The Wrong Dog Blog

He loves to be Outside. He sniffs things. He looks around and wags whenever he sees a human walking toward us, even if there is no glance in our direction. He could sit on the front steps and just feel the air on his face for hours if I would let him. He is most relaxed when we are walking.

For me, Out is, at best, a state of tension: someone might come up and try to interact with me, even in the middle of the night. Mostly I just watch Sunny wander about. As Sunny wags his tail at the approach of every human, I tense up, hoping the human will pass without taking any notice of us. I like breezes, but prefer them from fans rather than the random fluctuations of Out. I’m much more comfortable with walls around me, with the known objects of my home, than even in known Outdoor spaces.

Once we get inside and I start relaxing, Sunny settles down to wait for his next venture Out. He naps. He sits and stares at me. If I put the computer aside, he leaps to his feet wagging his tail; if he’s in a different room, he hears me moving and charges in, the tail going and the face with a grin of woofy expectation.

For him, In is the state of wanting to be Out and not being there. For me, Out is the state of wanting to be In and not being there.

It turns out that a lot of the tapes I had stored in the basement are moldy. So moldy that I don’t want to put them in my VCR to get what’s on them onto DVD.

It’s like trying to get in touch with an old friend you haven’t seen for a long time and finding out they’re dead. One of the things I do is rewatch things I’ve seen before: most videos have too much stuff in them for me to absorb everything on a first viewing, so I can watch a show many times without boredom, and I like revisiting characters I like. (Doubtless some human-booster will argue that this is a drawback in Aspies. Stick your nonexistent attention-span where the sun don’t shine and don’t burden me with your shortcomings!) Some of the stuff I’ve lost is available commercially, so I can eventually get it again, although it will take a while. Some of it was obscure one-season shows that will almost certainly not come out on DVD. For instance, CBS’s Now & Again: how can you get more romantic than a story about a forty-something-year-old guy whose brain is put into the body of a superhuman twenty-six-year-old but is still so devoted to his forty-something-year-old wife and their teenage daughter that he risks a death sentence by refusing to divorce himself from his old life? Why on earth didn’t that survive? It even had plenty of action sequences for the brainless crowd.

Others were Japanese series, some of which have come out for the American market, but I’m not keen on the American translation houses. They have a tendency to do things like hard-title the translated lyrics of songs (hard-titling means you can’t turn off the translation). I hate that. And some of it won’t come out for the American market: too much plot and not enough mindless action. (Anime may be associated with mindless action over here, but that’s only because the American market is so damn attention-challenged that they can’t sell the intelligent stuff over here. The industry won’t even let you try. I know: I lost a lot of money trying to break into the business.) I am really surprised by how much of my Japanese collection was down there. I remembered not wanting those in the basement, and I thought I hadn’t done so.

Joh’s going to kill me. The Japanese collection is as much hers as mine, if not more (she did more taping for the Japanese friend who taped for us). I did ask her what she thought about putting the tapes down there all those years ago, and I remember that she never answered me (I was angry about that), but still I made the decision to put them down there.

I’m not done down there yet. I’ve got to find room up in the apartment for everything that’s salvageable. I’ve got to work one-handed down there because Sunny cries if I leave him up in the apartment while I work down there. I guess it’s because he can hear me moving around but can’t get to me. Anyway, I have to keep him on a leash when I take him in there or otherwise he won’t come out of some of the tiny places he wants to examine.

It is to make one nauseous, even if one wasn’t allergic to mold, which, of course, I am. Joh once said I was allergic to so many things that I was allergic to life, and I agree with her there. Not to mention cobwebs full of dead spiders. I don’t mind live ones—they eat pesty insects—but dead ones are revolting, especially when they cling to you because of the cobwebs. I gotta wash my hair again.

I wish Joh would respond to her e-mail so we can get the killing of me over with.

Gah.

One would think that I would feel some relief after all the stress of the lease situation. Plus I have been getting unwanted stuff out on FreeCycle, which is a good thing. (Although why someone wanted the two faded evening gowns and not the two good evening gowns, I have no clue!) Plus I got a bookcase from my therapist, which is contributing some order to my chaos. But I find that mostly what I want to do is eat and sleep—or perhaps it’s more sleep and eat. I took Sunny for WALKIES!!! on Saturday and today, but that only eases my feelings of guilt over him, not really lift my spirits in the usual sense.

