No Kill Nation

do you know why No Kill Nation is so difficult? people. it's not that it's so hard to just stop killing the animals. it's not that no one can afford to actually take care of the shelters. it's not that no one cares about the shelter animals.

it's people that own the animals that DO NOT spay/neuter their pets. if you are not a registered, responsible, breeder you DO NOT need to have you pet... intact. cats n dogs are not like people, they don't "enjoy" sex. they are "driven" to propagate. when they're intact it's painful if they DON'T breed, both physically and psychologically. that's why they become aggressive. unlike wild animals who have seasonal times of 3 or 4 months out of an entire year, pets are constantly within season. it's bred into them BY HUMANS to be this way. it's called domestication.

breeding for animals isn't even pleasant. for humans sex is GREAT, who doesn't like a good roll in the hay a couple times a week or more? i've never been one to turn it down. but if you ever watch animals, it certainly isn't fun. cats claw, bite, scream, shriek. dogs bite, scream, cry. ever hear of a "rape stand" for pit bulls? horses tear each other to pieces leaving horrible scars. cattle are so dangerous to each other that most ranchers do artificial insemination, and most race horses owners do it that way too so as to avoid injury to their animals.

take a look at the puppy section of the MDAS page. most of those puppies are dead today. none of them are over 6mos old. they were killed because the owners of their parents were thoughtless, careless, lazy, or wanted to have "a wonderful family experience". watch a damn video! want a moving experience, hold one of these babies as it dies on a cold steel table in a strange place w/a hundred strange dogs screaming and barking in the other room.

i go to sleep at night and i watch these little dark eyes passing one pair at a time. i hear tiny toenails tapping away on the stones. i hear whimpering in the dark. i reach out my hand and all i feel is a wisp of a passing cool breeze. they're gone. they're all gone because not enough people are responsible enough to give a shit for anything or anyone but their own convenience.

i'm tired.

Ashes and Dust.

Someone asked me: Just how will our end come; Stand-esk, or more along the lines of Robert McAmmons Swan Song?

I find it an interesting subject. Humanity's end. I love watching disaster movies, like, Day After Tomorrow or 2012. I like watching them mostly because I like catching where they get the science wrong. Like climate change, neutrino morphology, weather patterns, prehistoric weather and geologic history and patterns in comparison to what we see today.

I love hearing that people think that everything happening now is NEW. When our last ICE AGE actually happened in the 1800's and before that when Washington was crossing the Delaware. They happened because of volcanoes that went off half a world away and created severe climate change that affected the entire world. Nature happens. All the time. Everyday. We can't stop it. We can't interfere with it. We can't alter it.

Today there was a HUGE, heretofore never seen, solar flare that was like an earthquake on the sun. So large it created a corona around the sun and knocked out cable, internet and phone service, as well as satellites for GPS. All our knowledge, experience and technology is NOTHING in the face of Nature. Humans are so very arrogant. We think we are the movers and shakers of the universe and all we are is grains of sand slipping through the sieve of time, unnoticed, unheard, unfelt.

How we go matters only to us, because we'll do it to ourselves. But one way or another we will go and all else will be as before we came.

It is as has been said, we are only, Ashes and Dust.

The Love I Bear

I am brought to my knees
by the crushing weight
of the love I bear you.

My eyes are seared from their sockets
by the acid tears shed in rage
at the love I bear you.

The very soul of my being
is torn from the moorings of my body
by the depths of sorrow

of the love I bear you.

Mec 1292011

That Baby

It was a hellish night. Almost no sleep with the granddaughter teething like a 'gator, alternately crying and snotting or crying and biting. I haven't, even now, figured out which is worse. At least with her crying and snot draining down my shoulder I wasn't bleeding from those too little razor sharp incisors cutting into my shoulder. I am always shocked at the immense pressure a 10 month old baby can put into those bites.

Finally, she fell asleep. Fitful, but asleep. I was finally able to, sort of, curl around her and start dozing off myself. Joe's deafening snores were already drifting across the covers, probably what lulled her off to lala-land. I could almost feel myself slowly stumbling off into that dark corner of my mind where there is no light, no sound, only quiet coolness and soft breezes in the trees, and then...

Suuuuuuuu-MACK! Right in the left eye and across the bridge of my nose. OH MY GODS! I was seeing stars in my left eye! My eyelashes were poking INTO my freaking eyeball like tiny needles! My sinuses were about ready to pop out of my face! Then I heard it, once it got past the ringing in my head. The shriek. The shriek of a young animal in high terror as a lion is about to drag it down on the plains of Africa and rip it's throat out! Oh, geeze, that's not it, it was just the baby waking up AGAIN! Somehow or other, deep in her subconscious she realized I was getting close to being comfortable, and it was time for her to wake up and terrorize me. So there I was, snapped awake by a roundhouse slap that would've made Jane Crawford proud at about 120am. For the third time since we went to bed at 1100pm.

Well, what do you do with a crying infant when she's so upset and obviously in pain, when you yourself are also in pain by the very same crying infant? Well, you could just put her in the play pen and let her work things out for herself....you could give her a good solid whack on the diaper and say "GO TO SLEEP!", like so many surely do....or you could do what I actually really did. Pick her up unravel her blankie from around her arms and legs, wipe all the accumulated snot and tears from her face, give her a kiss on the cheek and hold on your shoulder and proceed to join her with your own tears and snot. Because in all actuality, we're both just too tired and upset to work any harder at anything else.

