The Wrong Dog Blog

I hate the squatters next door.

The people in the house next door didn’t pay their rent, so their landlord, who had been trying to fix up the place after years of neglect by the previous landlord, finally gave up, stopped trying to improve it, and in fact stopped paying the mortgage. Now the mortgage company owns it, it’s been condemned by the city, and there are many people there illegally occupying it. Yes, I’ve seen Rent and read the freegan take on squatting. I’m not convinced. As I said, the landlord was trying to make it better, and the tenants cut him off at the knees. A building cannot be improved if the landlord can’t get enough money to make his mortgage payments and he eats up his savings trying.

I resent the way the squatters behave. They treat the property I live on as if it’s an annex of the one next door, camping out on our stairs, cutting across our front lawn, and even allowing their guests to hang from our tree. (When I told the guest that the tree was on our property, that she didn’t belong here, and to go away, I got a lecture on how the “law of the universe” forbids the owning of a tree. Like she has a pipeline to the universe and I don’t.) They abused their landlord when he really did try to make the building a nicer place to live, in marked contrast to the way I had to pester my landlord literally all last winter for a ten-minute fix that has since given me reliable heat (as of course I’ve only recently found out because he had it fixed at the end of the heating season). The squatters look down at me because they are artistes (yes, that’s the French pronunciation!), and I am pedestrian enough to hold a job.

But I begin to wonder if my hatred is not because the squatters are parked right in the middle of a dilemma of my own.

Most of the squatters, like the characters in Rent, seem to think that society owes them a living because they are artists. (One of them described himself as a genius when objecting that I called the police when he was demonstrating his “genius” with his electric guitar on the balcony to the entire neighborhood, for the dozenth time, early one morning.) I grant that I think our system for making a living by art doesn’t work. It can’t be a popularity contest. The most important art flies in the face of the mainstream; it won’t be popular. It can’t be by connections for the same reason: the people in power want to stay the people in power, and so they will not assist any art that risks a change in the status quo. I’ve often mourned that the need to earn a living has left me little time to explore my own artistic aspirations. I’ve often deplored the soullessness of commercially successful art. And yet . . . the art the squatters are producing seems sterile to me. Except for that inflicted on the neighborhood unwillingly, they are the only ones who experience it. They touch no one else artistically, let alone any of the other ways they could be helping people if they weren’t playing artist to their tiny circle.

I am not sure I’m not rationalizing, though. I mean . . . I have this blog that is read only by people who know me (sometimes I wonder why I bother with the blog aliases when all these people know each other!). I debate whether I should concentrate on my writing or my knitting, which at least will yield something useful for someone else at the end, or just on my woofus (yeah, the Wrong Dog—it’s his blog, remember?—who loves the squatters, by the way). I try to decide whether the writing will actually accomplish something or just detract from what I can do that helps people. Take, for example, this precise moment in time. What am I doing? Blogging on said blog that only some of the people who know me read. What should I be doing? Quick survey of foremost obligations: catching up on Bianca’s financial sheets (two weeks behind and she’s got other work for me to do and there’s a third party waiting for me to do it!), taking Sunny Out (so he can try to con a few more biscuits out of Biscuitwoman—OK, it’s small, but it would make him very happy), knitting on those socks for Joh, or maybe even working on my fiction—it touches fewer people than my blogging, but the potential if I pull it off is greater, but the probability that I will pull it off is very low. So do I hate the squatters because of their inconsideration for the needs of those around them or do I hate them because they have the courage I don’t, to do without a lot of material things for their art?

I don’t know. In a way, maybe it’s better that I don’t know. I remember when George Bush said what people like about him is his moral clarity, and I thought that anyone who thinks morality should or can be clear, of all things, is a dangerous lunatic who should be locked up for the safety of those around them. I think this murkiness needs to be dispelled, though. Hating is Bad, both in itself and in its effects. I’ve always found it hard to stop hating unless I know why I do. Of course sometimes, as with George Bush, understanding the why only makes me hate more. If it turns out that my hatred of the squatters is really about the harm they do, then it’s going to be a lot harder not to hate them.

And here I am at the end of this entry, no wiser than I was when I started it. The financial sheets are no more caught up, the woofus is no happier, the socks no further along. Maybe next time I have a moral dilemma, I should skip the blog.

With the weather getting cooler, I have been trying to master the fine art of tofu baking. Well, that and the high price and high fat content of the baked tofu at the coop have inspired the tofu baking. At any rate, I’ve been running my oven more. I don’t use it much: ovens are pretty much for baking meats (so far I’m no higher up the food chain than fish), casseroles (usually with a wheat-based pasta and/or cheese, both of which I’m allergic to), or breads/cakes (also wheat based), so there just isn’t much call for it in my life.

About fifteen minutes or so after the oven would go on, the woofus would go nuts. I’d put in whatever it was to bake, go back to work, and in fifteen minutes or so, until I finally took the food out, Sunny would be at me, pawing, whimpering, trembling. My first guess was that he wanted the tofu I was baking (he likes tofu), but when I cooked salmon on the stovetop and he didn’t react, I began to wonder. A woofus wanting baked tofu more than some version of DEAD ANIMAL? Unlikely.