Sunny has gotten back to wanting more WALKIES!!! than I am willing to give. Even after the jaunt out to Joh’s on Saturday, the little woofus was not content. Not old yet, I guess. He’s enjoying all the FreeCyclers coming to pick up stuff. His bark isn’t really warning them off, I don’t think, more like “Hurry up and open the door, Mom, so I can say hi!” He even brought one of them his chipmunk yesterday. (She’d actually come for a ceramic figurine.)

Meanwhile, I’m checking out The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. I mentioned ordering it a while back, before the landlord crisis hit, and it arrived yesterday. When I buy a set, to be sure all the disks are OK, I watch at least one episode from each one; it’s not a guarantee the disk is good, but it’s a pretty good test and is shorter than viewing the whole disk (one hour versus four, with Brisco). At any rate, the viewings allowed me to confirm a woofy phenomenon.

I’ve been watching a fair number of DVDs lately. I’ve been checking out ones I’ve recorded, mostly, so that I can put the tapes in the “To Go Out” pile. Sunny vastly disapproves. My attention is, of course, supposed to be on him. He did for a while sit next to me while I watched, in exchange for tummy rubs, but he apparently has decided it’s not good enough. Grant him his due, I am usually too absorbed to distract. Concentration skills are something we Aspies have, and I can watch many times because I inevitably miss things on a viewing; there’s just too much going on. Some particularly dense films (e.g., The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the Eighth Dimension) I’ve seen more than a dozen times and still find things that I missed before. Anyway, Sunny’s long ago given up trying to distract me from videos.

Last week, though, I was watching an episode of The Day the Universe Changed, and just as the end credits came up, Sunny hopped on the bed and put his paw in my lap. I told him I’d be with him in a minute, and he got downright pesty. I thought the timing was just accidental; that he just happened to need to go out as the show was ending. A literal coincidence.

I noticed last week that he tended to show up at the end of episodes, though. Brisco has provided confirmation. The little woofus only comes up and makes him presence known as the credits are rolling. I can only suppose he’s reacting to the level of the background music and the absence of voices—the episodes of the things I’ve recorded are from back when they didn’t cover every second of the end credits with chatter—but he knows when the episode is done, and he’s not having any more procrastination from the monkey! Outs, food, tummy rubs—whatever it is he wants, now! He doesn’t know why Mommy is more receptive when the music gets loud and the talking stops, but she does!

Today I had a couple of tasks, one of which was washing the woofus. A personal horror to him, and today was no different. I’ll record the usual routine for the blog (my personal e-mail list has heard it already) later as well, but I want to deal with the unusual aspect of the thing.

After he was washed and toweled, I started combing his hair. The first pass is with a large rake that is really more a series of parallel scythes with wavy edges. They’re quite sharp and are for slicing the snarls out of his thick, sodden coat. I always remember as I do this that woofy skin is one-seventh the thickness of human skin and so I must be careful as I wield my blades. I did his chest, then worked around the near side of him, back to his near hind leg. Then I went back to start the far side of him at the shoulder.

I noticed a bright red streak in his fur, right at the base of his neck. What, did he get something on himself already? Wait a minute. That’s not “something”—that’s blood! Blood on my woofy baby! Had I been so careless as to cut him? Why hadn’t he yelped? Where had I cut him?

Frantically, I started searching over him, much to his sulky confusion, but found no breaks in the skin. Then it occurred to me that not only had he not reacted as if cut, but the blood had been on the ends of the hairs. The blood had come from the outside, not in.

I looked down at my hands. There on my left middle finger was a gash somewhere around a half an inch long, bleeding quite profusely for a cut that size.

Last year when it was up for renewal, the landlord had added a new clause, requiring the tenants to shovel the walk. I don’t know about the world in general, but in my state, that’s illegal. The landlord can give a tenant a break in rent if the tenant will take over the task, but to require it, or even raise the rent because the tenant won’t, is illegal.

That’s nice. And just what does one do about that besides move? “Legal” is only as good as your ability to enforce it, and if you take your landlord to court, you’ll have to move anyway so you might as well just move. And last year I remembered that and got to stay where I was.

This year I stupidly tried to push the point. Asperger’s syndrome can (and, in my case, does) affect the processing of data from the inner ear (just as it can affect the processing of all sensory data). Shoveling snow is more hazardous for me than for a human. I pointed this out to my landlord, saying he could get a kid to shovel the stairs and sidewalk for cheaper than what it would cost him if I fell. Now my landlord not only wants me to shovel the walk, he wants me to sign a liability waiver so he can’t be held responsible for my being hurt doing it.

