Stop Separating Me

            I have this dog named Flower.  She’s a scruffy tan terrier, probably mixed with greyhound because she’s fast as hell.  And yes, she does look like something invented by Dr. Seuss.  She is also the best hunter, besides a cat, that I’ve ever seen.  I hate that.  Well, unless civilization crumples, then I’ll be happy because she can bring me dinner and I’m pretty sure she would share.  Aside from being lethal she’s very generous and maternal in her general attitude towards life.  She attempts to give me a slobber bath daily

            So, this morning as I head outside to pick up the dog shit, Flower’s got a woodpecker in her mouth.  When I yell, it frightens her and she lets it go, then grabs it again by the edge of the wing.  I throw my coffee cup at her, hey, you use what’s on hand in an emergency, she lets go and the bird makes a mad dash on foot, tangling itself in the two layered fence, half hogwire, half chain link.  As my dog tries frantically to regain her grip on the bird, I conk her on the head, taking her aback long enough so that I’m able to get a hand on the poor terrified bird.  As it screams and pecks my hand, I can see it’s gotten itself into quite a pickle and I can neither push it through the tangle of fence nor pull it back out.  Finally, I am able to get one of its wings into position and turn it so it can move forward. I midwife the bird through the fence. I watch it on the other side, worried that my dog broke a wing, but it manages to align them and shake them straight.  I’m about 70% sure it will recover.

            “Bad dog.  Bad dog.”  This said with limited conviction, exactly the same way as when she killed the ground squirrel, the tree squirrel, and the collared lizard.  She’s only doing what her breeding tells her to do.  Catch and kill small creatures.

           

            When I was a little kid we had a dog.  Shane was barrel bodied, with shortish legs, mostly black coloring but some brown around the muzzle so maybe there was a little Rottweiler in there.  He was my best friend, by far the most interesting and loving being in the family, and when my parents gave him away because my sister’s asthma doctor told them to—never mind the fact that my father continued smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day, in the house, for another 3 years—I was decimated.  Our cat, Francis, got the heave ho too.  What I remember most about that time is that we kids were not allowed to talk about it.  Shane and Francis were gone, period.  Humans are more important than animals.  I was supposed to accept this as a given.

            At catechism on Saturday, thoroughly grief-stricken, I confided in a nun about what had happened, and told her I’d be happy when I died, that I was going to be very good so I could see Shane in Heaven.  She told me unequivocally that of course I wouldn’t.  Dogs don’t have souls and can’t go there.  When I asked her where they went she said, “nowhere.”  

            Something inside me started screaming that day and has never stopped.  I wanted my dog back so bad that I would have gladly followed him into Hell but “nowhere?”  I hadn’t any idea what to do with that.  I wondered how I was so different from Shane, and resolved that if someone like him, someone so playful, sweet and warm couldn’t go to Heaven, then I didn’t want to have anything to do with the place.  What was there to do there anyway?  Sit at the right hand of the Father?  For what?  How long did I have to sit?  Everything grown ups thought mattered was boring, and to hell with it all.  That was the beginning of the end of Catholicism for me.  Years later, at about the age of 14, I managed to avoid attending church by clinging to the leg of the bed harder than any limpet to any rock in all of human history.  I haven’t been back since.  If I am so different from Shane, if someone like him cannot be my brethren and kin, then I didn’t want to be me.  Being a human was just too much of a burden.

            Years later, schlepping through the first year in college, I took a logic class and was fortunate enough to have a wonderful teacher.  Bill was smart, completely in love with his subject, and along with his goofy grin, had long blond hair and didn’t seem to give one goddamn about what other people thought about him.  He’d dress weird, drag around found objects; I remember a long stuffed snake and a digereedoo, and when it came to making sure his students understood the material he’d do just about anything.  For instance, one day he did a miles long logic derivation and since it wouldn’t fit on a regular paper, he did it on a long roll of butcher paper, which he unfurled into the classroom.  By the end of the semester I could do long derivations just like that, and discovering my love for logic, decided to major in philosophy.  But it wasn’t all as much fun as logic.  No, no, no, far from it.

