were twisted around
its neck so that my best course was to cut them, not try to disentangle
them.  After I’d freed that one, a thin and cool-feeling, smooth
little calico with beautiful markings, I felt around some more, found
one big hearty-looking black kitten with white on its belly and feet,
one cold dead tabby, and another tabby.  That one also was thin
and cool to the touch, and was struggling to free its feet from the
fibers.

I freed it and placed Hilary and all the kits on the couch.  I sat
there and stroked Hilary until she became convinced to stay there and
nurse the kittens.  Then I went back and finished removing the
fabric from the boxspring, and did some more searching and
cleaning.  I found another cold dead tabby kitten and my old
Reeboks.  I also found a dime and a lot more debris than I had
ever imagined could have accumulated behind and around those underbed
boxes.  

Entangled in the fibers were three separate “jingles”: bells or pairs
of bells that had once been parts of cat toys.   I make for
my kittens little things I call jingle birds, just bundles of feathers,
wired together with a little bell or two.  A litter of kittens can
run through half a dozen toys during their prey-play phase, pouncing on
them, fighting over them, and slapping them around until they get
“lost”.  I had discovered the jingle bird graveyard.

Hilary and her three surviving kittens are together on the couch
now.  I’m satisfied that she has bonded with them sufficiently
that I won’t need to worry about her neglecting them for Sammich, but I
intend to keep an eye on him so he doesn’t steal all their milk. 
The couch is not a good permanent nest for the cats. 

When I moved them up there, I put Koji on his “hook” (a cord on a hook
by the door that allows him enough slack to reach his feeding station,
and in winter to lie beside the wood stove, but no further. 
Hilary attacks Koji if he approaches her kittens, so for my dog’s
safety, I’ll have to find a place for the kittens that is beyond Koji’s
range.  After Doug wakes up, I’ll try moving them into his closet
where Hilary had her first two litters.  If she doesn’t like that,
she will have to find another place for them.

Now, I have to go finish my underbed cleaning and get those boxes back
in there.  They’re up on my bed now, and I’m going to need it
tonight.  I plan to drive to Wasilla tomorrow for shopping, a
meeting, and some time with Greyfox.  This has been an exhausting
day.  I’ll probably need some ephedra to get going tomorrow. 
It’s time for my regular mid-day empty-stomach meds now (herbs and
amino acids, plus vitamins and minerals to synergize with them).

Breaking promises to myself — that’s pathetic.  I do a splendid
job of not making promises to others that I can’t keep, and of keeping
the ones I make.  It’s when I get to those little private
commitments I make that I slip and fall.  I was going to keep this
journal updated, or so I told myself.

The dental wounds are healing.  Amy, the dentist’s assistant, told
me that the tongue is a “sneaky, nasty, dirty little thing,” and that
I’d be tempted to stick it in the newly emptied socket.  She was
wrong, in my case.  I wasn’t tempted consciously to tongue that
space, and there was no unconscious exploration, either.  A few
days after the extraction, when it had healed, I checked it out and
discovered that the best-case scenario I’d been warned about had
occurred and I’d gotten a bonus.

Part of the standard routine warnings and advisories concerned the
possibility of an adjoining tooth being damaged during an
extraction.  I had laughed at the time, and told them that one of
the teeth next to the one that was set to come out was broken and I’d
gladly have it come out, too.  It had been a snaggly, blackened
stump that made me sometimes suppress a wide smile for fear of scaring
someone.  Now, no visible trace remains.  It was four days
before I noticed.

---

CAT NEWS:

Sweet orange Nemo died.  It was quiet and peaceful, and Doug found
her in her favorite shelf of the hanging sweater organizer in his
closet one morning when he awoke.

Hilary, the mother of all our young cats had been staying away a lot,
only coming around once a week or so to eat.  Her daughter Alice,
the only female out of the seven kittens she had produced, had been
gone for months.  Occasionally, one of us would see Alice perched
on the edge of our roof, but she didn’t come into the house. 
Around the time that Hilary began to make herself scarce, Alice moved
back in.  I suppose that’s some sort of feline territorial thing
between them.

Now, both Alice and Hilary are in full-time residence here again. 
Hilary was visibly pregnant when she returned.  Yesterday, her
water broke and she may or may not have had a kitten or two. 
There was no sign of kittens, no little mewling sounds, and I could
still feel kittens moving in her abdomen.  She was lactating, and
kept cozying up to the nearly-grown guys from her second litter,
offering milk.

I saw one of them, Buzz (Buzzy Truffle, formerly known as Fuzzy
Trouble), give her a look like, “You must be kidding!” and scoot
away.  Hilary had weaned her kittens and aggressively rejected
them even before Nemo lost her litter and adopted them.  Finally,
Sammich (whose name initially had been Pobo or Bo-in-a-Po-suit after
his older brother Bobo and his father Potemkin) took her up on the
offer and has been nursing since yesterday afternoon.  Apparently,
she has re-bonded with him.  Ain’t oxytocin a marvelous
thing?  That cat is all sweetness and affection when she’s
nursing, and all teeth, claws, hisses, screeches and growls when she’s
not.