I could kick myself. I knew he’d say that; that’s precisely why I didn’t do it last year. When will I finally learn—how many times do I need to have it proven?—that what humans tell me to the contrary doesn’t matter, that the laws don’t protect me? I am in that marginal section of society with all others labeled “Not Human” by those who are, and you’d think that fact was so heavily emblazoned on my soul that nothing could cover it over. There are a lot more of us in that secton than even I’ve been telling you about in this blog. Under the income level that can afford to sue, for example, you just aren’t human in American society.

So now I have to either kiss Fred’s butt and shovel snow and not be able to sue him if I (high odds) permanently damage myself doing so, or I have to move. With minimal money, too much stuff to move (and I have been working so hard on that!), and a woofus—the last of which reduces my housing options, in my area, to seventeen percent of what they otherwise would be (according to a rental listings site). Now consider that I can’t drive a car (my brain doesn’t process visual data fast enough for me to make rational decisions at car speeds) and therefore need to stay close to grocery stores, and think about what that does to my housing options. Trust me, Fred has done so, and he knows he’s got me where he wants me. I believe it was Carl Sagan who said that “Tiny squared is a very small number.” Fred’s doubtless laughing tonight. I spent the day bursting periodically into hysterical tears.

And people think I’m crazy for having wanted to be dead ever since I was seven years old and realized that if I was dead, no one could hurt me anymore. It’s you lot who are crazy for insisting that I go on, thank you very much.

I don’t actually know they are orphaned, but the hypothesis has legs under it: they are quite small, no bigger than the babies I saw on a wildlife show as still needing maternal care, and they have put in several daytime appearances. I haven’t seen an adult opossum in the area lately, although we’ve had one in the area for a couple years. I’d see it occasionally when I went out very early or very late with Sunny. It acted far smarter than these younglings, which almost let one of my neighbors pick them up.

My neighbors are not civilized about wildlife. I had a family of raccoons living on my balcony one year, back before I had Sunny, and there was much hostility to their presence. The neighbors were determined to kill them since they sometimes saw the mother out in the daytime. I told them what I’d learned from a wildlife rehabber: mother raccoons often need to go out to find food in the daytime because they’re nursing the babies at night, when the babies are awake. It didn’t help, though. Unfortunately I was an idiot, and the baby raccoon ended up being killed so it could be tested for rabies. No, I didn’t touch it, but it accidentally got in my apartment. The mother raccoon came calling it, and I was scared to open the door, not wanting her in the apartment. I should’ve let her in and let them leave together. It was tragic the following night when she came back to call her baby at the last place she’d seen him, and he wasn’t there.

This time I’m being more sensible. That baby opossum, the larger one, looked pretty weak on its pins tonight; I haven’t seen the smaller one since the first appearance. I did not go and try to catch it. I kept Sunny off of it; he clearly wanted to get to know it better. There’s a hollow under the edge of the house that they’ve been staying in, so I’m told; so I went back inside and got a small bowl (used to contain Tofutti Sour Supreme imitation sour cream) and put some of Sunny’s kibble in it. I put the bowl in the hollow. Not that I intend to make a habit of it, but the little guy looked pretty desperate, and it’s obviously starting out with a lot against it. One decent meal won’t make it dependent on humans and may keep it going long enough to figure out where to find food on its own. It’s a good-quality kibble, with fruits and veggies in it as well as meat, and so should be good for the little omnivore.

Earlier today, I learned about their frequenting the hollow because one of my neighbors wants to cover over the hollow with rocks. “Not,” I told her firmly, “while there’re babies there.”

“I don’t want ‘em around.”

“Opossums aren’t any trouble. They almost never have rabies—last I heard scientists thought their body temperature was too low to support it well. If you leave opossums alone, they leave you alone.”

“They’re funny-lookin’.”

“Well, I’m no beauty, and no one’s offered to kill me yet. Would you?”

She laughed. I doubt she took it to heart; she was for killing a skunk merely because it was a skunk. She’s wrong, though: the opossums are not funny-looking. They’re adorable little balls of fluff with big black eyes and bewhiskered snoots. Granted, that’s immaterial to their right to go about their opossum business, but for the record, they’re very cute.

I hope the opossums find the food; when I saw the one looking weak, it wasn’t near the hollow, but I didn’t see it around when I came back with the food and thought the best place to put it was where it tended to take cover.

As usual, I didn’t get done near what I hoped to accomplished. I did move things around a bit in the bedroom and get some stuff thrown away and get some stuff put in the box for Bianca and get some VHS tapes converted to DVD. I decided to indulge myself and get rid of about twenty-five tapes a lot faster by buying The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. on DVD. (Whether you like Westerns or scifi or comedy, it’s wonderful! It just had the worst time slot in TV.) I got all my prescriptions refilled. I kept my blog updated. I walked my woofus.