            As a matter of fact, Epistemology (the theory of knowledge) felt like a bad acid trip.  My professor styled himself an old southern gentleman, his bushy hair parted hard on the side like a confederate colonel, had a humongous belly and for some reason I never did figure out, loved to say the words “beef bourguignon.”  Either he thought he was neato because he could say it, or maybe at some point he’d succeeded at cooking it.  Maybe he could even spell it.  Anyway, he would use it in all his examples: “If a beef bourguignon falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, did it really make a mess?”  That kind of thing.  But the real problem with Epistemology was that it was there that I first encountered Rene Descartes and his “cogito.”  Now, I’m no historian of philosophy and it is many years later, but the way I remember Descartes is a foppish, sulky French guy sitting by a Dutch oven, whatever that is, and wondering whether or not he existed.  I mean, on a purely physical level I’m guessing he knew it, otherwise why would he have bothered keeping warm by sitting next to an oven?   But he wanted to prove it so he could argue with other people.  After 3 days and having eliminated everything else…Let’s see, I shit therefore I am, I refuse to get out of my pajamas therefore I am, my earwax is thickening therefore I am… none of the answers he came up with really had the oomph he was looking for.  I suspect his underlying desire was the need to prove that Man is special and stands above and outside the animals in the “great chain of being.”  The great chain of being was a very popular idea back in those days.  It was hierarchical and went as follows: first you had God, then angels, then saints, then regular humans, then animals and loads of other stuff that Descartes didn’t think mattered.  It was a happy day when he came up with his cogito.  First, because he could leave the damn Dutch oven which had undoubtedly gotten cold by then, and second, he thought it was iron clad proof that he existed.  “Cogito ergo sum,” (everything sounds smarter if you say it in Latin) “I think therefore I am.”

I never did figure out whether or not he still existed while he was sleeping and presumably not thinking, but better minds than mine have had at that one.  The point is, back in those days if you were a philosopher who didn’t want to be tortured to death for heresy, everything you came up with had to be consistent with the teachings of the Catholic Church and Descartes’ cogito was so consistent with church teachings, with holy scripture, with Aristotle and Saint Augustine, that not a single clerical feather was ruffled.  God had made man in his image and of course the Almighty is a boffo thinker, so Man must be too.  Case closed.  Of course, an unfortunate corollary of the cogito is that anything that does not think, as defined by Man, lacks existence. So, were you for example, to throw a cat into the fire and it screamed, it wouldn’t be because it was actually in pain, since it didn’t exist in any real, meaningful way.  It would simply be due to a physical reaction, like the outgassing of a green log.  I’ve never read anything that made me believe Rene Descartes was a sadist; and I don’t imagine he made a habit of throwing cats into fires, but it does logically follow that if he wanted to he could have without transgressing any moral boundaries.

It’s interesting to note that Descartes “cogito” is entirely consistent with biblical teachings which dictate that Man is, fundamentally, a divine creature that stands apart from the rest of creation.  This seems to me an incredibly lonely place to be. But fortunately, it is also completely wrongheaded.  The fact is that my DNA is 99.9 percent the same as the bum who just knocked on my door looking for someone named “Frank,” but also as Lebron James.  It is 98.6% the same as a chimpanzee, 98.4% identical to a gorillas, 92% the same as a mouse (really!)  I share 84% of my DNA with my dog, 60% with my neighbor’s chicken, 80% with a cow, 90% with a cat, 61% with a fruit fly and 60% with a banana.  In other words, I am not “me.”  “You” are not you; and “they” are certainly not “other” and therefore inferior.  We are all DNA in seemingly infinite configurations inhabiting a planet called “Earth.” We are the same thing.

I remember a short story by Martin Amis.  In it, the aliens surveying Earth could not tell one thing from another.  They simply broadcast, “Hello DNA!” And when they got no answer, decided not to worry about wiping the planet clean of whatever this slimy stuff was, so they could take it for themselves.

I believe the Christian creation myth, elaborated on and reiterated by philosophers like Descartes, and the consequent internalizing of the “great chain of being,” is wholly responsible not just for the separation we feel from one another, but for the separation we feel from the natural world.  And in the name of this separation, and by giving ourselves permission to minimize the importance of every other creature on the planet by virtue of our specialness, we’ve all but guaranteed our passing from existence.  There have been many human cultures that did not understand human beings this way; many Native American peoples rightly view human beings as part of nature and other species not as inferiors but as other nations.  However, this sensibility is functionally extinct on Earth today.  Its absence has been described in many ways, but unfortunately the only thing that comes to mind at the moment is that or the masturbating comedian Louis C.K., who called it “the big sad.”  It’s always there, in everyone to greater or lesser degrees, like a spiritual sucking chest wound.  We try to fill it with stuff—electronics, cars, big houses, money, or substances--drugs, booze, massive amounts of food, but it never entirely goes away.  We are forever trying to fill a hole that our egoism, borne of our insistence that we are better and more important that every other creature on the planet, has created.  But we never will.  In amputating ourselves from our non-human brothers and sisters we have instead, cut off ourselves from ourselves.