Early this morning, Hilary gave birth to two kits on the couch and
dragged them under my bed.  They are inaccessible and out of
visible range.  I heard some tiny mewling sounds earlier, and saw
Hilary scamper under the bed immediately.  Then after a while she
came back out and jumped up on the bed, where she has been nursing a
gluttonous Sammich off and on ever since.  He sucks a while and
falls asleep.  Then she starts grooming him and that wakes him up
and he starts sucking again.  They’re quite a pair, just about the
same size.

Pain is a message you don’t have to receive.  Pain is a negative
response to a positive stimulus. Pain is necessary; without it as a
warning, injury would result.   Pain is part of life; suffering is
optional.

Pain is the least of my problems, insignificant beside this crazy
immune system that attacks my own body and is ineffective against
infections as it resorbs my bones and teeth, stiffens my joints and
finds new ways every day to trip me up and challenge me.  Because
I have mastered the pain switch
technique, but have few resources to deal with my sensorimotor
deficits, sleep disorder, unstable blood sugar and incomprehensibly
inconsistent brain chemistry, sometimes it catches me by surprise when
I observe how pain seems to be so important for most people… so
important that they can’t manage to just pay attention to what it is
telling them and let it go.

I had a tooth extracted Friday.  It was the left-side twin of the right upper bicuspid I half-pulled
with my own fingers about four years ago.  It was fractured, split
down the middle just like that other one, but both halves were firmly
rooted, with roots curved to make it harder for the dentist.  I’m
familiar with that curve, having wiggled and worked that other
half-tooth every way possible before finally giving it just the right
twist to bring it out.  I still have the remaining half of that
right bicuspid anchored in my jaw, but am pleased to report that Tina
the gentle dentist of Sunshine Clinic got both halves of the left one.

Gentle and strong are good traits for a dentist, or for anyone.  I
have never had a dentist with such a soft touch in the prep phase with
the local anaesthetics.  She swabbed my gums with a clove-scented
solution before warning me there’d be “a little pinch” as she injected
the first shot.  All I felt was pressure.  Pain didn’t have a
chance.  I was ready to deal with it, but I might as well not have
bothered because Tina was ready for it, too. 

After the third shot (none of which was painful), she did some poking
around to determine if my nerves were asleep.  The whole left side
of my face was asleep, but when she poked at the tooth in question, I
jumped in the chair.  It wasn’t pain.  Like I said, pain
didn’t stand a chance in that chair.  But it was a signal that the
relevant nerve wasn’t dead, so she got another syringe, something she
identified only as, “a different anaesthetic.”

A minute or two after she injected it, I asked her if that stuff was
psychoactive.  I was floating, all euphoric, trying not to giggle
because I sensed somehow that it wouldn’t have been appropriate at that
time and place.  She said it wasn’t supposed to be
psychoactive.  I shrugged and said, with a grin I couldn’t
suppress, that I am sensitive to lots of drugs.  She and Amy, her
assistant, exchanged worried looks and asked me if my heart was
“fluttery”.  I replied honestly that it was, and as I reached
across to feel my own wobbly pulse, Amy put on the sphygmomanometer
cuff and checked my BP.

Reassured by the numbers and my insistence that I felt great, she got
to work trying to yank that tooth out.  The first half was sorta
tough, resistant to her efforts.  I kept reminding myself to relax
as much as possible without letting her pull me up out of that chair
with her tool.  That meant lots of tension in neck and shoulder
muscles to resist her pull, and nothing but dead weight from there
down.  Consequently, for a couple of days I’ve had stiffness,
fiery inflammation, swelling, and muscle spasms in my neck and
shoulders.  Just the usual, nothing alarming or inexplicable.

It was the second half of that tooth that gave Tina more trouble. 
It broke off and she had to do a lot of digging and delving to get a
grip on what was left.  In the end, she looked at what she’d
gotten and wasn’t sure she got it all.  It’s hard to tell, I
suppose, what with the autoimmune tooth and bone resorption.  As I
sat there biting on gauze to stop the bleeding, she reviewed my medical
history and she and Amy gave me the standard post-op cautions and
instructions.

When she got to the part in her spiel where medication comes in, she
said she assumed that I take “all sorts of meds to manage [my]
pain.”  Concentrating on keeping pressure on my wound, I shook my
head and pointed toward my temple.  Later, when I could speak, I
said that pain is a message you don’t have to receive.  I got
blank looks from Tina and Amy in response.  I did manage to get my
point across, that I didn’t want any drugs for the pain.

That was prudent on my part.  If I had accepted pain medication, I
would have taken it.  Addict that I am, I might even have gotten
that old “prescription dyslexia” and if it was supposed to be one pill
every four hours, I might have taken four pills every hour.  For
an insane moment today, I was thinking about getting loaded. 
After sanity reasserted itself, I realized I was experiencing the
aftermath of the physiological stress of the last few days, that
atypical euphoric reaction to the anaesthetic, and my body was craving
some more of the endorphins it had been running on for a while.