Speaking of which, if you thought this would become the Right Dog Blog, fear not. Today we went for WALKIES!!! and I had to turn him for home rather than his taking me there. I’d already gone on two errands before the WALKIES!!!, and my foot just couldn’t take any more. Since my right foot is incapable of correct foot action until the nerve grows back, the thing swells with fluid when I walk. Sure, everyone’s feet swell when they walk, but when I got home, my right foot was brick red and stiff. I had to spend a few minutes bending it to get it approaching the right color. Anyway, my woofus wanted much more in the way of WALKIES!!!, giving the lie to his mommy’s notion that he is becoming an old fogy woofus. Unfortunately I expect trouble tomorrow, when he will get no WALKIES!!! at all. It was fairly nice today, though. The clouds came in to cover that ghastly sun, some gentle breezes kept it cool, we caught the tail end of the cherry blossoms (they’ve been lovely this week), and the violets (my favorite) were at their height. Can’t do better if you’ve got to have WALKIES!!!

I made some gluten-free cupcakes with a mix that Helen (my therapist) gave me. The mix was probably supposed to make a dozen and a half cupcakes because it made seventeen (I like batter, so that accounts for number eighteen). The only thing wrong with them is that, being chocolate, they cannot be shared with woofi. I guess that’s what they make doggie treats for. Helen also gave me the URL of a gluten-free bakery that ships. Maybe I can eat sandwiches again!

The only down note in my busy day was another visit by The Neighbor (no blog alias as of yet—I need to find a cluelessly irresponsible fictional character to draw on!). I mentioned that I had suggested to the landlord that we have two free-sales this summer, one in May and one in August, to get out some of the stuff stacked around here. The Neighbor wants to have another yard sale. To understand my unfriendly response to her suggestion, you must understand that (a) to advertise a free-sale on a FreeCycle list (or anyway our FreeCycle list), there cannot be a for-profit sale going on at the same location at the same time, and (b) that her yard sale last summer took all summer to get organized and happen. She was all over the front of the building all summer long. Besides having to detangle Sunny from her stuff every time I took him Out, I didn’t get to participate in the landlord’s free-sale because it didn’t happen because of The Neighbor’s yard sale. I e-mailed our landlord and asked him to declare it a free-sale-only summer. It’s not like The Neighbor’s junk is likely to move for any money anyway; she’ll be lucky to get rid of it for free!

I suppose I shouldn’t be down that I didn’t get more done cleaning-wise, but there’s just so much to go through, and I know that eventually the “getting-rid” is going to get hard. So far I flit from one kind of thing I could get rid of to the next, hoping against hope that somehow I won’t have to get rid of any of them. I want to move next year, however. I have just had enough of the stairs out front, and Sunny’s not going to be able to handle them as he ages. I am going to have to get rid of a lot before I can move, though. I am just suspecting that everything I want to keep is in the first archaeological layer, but I can’t get down to the other layers to be certain. Gah.

I did walk my woofus, and it looks like this short (compared to his previous standard) WALKIES!!! thing is here to stay. He did want to go around the larger block, the one we live on rather than the one we face, which is uphill at a steep gradient, but he wanted to go around it most of the way, head halfway up another slope, spend about fifteen minutes grazing, and then back down all of it and go straight home. Of course Sunny’s cow impersonation is generally followed by his cat-with-hairball impersonation, but today it fortunately was not. We just came home.

I did make the mistake of taking him into the basement with me while I looked for videotapes. That is, after all, where the mouslies seem to be based, so he spent the rest of today insisting we return to the basement. I was not keen on doing that because it occurred to me after a few minutes in the basement that my landlord had spoken of putting poison down there for the mice and I didn’t want Sunny to get into it. I need to visit the basement without him next time, but unfortunately he can hear me in the basement and cries continually while I am down there, which is why I took him in the first place.

Anyway, the continuing mess and the trend for lower energy expenditure on Sunny’s part would get me down if I allowed myself to think about it, which I’m not going to tonight. Instead I wind up with what I planned to wind up with yesterday, the account of when I first noticed that Sunny wasn’t a puppy anymore. I quote from the e-mail I sent to friends (with appropriate alias substitution ^_^).

16 January 2007

Today I braved the at-long-last wintry weather to see if there was mail. There wasn’t, which was surprising. Clarence usually hits the place by 1 PM. I forget what I went to the kitchen for when I got back inside, but I wasn’t in there long: two minutes at most. As I was leaving the kitchen, I found a nearly entirely destuffed chipmunk lying across the doorway.