We are not better that the fish of the seas, the whales, the dolphins, the deer in the forests, the tigers in the jungles, the koalas in the trees, the snakes in the desert.  What we call human intelligence is nothing more that a feedback loop born of opposible thumbs paired with large brains in order to manipulate our environments.  Hopefully, this will not be repeated again in the evolutionary future.  I’m not terribly worried about it, since it’s only happened once and while it’s impossible to calculate the odds, it seems unlikely.

As for the nun who told me I’d never see my dog again, fuck you, Sister.  You’re probably dead by now, sitting at the right hand of the Father, chained like Princess Leia to Jabba the Hutt, and I sincerely hope it’s every bit as boring as I imagined it would be when I was 6.  When I come around one day, with Shane and every other wonderful non-human friend I’ve had in all the years since I first gazed into your empty eyes, I hope every damn one of them lifts his leg, on you.  Then we’ll head off.  And live happily ever after.

Is my Neighbor Living with a Dead Dog?

Is my Neighbor living with a Dead Dog?

I’ve never liked my neighbor, but I have pretended to.  We all do that, don’t we?  You pass each other in the driveways, taking out the weekly garbage, all that.  Who wants animosity?  Certainly not me.  But sometimes animosity comes looking for you. 

She’s a type, former hippie, the real dumb kind who doesn’t believe in medicine unless it was taught to her by a salesperson in the vitamin aisle at Whole Foods.  Why spend time listening to people with actual degrees and at least nominal brain cell activity when you can rub some slop on that oozed out of a tree or was shat out of Albanian maggot’s ass? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for alternative medicine as long as no one is actually sick or injured.  It gives hypochondriacs and crackpots something to do and Lord knows those people need to be kept busy.  It’s all tailor made for my neighbor, whom I’ll call Rosemund for the simple reason that Rosemund is what she should have been named in the first place.   Rosemund is never sick.  She could never get sick because she never interacts with any other human beings and rarely leaves her shaded and shuttered apartment.  She used to, to visit her mother in the nursing home, only she got thrown out for screaming at the help for putting Desitin on her mother’s chapped ass instead of yogurt, the way she wanted.

When I first moved into this duplex, I would make friendly overtures, inviting Rosemund over for a glass of wine or a meal, but she was always on a “cleanse.”  I don’t understand these people and their cleanses or why they think they need them, nor do I accept their reasoning.  If the human intestine is such a vile thing that it needs to be cleansed they should just go get some of that stuff they give you before a colonoscopy; that stuff will clean out your gut for sure and within about 8 hours it will be so clean you can eat off it.  I know.  I’ve seen pictures.

            The other thing weird thing about my neighbor is that nobody, and I mean nobody, ever goes into her house.  The couple of times I’ve knocked on the door for one reason or another, she’s opened it just enough to squeeze out, closing it right behind her at the same rate she’s moving forward so you cannot catch a glimpse anything inside.  I’ve heard from the handyman that she’s got junk stacked from floor to ceiling in every room, with just a few paths to walk from one place to another.  He gets mad because every time he goes there to fix something, he has to move loads of crap to get to it.  The other day she wanted him to do something in the “spare” bedroom—these are 2 bedroom places—and she expected him to move all the shit out then put it back in.  He said, no thank you.  He’s very polite.

            But hey, people can do their things.  I’m a live and let live kind of gal.  If they want to be weirdass hoarders with stuff stacked to the ceiling that’s their business.  Think of the Collyer brothers, the greatest hoarders of all time.  In that haunted house mansion of theirs in New York City they didn’t bother anyone until eventually their tunnels amidst the rubbish collapsed and they suffocated under all the worthless shit they’d been collecting for 50 years and it started making a stink, or at least a stink that was worse than before.  It bothered the neighbors.

