THE LOST DOGS OF LANGSTON.

Entry 29.

Animals can be nasty. And they don't like the sound of the vacuum cleaner.

You can imagine what sorts of existential conflicts THIS proposes. And enacts.

For example, this morning as she was on her way out to the back yard to pee, Sophie rounded the corner of the Think Tank, which is what I call my small dining room that is adjacent to the kitchen (it didn't used to be the dining room; I don't know what it was used for but I imagine it was maybe a small sitting room where people would warm up after coming in from the porch, which my kitchen used to be) (it used to have a higher ceiling too but they dropped it, probably sometime in the sixties, probably to save on the heating bill or maybe because some of the bead board got messed up and they couldn't find any to replace it, who knows) and found some lovely cat vomit to scrounge up. And Waldo the cat had a virtual blood feast out on his Adirondack chair on the porch the other morning; I went out and saw pieces of something he had killed, strewn all over the chair, and there was immediately laundry to be done. I take the small dead things out to the fig tree, which is becoming a literal necrophyte and therefore very well fertilized by dead moles and voles and chipmunks and baby flying squirrels and mice and an occasional rat, sometimes a very decomposed one that Waldo has saved under the house for awhile that he brings up to the porch to play with, and even a bluebird and a couple of lizards that the garage cats, Tuley and Widgie, made short work of. I keep telling them not to bother the birds but they don't seem to give a damn what I say.

Waldo is kind of an asshole. He'll charge at you and bite your leg if he gets a notion to do so. I am tempted to tell him that's why he got thrown out in the first place (there's always a reason) but I sometimes refrain from this as it isn't a nice thing to tell someone. Or maybe it will make him change his attitude and act better, if he hears the cold hard truth; I don't know. People say a lot of things. You never know how it's gonna come off.

Animals can be gross. You have to watch them. Sophie also has to take these little pumpkin treats so she won't make a nasty smell. It usually works but not all the time. You have to watch her or there will be more immediate laundry to do.

Well now this sculpture garden. If they are on a farm and they aren't useful sculptures, why then bother to make them? Art, I guess. But ideally, they could be used for housing animals, as I don't see that any of the good ol' boys network is gonna change Alabama for the better about all these spay/neuter laws and animal abandonment ordinances complete with huge fines that I'm constantly declaiming about. Although I could be pleasantly surprised about all that, if the Millennials get busy quicker than I think they will. (It's not gonna be me, I've got fibermyalgia and I've got to get my nellsdun and my herdid, I'm too tired, I've got an excuse.) Unless the dinosaurs all just kick the bucket all of a sudden which is probably not a far cry from shortly becoming reality. I mean people are so damn slap-happy running around maskless out there because they somehow found out that 20 percent of us or less (or fewer) are vaccinated now and Governor Memaw has said you don't have to wear your masks anymore so maybe some of them will catch it again and learn the hard way. I hate to be the one to say Told you so but I probably will. I just soooooo super-duper hate to be the one. I mean I REALLY HATE THAT...

But all that will have to wait and in the meantime the animals will need some shelter if they're gonna keep on getting dumped out here. My one artist friend built a dog barn for me recently, but that's only gonna work for at the very most three or four dogs in the size space that it's enclosed in. More than four and we'll have a tempest in something a bit larger than a teacup. There'll be fights. Digger dogs and we will have a real problem as they'll probably dig under the outside fence too, dammit.

You have to watch them.

And you know we did the ballet when we were young, complete with anorexia/exercise bulimia and then we did children's theater, the opera, and later more little spots of theater here and there, and then starting up an arts center complete with making visual art, and we did radio too, and also songwriting and music and all that stuff, and so I guess the next thing to come down the pike in that same vein that will be an art project that doesn't go much or anywhere or make any money will be the sculpture garden/animal shelter, and I guess that combines sculpture and architecture, if you want to stretch it a little; but who knows, maybe that will finally be a huge smash success. Nobody would like me if I were a huge success though. I'd have to live with that. People just don't. It changes you and it changes them.

So I guess if I ever made a big hit with anything, I'd find out real quick who my real friends are.

Meanwhile I'm just this little voice rattling on in the middle of nowhere but at least it's pretty out here. You can tell I'm trying to think of everything so there will be no surprises. But I guarantee you if you do that you will have a surprise some where. Some where. I just hope I cover all the negative stuff beforehand so that the only surprises that come up are good ones. It's like a magical spell, of sorts. Or something that's tryin' to be. Like my old friend back in the college days, she was in graduate school in French, she said if you think of everything that could possibly go wrong and just kind of go over all the long list of these things before you start, you've done with your worries and you can just proceed clearly from there, with a ton less anxiety. It worked for her. Sometimes I use that philosophy and either I've just been lucky or it's worked pretty well so far. Not all the time and not every time, but I think it kinda works. Because then you realize that not EVERYTHING will go absolutely wrong and you get over being silly and you just pick up and go on from there and start doing something. Once you get going you'll usually be all right. Maybe we could just make a bunch of weird animal shapes out of the Galvalume and use them for roofs on top of a bunch of odd little dog barns, if nothing else.

I guess that's the way to do a sculpture garden. Make the sculptures into useful animal shelters so that meth heads can't run off with them and so that people don't think they're "too weird" and make a fuss in the neighborhood about it all being an eyesore, and build them right so they don't get flooded or eaten by termites or inhabited by armadillos or fire ants or blown over by semitornadic backwash so that whatever else you need under What Could Possibly Go Wrong With This Project will be covered.

I wonder what all Nikki de St. Phalle had to think of and go over before she started her project. She's dead now so we'll never know the half of it. Maybe it was just a thing that happened from out of the blue, like those crop circles or the pyramids or all that other weird stuff on the planet that they really can't explain in that book Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past. Maybe they'll write another book someday kind of like that one and include my animal shelter sculptures/architectural marvels in it. Then people would have some cult book to blather on about in their fascinating and woo-woo tinged conversations for another fifty to seventy-six years or so, like they like to do. Or longer, even, than that.

(I would have typed seventy-five, but I wanted to use an x. You're starting to see how these artistic decisions are being made. It's a little like John Updike. He used to do that in some of his writing. It's a little annoying at first but it gets interesting later as "inanimate" objects such as typewriters start to take on a will of their own and "type things" sometimes. Well there is no "how" to the "decisions" really; they're just being made, somehow I guess, but I can't explain exactly how.)

I mean a landscape is already fine like it is, we all know this but sometimes I like to see it oddly decorated. Like those cars all standing on end out west, whatever that is, Carhenge or whatever they call it. Like the huge peach on top of the water tower. Like Meow Wolf. Like, "In your face! We're HERE!"

Something to strive for.

It's Mother's Day and I feel like a new project is about to get born and I guess it's gonna be the sculpture garden. Eating disorders and migraines be damned, I've got to have something to do.