It had not been there when I went into the kitchen. I was sure of it. I picked it up. There was no spaniel in evidence. I suspect it was, to steal a line from the Blackadder saga, a cunning plan to trick Mommy into playing. That’s about as subtle as Sunny plans get, so I would’ve loved to reward him by playing, but there just wasn’t time. I had work to do. I put the chipmunk back where I had found it and went on to the bedroom.

In less than two more minutes, Sunny was standing in the bedroom doorway with the chipmunk dangling out of his mouth. He had his head in that hyperalert mode: straight up, ears perked, clearly saying, “You must have seen the Object of Woofiness, Mommy!”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart, Mommy’s gotta work.” I commenced messing with Excel sheets containing sales data from last summer.

“Never take ‘Later’ for an answer!” may well be the spaniel motto. He hopped up on the bed, with the chipmunk still dangling from his mouth. I reached for it, figuring I could throw it for him without really interrupting my work, but no, he dodged. If he thought that was the start of a frolic, he soon discovered he was sadly mistaken. Fine, I thought. Don’t let Mommy throw it for you. I continued working.

About a quarter till three, Sunny started yipping. “What now?” He ran for the door, yipping. Oh, I thought, Clarence is probably here. Back before the postal service forbade it, Clarence would give Sunny a treat whenever he went by, so he’s one of Sunny’s favorite people. It’s like radar: Clarence doesn’t even have to be near the house for Sunny to have a Clarence fit. Clarence says that the postal truck must have a unique sound because Sunny is not the only member of his canine fan club to insist on going out the instant Clarence’s truck makes an appearance in the neighborhood.

So we went out and Sunny acted goofy and I saved Clarence the trouble of going up our stairs, which weren’t too bad at the time, but they’re never good. We went back in. I got back to work. Sunny curled up next to me for some serious napping.

I decided to wrap up work for today at 6 PM and have a good frolic with Sunny, but just as I was about to sleep the computer, I saw some work that I had forgotten about but had to do today (Bianca: the 1/15 postage fees ^_^). Darn it, I thought, but I plowed through them in half an hour.

At long last! Time for quality time with my boy!

“Hey, Sunny, look what Mommy’s got!”

He woke up and looked at me with sleep-filled eyes. I don’t think he even saw the chipmunk.

“It’s the chipmunk!” I informed him, waving it in his face.

His expression slowly moved to quiet puzzlement, as if to say, “Why are you waving a dirty and limp chipmunk in my face?”

“Get the chipmunk, Sunny! It’s going to get away!”

“Let it,” his profound lack of motion said. He finally readjusted so that he could mouth the chipmunk a bit.

“That’s a boy! Get the chipmunk! Get the chipmunk, Sunny!”

He did try. He could see that it was clearly important to me, but he just couldn’t get into the spirit of the thing. I threw it, to see if a fleeing object would trigger the old predatory chase instinct.

He lay on the bed and wagged rather apologetically at me.

When Sunny was one year old, he was running me ragged. Everyone said that he’d slow down at three. When he didn’t, they said he’d slow down at six. Since he didn’t slow down at all at three, some part of me stopped believing that he would slow down. Even though I knew intellectually that Sunny had to cease being Super Spaniel someday, his high-energy level has been his chief characteristic for as long as I’ve known him. I couldn’t quite imagine him without it. It was really astonishing when once during a play session last week, Sunny just stopped playing and sat and breathed heavily. Not in distress, mind you, still smiling a goofy grin, but unquestionably stopping because he’d had enough. For the past five years, I have always been the one to tire out.

My baby boy is starting to get old. . . .

Woofi live in the moment and so cannot feel regret that, for instance, they bonded with someone who worries constantly about their needs but does very little about them. Granting that such living makes life easier to get through, I really find that (the beauty of the musical RENT notwithstanding) a reprehensible way for anyone with a basically functional neocortex to behave. Regret is the spur that drives one to do something different the next time, to take time out to plan so that there’s no need for later regret, and the last thing our disposable-everything, instant-gratification culture needs is more people doing more living in the moment. If I ever have another dog, I am definitely going to look for a sedate, stay-at-home, one-person sort of woofus, having managed to pretty well warp the life of one of the opposite sort already.

I meant to finish up with the tale of when I first began to suspect that my boy wasn’t a young woofus anymore, but that has a vein of humor in it that, though bittersweet, is still too much for my mood this evening. I sent that one out by e-mail when it happened, so most (if not all) of the folks who read this blog have seen it. You might want to read it as an anodyne to this entry. I may post it tomorrow if I’m feeling less . . . I don’t know the word I want . . . just less this.