THE LOST DOGS OF LANGSTON.

Entry 30.

So before you build up a bunch of sculptures in your sculpture garden, you might have to tear down a few things first.

So the other day it was the New Moon and I wasn't counting on it but I just broke up. I mean I just cracked up. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald only without all that alcohol. Without Zelda waving her Bible and without any of those fancy motorcars or whatever else it was they had back then in the roaring twenties when the depression was about to hit.

Do you kinda wonder what will happen in 2029? It freaks the hell out of me. But maybe I'm worried for no reason.

Or maybe not. Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean the space visitors from Fyffe aren't watching you and leaving little bits of broken glass in your yard.

Well now don't bother to translate all that, it's just part of the melee from the crack-up. I went on Facebook and threw a royal major fit the other day, it was the day of the New Moon, and I guess things are getting stressful here again because I'm one person managing seven dogs and five cats and one of the cats is really sick and I don't know what she has yet and I also have to go to the dentist and get the car seen about and pick up a prescription for my migraines and the foundation guy has to get here and put something under the house so it doesn't entirely fall in and I have my coaching call today for the Isabel Foxen Duke course that I'm taking to eliminate diet mentality and I'm trying to answer everyone on Facebook who has been incredibly kind because they all have and Waldo the cat is still being an asshole. So he's in his cat crate for now because Maja (the sick cat) doesn't want to be jumped on by the stronger cat who is Waldo and that's what cats do, I've seen it before, Buster jumped on Little Kitty when she was about to die, the stronger ones try to take the weaker ones out, it's the law of the jungle or something and maybe it has to do with compassion in the long run because maybe the stronger ones can't stand to see the weaker ones suffering in their long slow deaths and they want to take them out of their misery but also the stronger ones feel the pain too somehow on some level and they want that to stop also.

Compassion wins the battle and holds the fort. It is the bulwark set around those Heaven helps. That is Ursula Le Guin's translation from the 67th verse of the Tao Te Ching and it's the one that keep scoming back and back and back to me. It's a little like The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. A little bit. There are great parallels in the world's major religions and it would behoove you to look for these. I'll explain more about that later but you can kinda see where this is going if you have any savvy at all, which I think you do.

So today I have to go get Brownie/Patterson from the boarders and he's going into the dog barn with Cinderella 2.0/Annie Belle, who is much larger and I sure hope they can hang out because I have nowhere to put him in the house. Angelo would eat him I think. I don't know for sure but what I also don't know is whether he is housetrained since he's been pretty much living outside up to now from what I can gather. No judgment here, just observation of the facts. However, he is a very sweet dog and deserves a good home. I don't want to have to drive him to a shelter to risk getting put down but I was thinking that might be my only choice at this point unless someone steps up to give him a foster home. He's about thirty pounds and neutered; he has heartworms also and I am thinking of getting him the shot without the prednisone if the doc can determine beforehand that he has no symptoms on the outside.

I have been reading a lot of shit since lockdown. A LOT of shit. Mostly on the computer and they say you don't process that as well as you do reading from a real page in a real actual 3-D book, but I'm not so sure about that in every case. I have also been listening to celebrated hypnotherapist Marisa Peer who tells me that I'm worth it over and over and over until I can't listen anymore because I know she's talking to billionaires with THEIR bad psychic traumas and problems and she's not really talking to me personally. Even though I think she intends for her words to extend to me and that's the best she can do at this time since her live and in-person sessions cost 12k and since she can't be everywhere in the world at once, awesome as she is.

She's really good. She talks a little bit like Aunt Sofonda. Who talks like a really influential friend from my past.