Finally, thankfully, baby's mommy comes home from work at 2am or so. By this time I can't see straight enough to even be able to read the clock. Between the lack of sleep, being smacked around by a baby, and the number of shed tears, my eyes just don't work right anymore. But I do see her walk in the bedroom in her pristine white shirt looking for all the world like an angel of mercy come to give me my release to heaven. In this case, my release to the haven of sleep. She says to me,

"Mom, is everything okay? Are you okay?"

And of course, I can't tell her how really abusive her sweet little daughter has been. Well, because I adore my granddaughter, and I just couldn't say a negative thing about her. She's my little angel-baby. It's not her fault that she freaking hates me tonight! So I tell her,

"I'm fine honey, just a little tired. The baby has had a really hard night and she's very, very tired. You should take her right upstairs and get her right back to sleep."

Lovely girl that she is, she gently takes the baby from my arms, I kiss the babe goodnight and they quietly leave my room. I am left in the dark with my wonderful stentoriously snoring husband to finally fall asleep. Yet, when I lay my head on my feather pillows, my eyes remain wide open. Even the left one, still stinging from the lash-burns. I lay there, and lay there. I cover my head with my pillow. I can't breathe, so I take it off and turn over on my belly. Nothing. No Sleep. Not even relaxation. Why wasn't his snoring putting me to sleep too?! I will never sleep again. I will forever be exhausted. It's all because of THAT BABY!

Then all of a sudden I glanced up and over at the clock and surprisingly it was 730am. It was no longer 4am. Ahh, i had slept after all. Somehow, some way, I had finally passed out and slept the sleep of the comatose. It will be a good day. I wonder if my daughter works tonight or if it's her night off....

Mental Pause

I went to the doctor a couple of weeks ago. Not something I usually enjoy, but this visit was unusually pleasant. She didn't poke and prod, or stick things in me that obviously didn't fit. For a measly $168 and five minutes of her time she walked in and said,

"All your tests came back fine. You're right where you should be. You're perfectly healthy. Here are your regular 'scripts, we're all done." and turned around and walked back out the door she walked in through.

That was it. I had waited a full two hours and fifteen minutes to hear that, the money comes out of my insurance and bank account like shit out of a goose no matter how long she takes. But, lucky for me, the news was all good. Especially after the months of hypochondria I had previously spent. Let me in enlighten you.

I'm 48.5 years old. I have three daughters. Anyone with all sons, no daughters, sisters, granddaughters, nieces, girl relatives of any kind, please consider yourselves among the blessed of women. Female relatives are amongst the most vicious of creatures ever placed on the skin of the planet. I love my daughters, to the point of death. I truly mean that sometimes i could just kill them, slowly painfully, for all the mean things they tell me. But that would be illegal, and I enjoy my freedom.

But i digress.

At 48.5 years of age I suddenly came to the conclusion that I was well past being young anymore. I have to color my hair every month. I had to learn how to use makeup for "the middle-aged face", which by the way is much different than for a twenty something. I've always been a natural frump, so my clothing didn't change that much, but all of a sudden I was the grown up I never thought I'd see in the mirror. One day, just when I least needed to be reminded, my monthly visit from Aunt Flo didn't show up. My youngest daughter tells me,

"Guess it's time to break out the little broom and dust pan to collect all the dust backing up in there!" shakes her head and walks away.

I stand there dumbfounded that someone who supposedly loves me would say that. But of course, she's only nineteen, what could she possibly know. Until the next month rolls around, and no Aunt Flo again. My youngest strolls by, stops, looks at me, shakes her head and strolls off again cup of tea in hand.

"Getting old must be so difficult."

Now I do expect a fair amount of sympathy from someone. Maybe my oldest daughter, she's all of 23, maybe she has some feeling for me. We're standing on the front steps while I'm having a smoke and she's just home from work. I'm telling her about my missing visitor, and she pipes up and reminds me of some thing I was supposed to do. I tell her oh, I forgot to do that, i'll take care of it after supper tonight.

"Oh, don't worry about it mom, it's just that old mental-pause thing ya got going on! " and busts out laughing to point she falls off the step!

Okay, no sympathy there. Maybe Joe. My husband is almost always a good shoulder to cry on. One night we're in bed watching a movie. Some chick flick I think, because I was sitting there with tears standing on my cheeks, I hate that. He tells me he thinks I've been a little preoccupied lately and wonders why that might be. Now's my chance, so I tell him how I've been feeling so old and like a train wreck lately. My body doesn't feel like mine anymore, nothing is working the way it should, and then I start to cry for real, because suddenly it dawns on me that I really am getting older and I'm not okay with that.

He gently pulls me to his chest, he always smells so good and his arms are always so comforting. He brushes the tears from my cheeks and kisses my hair and lets me cry for a little bit. Somehow he always knows that sometimes just crying makes things better. Now I would really like to just stop right there and leave it to sound so sweet and wonderful, but that's not how it ended. There's always just one more thing.

He lifts up my chin and kisses me tenderly on the lips and says to me,

"It's okay honey, I'm not worried. I'll love you no matter how old and wrinkly you get. And if Aunt Flo never shows up again that's okay too! We can have ALOT more sex!"