NO MORE

**Bye, Baby**

No more lonely, cold nights or hearing that I'm bad.

No more growling belly from the meals I never had.

No more scorching sunshine with a water bowl that's dry. 

No more complaining neighbors about the noise when I cry.

No more hearing "shut up," "get down," or "get out of here"! 

No more feeling disliked, only peace is in the air. 

Euthanasia is a blessing, though some still can't see

Why I was ever born if I weren't meant to be.

My last day of living was the best I ever had.

Someone held me very close, I could see she was very sad.

I kissed the lady's face, and she hugged me as she cried.

I wagged my tail to thank her, then I closed my eyes and died.

Written by an animal shelter volunteer in Massena, NY

This poem was posted from Shannon Marie's ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN Facebook album of pound dogs that have been put down, and reposted from my friend chowchowgrl's blog at: http://pikaiagrl.blogspot.com/2012/10/no-more.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FYSOBs+%28Woof%29. 

Please educate yourself before deciding to adopt an animal just because you think he or she looks cute; different breeds have different needs. 

Please spay/neuter your pets so the pounds won't fill up with discarded dogs and cats. 

Please check out NO KILL alternatives in your state: http://www.nokilladvocacycenter.org/

FLAMENCO BALLOON DREAM

Sometimes I go to the flea market not to shop but to take pictures. It's fun to pretend to be a little kid and let my imagination run totally loose. 

Walking outside among the buildings and tables, I spied something red on the ground. A shred of popped balloon lying in the gravel. 

Does that look like anything to you? What does it make you think of? 

To me it looked like a dress, a fancy red dress, a dress for a sexy woman who would be dancing and swirling, like a gypsy dancer, a flamenco dancer. 

Watch Eva Yerbabuena dance. She is surrounded by men intensely focused on her and she's HOT! No, she isn't the stereotypical celebrity in her twenties with the impossibly tiny waist, but she is all proud woman, flesh and blood and bone, sweaty and juicy. Look at the faces of the musicians around her, and look how she loves what she's doing. Miguel Poveda is the singer clapping behind her, singing as they've sung in Spain for centuries. All this ancient passion made me horny! Enjoy: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q6tQQ9NuxQ&feature=share

Next time you go out, lock the house door behind you but open your brain's door 

to what you will see and feel.

Money, Naked Neck, Shar-Pei, Jimmy Dorsey

So if things *happened* and then you found out you probably had a check coming to you for over $17,000, what would you do? 

Count the number of digits. That's five digits. 

I can tell you a couple of laws of money that I learned the hard way. The first is that you are wildly rich temporarily, and then it turns itself inside out and is fucking GONE really fast, right when you get used to having it. You have to be careful. But first you have to get used to the feeling of cool air blowing around your neck, as opposed to the hard, rough wood of the chopping block upon which your neck has rested for so long. 

So what would you do? I invite you to comment below what you would do if you got $17,000. 

I was dizzy at first, like, "WTF?" But now I'm thinking I can get the car fixed, get health insurance, replace my broken camera, get the dog his shots. Then what? I can actually pay my rent in advance for a year! 
I could. 

I want another dog, a girl. There is a crabby Shar-Pei/Beagle mix (known as a "Sharp Eagle") red girl at a local no-kill rescue sanctuary. Her name is Tangerine. I've wanted her for around a year. She came from a puppy mill and is not very sociable or socialized, so she is not very adoptable by other people's standards, but I don't care about that. If she won't attack my other little pets, she's welcome here. She can have all the emotional space she wants. The way to a dog's heart is food and walks. My other dog is a rescue also, submissive, grateful, peaceful, appreciative, and I think they would get along fine.

All that money, and what I would really like for myself is 
that bitchy little dog.  

Well, tomorrow, folks, I'll let you know if I got the money. Then I'll let you know if my landlord acquiesces to my taking home Tangerine if I pay a year's rent in advance. Then I'll let you know if the sanctuary will let her go if I donate a few hundred dollars. Then I'll let you know how she fits in with the other creatures in this house. 

I will sing to her:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdistoUW4CQ

"Unanswered questions." Guest blogger Don-Guitar.

I love questions that generate thinking. Thinking generates action, eventually, and that's what changes society. Here is a blog from a very special person who's been writing forever.