I have also been reading articles about how to treat dogs for heartworms. Many people are saying that I have been doing that, anyway, and I found this one (do you see where this is going) article on the TVP Journal (peer-reviewed or at least that's what it says) (do you see where this is going) that says you don't have to use the prednisone for two months unless the dog has major coughing and crackly-sounding lungs on the outside where you can actually hear this. You can just have the shot and it's a three-day procedure where they keep the dog for that period of time and I guess that's in case something goes wrong because it's a risk to do it but I guess they've had some success with it or they wouldn't be offering it. I think the call is made in the end by that split-second decision the vet has to make that leans via intuition one way or the other. And if you get the shot for your dog and not the prednisone, then Tinky doesn't tear up her crate pulling the blankets through it by sheer force of will and she doesn't get out of the crate and jump up on the food can and over the baby gate to eat everybody else's food and she doesn't gain all that weight (oh god is she obsessed with the DOG'S WEIGHT TOO? Please dear god tell me no) (I mean that would be vanity to the EXTREME, if you were worried about your self-image if your DOG got fat too, for chrissakes)

You can see where this is going.

So. We're all mad here. I have a really influential friend from my past who was talking to a psychic in California years and years ago, her name was Rhea (pronounce: RAY-ah) (isn't that a beautiful name? I think it is) and Rhea said to him, If you see those little black dots on occasion and then they disappear when you look again, you should say, Welcome, thank you for coming from your faraway galaxy to help us!

So I do that occasionally even though I don't see the black dots much or maybe just once or maybe they were floaters that happened when Lily Belle crashed into the side of my face and I had to go get my retina laser-stitched up as I think I talked about in a previous entry of this wannabe-illustrious and ridiculous blog.

So. Rhea also said that the first part of this century, all hell was gonna break loose. And this was in 1993 or 1994 or so when she said that. My friend who talked to her was into all kinds of fascinating things. It's where I get most of my education about the esoteric and the arcane. I owe him a great debt for things like The Urantia Book and The Golden Bough and probably The White Goddess, too. All of which are very interesting books and you may derive what you will from knowing the titles of these things.

You may even fall down a rabbit hole from which there is absolutely no return, unless they lobotomize you after reading them and I wouldn't let them do that if I were you. It wouldn't serve you too well.

Or maybe it would. I don't actually know the answer to that conundrum. Why did I even bring it up? I'm guessing years of dieting have put paranoia into just about everything I do. It's actually true. I don't know how I've made it this far and trusted other people as much as I have, to tell you the truth. I'm paranoid about EVERYTHING. I'm even paranoid about my paranoia, but obviously not paranoid enough about it not to express that thought here.

And then on Calm dot com they are saying lately that you are not your thoughts, so let's throw that in there just for good measure.

But then, Rhea told my friend that the rest of the century would even itself out and that everything would get glorious for everyone. And the Age of Aquarius would allow humankind and all other sentient creatures to flourish and thrive. I almost forgot to put that in.

Now, let's take a step back. Today is only one day. I have to get through my coaching call with Isabel Foxen Duke at twelve noon, unless the Second Coming happens or something (or maybe it'll actually be the Third by this time) and then I have to go get migraine meds from the pharmacy and Brownie/Patterson from the boarders and then I have to bring him home and see will he manage to get along with Cinderella 2.0/Annie Belle and if this does not happen successfully then I will have to either take him back to the boarders or get an instant foster home or even an instant forever home for him.

You can see where this is going. And I have to also throw in "Lord willing" after all of these items, if not actually out of respect for the "powers that be" that some politicians are always talking about when they write you their form letters back via the email, explaining to you that they cannot speak freely because they will be chastised for it, then they go ahead and speak freely anyway which just seems crazy to me, but it's very instructive in the literature of today and might even become a literary device but I suspect it already has been one for quite some time and its name is either irony or hypocrisy, with a good bit of paradox and/or parisology thrown in...but let's not digress too much because I was explaining just a bit ago that EYE have to throw in "Lord willing" after all of the items on my list of things to do today because it's kind of a compulsive superstitious good-luck thing with me. And also it's a memory of something a lady used to say, a lady I used to know who ran an animal shelter. She had a fit when her best friend died and she doesn't talk to me anymore and wrote letters to my place of employment trying to get me fired at that time. Which didn't happen.