I have already observed significant improvement in the sinus infection
I’ve had for a year or two.  I may need to get more teeth out
before it will go away completely.  All but six of my upper teeth
are gone now,  and some of the uppers I have left don’t meet up
with corresponding lowers.  With no effective molars, eating has
been a sorta rabbity thing for me for many years:  all my chewing
takes place in front.  Even so, I can manage to munch popcorn,
which I really enjoy, so I’m not eager to get rid of my popcorn
choppers.  It’s an attitude problem.  Attitude:  that’s
the problem.  I’ll keep working on it.

This comment has had me thinking about earthquakes even more than I usually do:

…have
you noticed, perhaps, that your subscription to the earthquake warnings
has generated a whole lot more since the bombardment of iraq? that’s
why i have nicknamed him ‘george w.m.d. shrub’, i sincerely believe
that the constant detonation of explosives during the iraq war has
unhinged many of the plate margins leading to many more earthquakes and
volcanic activity around the world.

That’s a neat trick, because hardly a day passes that I don’t think
about earthquakes anyway.  I am apparently more sensitive than
most people are to little shakes occurring locally and big ones at a
distance.  That fact became a topic of discussion locally about
fifteen years ago when we had a swarm of little earthquakes here.

For days and daze I had been asking Greyfox, “Did you feel that?” 
His answer was always, “no,” and very soon he began giving me funny
looks when I’d ask.  Soon after that, he expressed the opinion
that I was imagining things.  Then, when I felt one while we were
visiting our friends Bear and CeeCee, I asked that question
again.  Bear looked blankly confused, Greyfox looked slightly
worried and more than slightly scornful, and CeeCee looked surprised
and relieved as she chirped, “You felt it, too!?”

CeeCee and I decided to ask around and find out how many other people
were aware of the little shakes.  I found no others, and she found
only one:  a nurse at the local health clinic, also female. 
Until recently, I’d had no easy way to independently confirm what our
senses were indicating.  Then, the USGS changed their reporting
system and began allowing users to change the settings in the new Earthquake Notification Service  (formerly the BIGQUAKE service).

I reset the local region sensitivity for a few days until I got tired
of the mass of email it generated.  One thing I learned was that I
feel some local quakes below magnitude 2, and can be awakened from a
sound sleep by some below magnitude 4.  But I digress.

My intention had been to respond to Ian’s question.  After much
thought, I failed to come to any definite conclusion.  I asked
Greyfox if he thought bombardment in Iraq would cause increased seismic
activity.  He was fairly certain that it wouldn’t, or that it was
at least highly unlikely.  I’m not sure.  I have no idea how
likely or unlikely it is.  I am fairly certain it is possible.  I suspect that the the recent increase in activity might more likely be attributable to global warming and retreating glaciers, but I’m not sure.

Both factors could be contributing.  It’s also possible that
some quakes are being triggered by the removal of oil from
belowground.  Small changes can, over time and space, trigger big
effects.  That’s 
The Butterfly Effect. 

I have nothing to say.  My brain fog seems to be clearing a bit,
but is still thick as soup.  I was able this morning to discern an
inaccuracy, or at least an instance of woefully incomplete information,
in my latest entry.  The Aleutian Islands range along the boundary
of the North American plate and the Pacific Plate, and it is actually
the Pacific Plate doing most of the moving.

Sea floor spreading in the deep trenches of the Pacific pushes the
crust outward from those areas.  Up here, the Pacific Plate is
thrust under the North American plate.  Islands, mountains and
volcanoes develop along the plate margins. 

North Koreans are shooting missles toward the Aleutians, I have
heard.  I think I might be a happier and more serene person if I
could break the news addiction.  I think, maybe, that is
true.  I don’t know for sure.  What I know for sure is that
I’d be more ignorant and out of touch with what’s going on in the
world, and that is what keeps me tuning in.

This morning I was listening to an inteview with Jane Mayer who wrote an article for the New Yorker
magazine about David Addington, the Vice President’s lawyer, who seems
to be more powerful, and certainly more intelligent, than the
President.  Intelligence does not necessarily translate into
wisdom. 

Several factoids from that interview impinged on my
consciousness.  One was that far fewer of the top members of the
current federal administration are lawyers than has been the case for
many years.  Ms. Mayer’s comment on that is that they are not
conversant with the U. S. Constitution.  That clears it up for
me.  All along, I’d been thinking that they just didn’t care about it.  Now it is apparent that the problem is simple ignorance.  Yeah, right.

Another thing she said was that Addington doesn’t like having his
picture taken.  That impelled me to see what he looks like. 
In my Google image search I found many iterations of an
official-looking formal portrait, and several more candid-looking shots
of an entirely different, but similar-looking (though probably older)
David Addington, a litigator in England.  Imagine being that
English David Addington, learning that your evil twin across the pond
is pulling the strings of extraordinary rendition for the former
colonies.

The image search turned up a different, but related, picture from the (old) heretik: (now burning hot at http://theheretik.us/):