You can subscribe to his ezine here: http://www.don-guitar.com/currentissue.html

DON-GUITAR

DON CROWDER AND HIS WIFE, LISA MILLER, ARE PROPONENTS OF AND BELIEVERS IN, TRUE LOVE, RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS AND A CHILD-LIKE SENSE OF WONDER. THEY SPEND THEIR DAYS WRITING THEIR EZINE, TENDING TO THEIR WEBSITE, COOKING, GARDENING, AND PLAYING WITH THEIR PETS. SAID PETS CONSISTING OF A CONSTANTLY CHANGING NUMBER OF NAMELESS COMPUTERS, MOST OF WHICH ARE EVENTUALLY ADOPTED BY GOOD HOMES.

FRIDAY, JULY 23, 2010

Unanswered questions.

Until today I'd never heard of Epicurus but I was intrigued by this quote which is attributed to him:

“The gods can either take away evil from the world and will not,
or, being willing to do so, cannot;
or they neither can nor will,
or lastly, they are both able and willing.

If they have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not omnipotent.
If they can, but will not, than they are not benevolent.
If they are neither able nor willing, then they are neither omnipotent nor benevolent.
Lastly, if they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, why does it exist?”

---

I love questions which can't be answered. I'm amused by those who feel that such questions have been answered and disgusted by people who are frightened by the questions. I'm content to say "I don't know" but that doesn't mean I'll stop trying to reason out an answer.

guitar.blogspot.com/2010/07/unanswered-questions.html

Ghosts In The Old Man's Bed

Unless you have it, you might not know what tinnitus is. It's pronounced either "TIN-it-tus" or "tin-EYE-tus," but the second pronunciation would lead you to believe that it's an infection or inflammation such as appendicitis or arthritis, and it is neither. The word comes from Latin, meaning "ringing," although people who have this condition often report rustling, buzzing, hissing, clicking, and other kinds of sounds. Almost like ghosts. Tinnitus can be caused by several different things so there isn't a single clear-cut cure. 


Just as there is no known cure for history. It is an underlying condition that accompanies us wherever we go. It clings to us in the silence of moments when we allow ourselves to listen. 


Go outside and sit down and shut up. Listen beyond the obvious sounds. You hear the echoes of history. Who occupied the very spot where you now sit? What happened there? And a hundred years before that? And a thousand years before that? And do the animals' lives and the plants' lives count for anything? All the stories, all the drama, lost to time ... is there no micro-echo that we can detect?


Where I'm sitting at this moment as I write, a tiny add-on porch-room lined with windows and fitted with a washer/dryer hookup, this room was an old man's bedroom. I don't know why he didn't live in the main part of the house, but he didn't. He had a cot in here. He got up early every day, dressing up in his shabby suit, and went for coffee at a little restaurant that no longer exists, torn down to be replaced by a chain drug store. Do I feel him here? I honestly must say no, but I like this room. I decorated it in green, yellow, and white; it is home to a couple of hermit crabs in a glass tank, a small fish aquarium, and lots of houseplants. I like to write in here while the laundry chugs and pulses and sloshes away. I don't feel any presence of the old man, but I feel comfort. I see the same morning sun rays and evening moon glow he must have looked upon. 


Seventy-five years before, this old bungalow was on a different lot, I'm told. The lot owner actually had the whole house moved forward! While digging a small garden in the back a few years ago, I kept finding chunks of hard black stuff honeycombed with tiny holes, like volcanic scoria. My neighbor told me that it was left over from the days when coal was the way people heated their homes, including my little house. 


In the early 1800s, not far from here, an African-American settlement came together when a local landowner died and his slaves were set free. Parts of their cemetery still remain. 


A few hundred years earlier, this was a green woodland, watered by the nearby river, an old gathering place for Shawnee Indians. The rich soil and plentiful rainfall supported a bounty of animal and plant life. 


Nowadays, though, the Shawnee people are mostly gone. The animals -- raccoons, possums, deer, crows, and coyotes, to name a few -- and the plants -- purslane, wild strawberries, pokeweed, wild onion, and osage orange, to name a few -- are regarded as pests. 


But as you sit quietly, can you not hear the rustling sounds of the past on the breeze, the tinnitus of history?

DO BUGS HAVE SOULS?