             But at this point, there’s not much of stink coming from Rosemund’s house, except for a cloying, old lady perfumy one when she’s been out on the porch watering her potted plants.  I have a feeling though, that pretty soon that is going to change.  In the four years I’ve lived here she has been threatening to get a dog, but I’ve never believed her.  How can she have a dog?  I’ve never seen her walk any place but from her house to the car, sometimes limping, sometimes with a cane although sometimes not, depending on whether anyone is watching.  As far as I can tell she’s one of those totally non-physical people who just sits home and watches TV all day, and dogs need to be exercised.  But about a month ago, the neighbor across the street, feeling sorry for her I guess because her mother without yogurt on her ass, died, took her to the pound and she got one.  I have not seen it or heard it.  The only reason I know it’s there is that the handyman told me and at my request took pictures with his phone. In the first picture you can see Rosemund’s legs, a shepherd mix dog on a leash, and a dog crate.  In the second picture, there’s a dog with a horribly swollen nose.

            I saw Rosemund out front, “Wow, what happened to your dog’s nose.”

            She was futzing around with her plants, watering them and pulling off dead leaves, got a real surprised look on her face that I knew about the dog, until she figured out that the handyman had been spying for me.  “Oh, she got in an ant hill,” she said.

            “Jeeze, are you going to take her to the vet?” 

            “Oh no, oh no.  Coconut oil,” she says.

            “What about coconut oil?”  I’ve got nothing against coconut oil.  I have some in my bathroom.  It’s lovely after you’ve shaved your legs.

            “I use coconut oil,” she said.

            “For what?”  I was really confused.  I’ve known some really brain dead hippies in my time, mostly during the seventies and I don’t think even the dumbest of them would have put coconut oil on a dog’s nose that was swollen to 3 times it’s normal size. 

            “I have some Benedryl,” says I.  “At least it will bring down the swelling.”  But she starts lecturing me on the dangers of “allopathic” medicine.

 “Ohh, I don’t want to make it worse!” she says.  “She’s also got a really bad case of dog flu.”  Again, I search my mind for what the heck she could be talking about.  I’ve adopted lots of animals from shelters and pounds and never heard of the of “dog flu.”

 Finally, I twigged. “You mean kennel cough?  They all get it.  That’s why they give you a free vet check.  If you take her in they’ll give her some antibiotics and it will be over in two or three days.”

She looks at me with massive superiority, almost as if I’m a particularly thick child, and explains that she took her to a vet who gave her “random” antibiotics and it made her worse.  What she is fighting now is a weak immune system, with herbs and lots of nutrients.  Thank you for your concern, (but fuck you.)

Okay, I added the last part. But it was there.  She’s one of those women who cultivates a “sweet” personality.  These people are usually as dangerous as fuck.  

A week or so later, I see her out front engaged in heated conversation with the neighbor who took her to the pound to get the dog in the first place.  She’s pleading and finally yelling at Rosemund to take the dog to the vet.  Seems the coconut oil she rubbed all over the ant-bitten swollen muzzle has cause a raging infection.  This I hear later from the neighbor who tells me that she not only offered to take the dog to the vet, but to pay for it.  Rosemund said no and the neighbor now says she’s “washed her hands of her.”

Well, that’s fine for her.  She’s across the street but I share a backyard fence and a wall with this psychotic throwback, and have not heard or seen any sign of a dog over there, at all.  I’ve called Animal Control and they say there’s nothing they can do unless I’ve seen the dog, which I haven’t.  I look through the fence.  I don’t think it’s even been in the back yard.  I’m surrounded by back yard fences on three sides.  On one side lives Zack, a friendly Shar Pei mix with whom my dogs visit regularly, and in the back there are a couple of I don’t know whats, but both my dogs run over to that fence when they go out and pee or bark at it, depending on what the moment requires.  They never go over to Rosemund’s fence.

So yeah, I’m pretty sure Rosemund has increased her hoarding to include a dead dog.  I imagine she talks to it every day, maybe even pets it; dead dogs stay soft for awhile.  I’ve tried intervention, but Animal Control says there’s nothing they can do unless I’ve seen it, and of course I haven’t.

I imagine one of these days I’ll start to smell it.

So, I really have no idea what is going on next door.  I only know that the only way a young dog would stay this quiet is if it was still deathly ill, or dead.  On some days I try to be optimistic; maybe she took it back to the pound, but realistically, there’s no way in hell.  That would mean Rosemund was wrong and if I’ve learned one thing over the last few years, it’s that Rosemund is never wrong.