I forgive her. She was wracked by grief. Or maybe she was just plain crazy, I don't know. Some people are. Compassion wins the battle and holds the fort. I don't like war metaphors but there you have it, that's what it says in the Tao Te Ching, according to Ursula Le Guin.

So you can kind of see where all this is going. Or maybe you can't. I actually kind of CAN'T see where all this is going because I do not at present know the actual outcome of the events of today. It gives me a little bit of anxiety sometimes, when that happens, as that whole setup is a little bit anxiety-provoking, I must admit. I suppose I have to suck it up buttercup because that's the human condition tootsie and there's no way around it. You just have to keep going.

We will see where all this goes. We will just have to wait and see, provided we are lucky enough to get to that point. And there may be some who will say they don't know how much luck actually has to do with it. But that depends on their personal philosophy and it probably doesn't depend on mine.

I suppose, however, that dealing with migraines and eating disorder therapy/the riddance of diet mentality and too many dogs and cats and a pandemic and a house foundation that's a bit wobbly and whatever else I'm dealing with, well that's CON-tent, isn't it, and without CON-tent, life wouldn't be much of anything, I don't suppose. I mean at least I'm not BORED.

But then again, if I were on a beautiful white yacht at the edges of the glorious Mediterranean and it was a glorious day and handsome lads were bringing me pineapple drinks and I hadn't a care in the world, well, how on earth would I manage that? With my distinctly Puritan-tinged Cumberland Presbyterian ancestry worrying about all the great heaps and piles of suffering of all the others on our beautiful planet, how on earth would I ever be able to stay with that beautiful relaxing scenario? I'd probably have to jump overboard and swim to shore and call the Red Cross to ship me home where I'd just turn around and rescue another dog! Is what!

(Although I do admit that, paradoxically or hypocritically, or both, I went to Payne's Drug Store for a hot dog and then to Patches Secondhand/Thirdhand Market the other day for a few hours just to take a break from the dogs so you never know.)

There's just nothing you can do with some people and you might as well give up. They're gonna be what they're gonna be, and that is all. Stop trying to control them, you'll never do it. There are much more fun things to do besides trying to control other people. Needlepoint, for one.

It was nice to dream about building a Sculpture Garden in the back yard (see previous few posts for more on this), but I think I have to get permanent homes for a few dogs first. If you missed that part you'll have to go to the blog because I don't know if I have time to repost the posts on all that here, you can probably see that I've skipped a few here (on Facebook) and if you really want to read it all then the blog is located at www.angstinlangston.com

(and I can't honestly tell you if I don't NOT have time to repost them, oh god don't go there you'll never get out, please just back up and continue) (say this like Marisa Peer would say it and it'll come out sounding just right)

and now I can see how incredibly much of a foreshadowing the name of this blog has indeed turned out to be. When I picked it I just thought it was clever, but you have to be careful when you're naming things.

I should hope, however, that the "powers that be" will prove helpful. One may hope, anyway.

Also Gianangelo had diarrhea all night and had to keep going out. Needless to say, I didn't sleep much. No more cat food, no more popcorn and no more prosciutto rolls with mozzarella cheese for Gianangelo. No matter how much he may want them. I will at least do him the courtesy of eating the popcorn somewhere else where he can't see what I'm doing. Although I have a feeling he will smell it and maybe to a dog smell is kind of a good thing; if he could talk, he could tell me that it really hurts his feelings that I'm not sharing the popcorn with him, but he might also tell me that just the smell of it is oh so satisfying and that he doesn't actually need to eat it, that the dog food is enough.

Try telling that to Annie Belle. All she wants is chicken and gravy and the leftover filet mignon. And the entire half a cherry pie that did not get eaten by anyone else during the week somehow. She won't even eat the kibble. I hope she doesn't eat Brownie when I put him into the barn with her today.

You can kind of see where this is going.