Never mind what a soul is, you can define that for yourself. My thing is that I am becoming increasingly convinced that bugs have consciousness and self-awareness, at least some of them, and therefore we should examine whether or not The Golden Rule applies. 


I cleaned the hermit crab tank this afternoon. I'm NOT into bugs, and hermit crabs count as bugs to me: lots of crunchy, hairy legs, eyes in places we humans are not used to, and did I mention lots of crunchy, hairy legs? Those are bugs! Where I work, the boss moved on and left the hermit crab behind, so since nobody knew how to take care of it, I volunteered to bring it home. It's been two years, and I just now got around to changing the shredded bark in its tank. If the crab is just a thing with no consciousness, then I'm not any more guilty of cruelty than if I'd neglected a houseplant. However, the hermit crab in his shell and the whole little environment of shredded bark, cuttlebone, hollow wood, food dish, and crab shack were crawling with thousands of mites, I guess the crab equivalent of fleas. The hermit crab never seemed to act as though he itched, even though I often watched for scratching behaviors. I put him in a basin with salty water that I treated the same as you treat aquarium  water to neutralize the chlorine and other chemicals, and then after dumping out the old shredded bark, I washed out the tank and added fresh everything. 


It seemed as though he noticed. He explored it. He didn't try to pinch me, so I think he knows me a little. In fact, the only time that he ever tried to pinch me was when he escaped once and was loose in the house for a day and a half. When I found him he was kind of nervous and aggressive, but who could blame him since he had to dodge the dog and cat for all that time? 


So, my first observation was that the hermit crab seemed happy in his new, clean set-up. My second observation was that I found myself referring to him as "he" instead of "it." My third observation was that happiness is not usually ascribed to bugs, crabs, and the like. 


My friend Donna, who has no life and spends all her time with her ark of animals, swears that her hermit crab not only recognizes her, but likes her. He doesn't like her husband (neither does she) and always tries to pinch the man. She says that the crab likes being petted, actually coming to her and sitting still as if enjoying the vibration of her fingers stroking the shell where he's housed. Either she's nutty and wrong, or, if she's right -- she still might be nutty -- then we are not treating our arthropod brethren kindly. 


I have another bug story. A few summers ago I was at my boyfriend's family's house in the country when his little niece found a praying mantis outside and went around showing it to everybody. I got my camera so I could take a picture of it. As she held it up to me in the palm of her hand, I noticed that it was LOOKING at me! LOOKING AT ME! Its head was turned and its buggy green eyes were examining me. I realized with shock that it was looking at the leafy print on my shirt and trying to decide if I were a bush, because if I were, it was planning to escape from the noisy little girl and all the other noisy humans by jumping into the safety of my green branches. That was totally one of the creepiest experiences of my life, to be studied by a bug. It meant that the creature had a brain with the capability to make evaluations and decisions. 


Apparently my brain has already made up its mind, independent of my feelings. Last week I saw ripples in the back yard birdbath ... a wasp! At first I thought, "Drown, bug!" But as I watched her struggle, and most wasps you see are females, I remembered all the times I've struggled without anyone to help me, so I thought, "WTF," and put a stick in the water to rescue  her. She crawled up the stick and I laid it in the grass so she could fly back to her business. It didn't seem stupid; it seemed right. 


The next time you steam crabs alive in your crab pot, or plunge a lobster head-first into boiling water after he's had his antennae clipped off and his claws handcuffed, just think about it and how you would feel if a big arthropod did it to you. 

GOD IS AN ILLEGAL ALIEN

I looked up some stuff, and here's the deal: God has presented no birth certificate, no consular Report of Birth Abroad or Certification of Birth, no medical record of post-natal care, no Birth Affidavit, no school record, no Naturalization Certificate, no Certificate of Citizenship, no U.S. passport, no census record. There is no record of his parents' marriage or of their presence in the United States. He just shows up. Doesn't that sound kind of suspicious to you?

If he is all-powerful, he should be able to produce appropriate documentation. Either he is unable to do it or he is choosing not to. 

Being in the Bible doesn't make him a citizen. There is no proof of authorship of the Bible, so the alleged facts can't be verified. You might argue that because he's God, he shouldn't have to comply, but wouldn't you like to know for sure that he really is God and not a pretender? 

Isn't that the whole point of documentation?