(07-19-2019, 12:59 AM)taramarie Wrote: How are you going pbrower? Been very worried about you.
It has been rough. I am finding that others care about me even if I am in a situation from which I cannot really extricate myself.
Maybe I was wrong to expose my dog to my doomed parents on the last days of their lives. I figured, though, that the dog had every right to know how its loved ones were faring. That dog also experienced how I grieved. Maybe he wanted to spare me...Dogs read us well, seeming to know us in ways that we do not know ourselves.
Unless he has been taken in by now, he surely dies today if he has not yet. The heat index in this area is about to reach 110F (45C) today for the first time in many years due to a combination of temperature and humidity. My home is on the margin of where one can live without air conditioning, and global warming has been slow to hit here. But when it does, we will have milder winters but hotter summers.
I made a mistake in letting the dog out onto the front lawn to do his dirty work. He acted in apparent urgency. I suspected that the end was coming. He was old, and he was full of warts and had some tumors. I had planned to give him a bath to get the stink off -- and it was a new, sickening stench. Maybe it came from inside him. His senses were weakening, he was eating less, and he was losing weight. He likely had cancer.
I am in many ways a misfit in my community. The job opportunities are low-end economically: farm labor and precarious factory work, and roadside services. Most of the work needs nothing more than a high-school diploma that shows more that one is not a rebel than that one has more than a dull-normal intellect. (You do not want to hire a high-school drop-out, but you can hire someone in high school to do fast-food work or do housekeeping in a motel). The secret of happiness is either stupidity or being rich.
I go through the expressions of hope, but I probably need a dog to keep me from going off the deep end. The local dogs have me figured out: you can't fool them. They knew that dog, too.
By the way -- how did the surgery go?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.