But there was a problem: I believe I have mentioned that I am a recovering clutterbug. My hated mother’s idea of house-cleaning was to assign each of us a task or an area, leave us to do it, and when we thought we were done she would come and “inspect,” by which she meant let us have it about how lousy a job we did. So “cleaning = trauma” is the equation in my subconscious, and my stove needed to be cleaned before anyone came to inspect it. It took a couple weeks, what with needing supplies to be got in and with my working the night shift, but finally yesterday, Helen and I had a counseling/cleaning session in my kitchen. Helen says that I try to clean too perfectly. I’ll try to keep that in mind in future.

With my newly cleaned stove, I called the utility company this morning. They thought I was a little nutty calling entirely on the basis of a dog’s testimony, but they can’t mess around with possible carbon monoxide poisoning so they sent a serviceperson. He also was dubious about the “call from a dog,” but he listened to my story and then pulled out his gadget and turned on my oven. We waited about ten minutes while the oven heated up and the gadget showed slowly increasing levels of CO, with occasional downturns. My CO detector went off for the first time. Sunny started getting trembly and whimpering. “What’s the matter, boy, think we’re trying to poison you?” the serviceperson asked. Sunny went on whimpering.

In the end, the serviceperson’s summation was “Good job, dog!” He tagged the stove and turned off the gas to it. My landlord is being informed that he must replace the stove or get it cleaned so that it burns more efficiently. One can’t help but wonder how long that will take. Meanwhile, I languish for lack of cocoa and miso.

Sunny continued to tell me about the CO for sometime after the serviceperson left, but we went down to the Biscuitwoman for some well-earned woofy treats and now the little guy is having a nap to recooperate from his stress. He knew that oven wasn’t safe, and his nose was better than the supposed CO detector that’s been sitting in my apartment all this time.

The moral, once again, is take your woofus seriously. Odds are that there’s something really going on and your monkey senses are insufficient to realize it.

“Knitting may not solve many ills, but it creates few of them.”
—King Rupert to his son, Prince Andre, A Baroque Fable by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

With all due respect to His Majesty, don’t you believe it.

I am returning to knitting after a twenty-year hiatus. In my previous incarnation as a knitter, I specialized in Icelandic wool sweaters. Most of the people I went to college with have one.

Since then I have learned about the horrors in sheep farming. To be honest, I should have known. The animals that are combed for fiber (cashmere goats and musk oxen) are safer than the ones that are sheared, but viewing a being as a production unit, whether human or nonhuman, makes for an abusive relationship. At least humans can do things to defend themselves, like organize. After hearing about the abuses, I remembered seeing a shearing demonstration when I was a child, after which I had protested to my father that the sheep had cuts all over her. He tried to convince me that the sheep wasn’t suffering, but that’s one of the advantages of autism: the parental tie does not bind so tightly that one believes flagrant nonsense like “Yes, it’s bleeding, but they don’t feel pain like we do.” So why was she crying so loudly every time more blood appeared? Animal fibers are out.

Not a problem, I thought. There are plant fibers out there: cotton, hemp, linen. I can try some of those.

I went over the internet, not to buy yarn but to find types of yarn to buy. I try to buy local when I can, and there’s a yarn shop only a couple blocks from me. Even just combing the internet, though, made me worried. Cotton yarn seems to all come from Brazil. This means that instead of contributing to the abuse of domestic nonhumans I am contributing to the destruction of the rainforest and the abuse of wild nonhumans. Yee gads, what a choice.

I had one knitter suggest acrylic yarn. I did a little research. To quote the Wikipedia article, “Production of acrylic fibers is centered in the Far East, declining in Europe and now shut down (except for precursor) in the U.S.” Centered in the Far East? Can we say “slave labor”? I thought we could. I may like nonhumans better than humans, but that doesn’t mean I’m for abusing humans, especially not economically and politically disadvantaged ones by economically and politically spoiled ones.

I went to the local yarn store, to see what was in stock. The only nonanimal fiber was Brazilian cotton.

This time I did buy local but exploited the rainforest. I’m not giving up, though. The advantage to doing socks is that they take small amounts of yarn, and I can try some of the hemp and linen and so on available on the internet, and when I find something I like, order a color card and go to the local store and ask them to buy it for me as a special order rather than going to the internet stores.

I should mention that there is one animal fiber I am willing to use: Sunny fluff. Dog hair is called “chiengora,” and I am collecting Sunny fluff when I brush him or get him trimmed so that someday I can find a spinner to spin it for me and I can make something from it to always remember my pretty golden boy by. I know past doubt that he is not viewed simply as a fiber production unit, and is not abused, even if he doesn’t get as many WALKIES!!! as he would like. (He did get some today, so all you Sunny fans need not worry that he is losing out to the knitting craze!) I can’t be sure how other nonhumans are treated by their caretakers, however, and as I said, having the nonhumans specifically for the purpose of selling their hair is ethically problematical inherently. So Sunny is it, but only because the hair comes off him anyway while he’s here for more important reasons: the ever elusive UCKY-WET DOGGIE KISSES!