A Good Dog Will Save Your Life

(I tried to post this on Alt...but after 7 attempts and it STILL sitting unpublished after more than twelve hours...well, fuck them)

Some days are harder than others...and today was a very hard day.

(trust me when I say I know Hard Days)

My old dog died.

My old dog who helped me though a hell of a lot of Hard Days.

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She came into my life at a time when I had a lot of Sturm & Drang rocking my boat. She quite literally adopted me and attached herself to me. And I didn't mind a bit.

Any six week old dog that works as hard as she did to throw off her neglectful owners to come live with me deserves what she wants. I mean...a pup tiny enough to fit in the palm of my hand scales a fence, climbs a staircase and trundles throughout a house until she finds me and passes out exhausted next to my chair? Who the fuck am I to turn her away? That's determination and demands respect.

Many a night, when I pushed away sleep...she sat up with me and kept me level. Don't ever try and tell me dogs aren't intuitive and in tune with human emotions. I'll tell you to go shit in your hat. That dog provided a comforting presence...never asking for anything...just sitting there...peaceful, licking my hand...reminding me that the peace in a life interrupted by the violent and the tragic comes from the simple moments.

That's it, man. She gave me peace.

As we sat on our New Orleans porch and I sipped my beer and she crunched her ice cubes and the evening humidity enveloped us like velvet...she kept me grounded. At a time when I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to come all the way back home...that goddamned good dog gave me a peaceful focal point.
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And now she's gone. 13 and a half years is s good run for a dog. I'd prefer they have 20 or more years...but that's above my pay grade.

She'd been sick off and on for over a month. And overnight it got bad. I had her in the car...driving to the vet...her laying in the passenger seat...me driving one-handed...my other hand on her chest monitoring her vitals...

...when she passed. I felt her heart flutter...and stop. She gave a final sigh, put her head down and that was that. I pulled over three blocks from the vet's office and closed her eyes and wrapped her blanket a little more tightly around her. Then I continued on.
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That's all you can do...suck it up, ruck up, move out.

But I still feel like a mooring line has been broken.

R.I.P. my friend

Kelly

Nov 13, 1995 - May 9, 2009

Cleveland Rocks.....

Marmoset There's Be Days Like This

I just saw on the news that it's expected that in the year 2009 over 443,000 Americans will die from smoking related causes.

I gotta ask...why?

It's so beyond my ken why anyone born after 1970 or so would even start smoking.

There are easier, faster, less expensive and less painful ways to kill oneself.

I Wish I Could Sleep Like This





The kittens at 4 weeks.

Four of the five kittens now living in my house.

That Ol' Plagiarism Thingie

Since maybe just three or four people from the other place read this blog I can post on the plagiarism without a ridiculous pissing contest ensuing. And believe me...my first thought was to bust them and make a big deal in a vindictive way because the perpetrator is an obnoxious ass.

There are two actually...they have a couple's profile but the male half also has his own. The offending blog is in the couple's name (look up Baby Girl in Grubby and VA daddy Dom 64). They showed up in the blogs about a week ago and immediately began being total trolls. They began telling people what and what not to post in blogs, attacking views belligerently, making personal attacks, making threats of violence, etc, etc, etc. You know the drill.

At first I thought they were the "agent provocateur" type of troll who only pretend to be dim and angry to stir up reactions...like Andy Kaufman used to do with his wrestling shtick. Their posts were just so...well, nearly illiterate. You really had to focus to make sense of what they were attempting to say. And they took any answer to their comments as a challenge and made threats. And then the racism started.

Yeah...both sides of the couple are proud and vocal racists. A typical comment went along the lines of Obama will never be elected because "it's called the White House!"

They were so ridiculous I was certain they couldn't be for real. They seemed to be forcing a severe stereotype...I was sure it had to be a character.

Now I'm not so sure.

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This is from their blog:


"There are 107 "Historically Black" colleges whose fundamental blackness must be preserved in the name of diversity, but all historically white colleges must be forcibly integrated, to resist being labeled racism."

And this:


"More & more the Obama campaign is using violence,vandalism and intimidation as its unofficial standard operating procedure. Violence and corruption seem to go hand-in-hand with african American politics. Stories of massive vote fraud by the liberal activists group ACORN have made the news this week,and now Obama's followers seem to be getting increasingly intolerant of free speech and in some cases violent as election day nears."

This first is just one section of several take from an article...

WHAT IS RACISM? by Thomas Jackson {Originally Published in American Renaissance, Vol 2, No. 8}

Which can be found in whole....on David Duke's website. Yeah, that David Duke...former Grand Wizard of the KKK. Did I mention that the male half of this couple has said on several blogs that he's writing in Duke for President this year?

The second bit of text is one of several paragraphs taken word for word and dropped into the middle of another of their blog posts...again no quotes, no citation, no different font or text color...none of the usual things that demonstrate that something is not your own writing....taken from an article on extremely right wing, anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, white supremacy site altermedia.info:

http://us.altermedia.info/news-of-interest-to-white-people/obama-campaign-using-violence-and-intimidation_3839.html

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And so on.

In none of these instances do they mention they are using outside sources. They just cut and paste and weave them into their own racist rants. Most of what they've written so far is plagiarized.

It's obvious as well. When they comment on blogs they really are hard to follow...and amusing in a way some insanely, aggressively maniacal people are. For example...this is typical of their commenting:

"Stay in yankee land loser,& BTW get a real tattoo. Racist,fail to see the problem there guy. Its the WHITE HOUSE & allways will be. Guess you & all the loudmouth Leftest assholes who NEVER serverved a day in your life are allways the ones who run your mouths. Go figure there KEYBOARD RAMBO,BTW My invitatation still stands in real time there sunshine KEYBOARD RAMBO.Barack Hussein Obama a black muslim name,BTW a muslim mole to infiltrate? Go watch CNN ya asshole loser."

It's becoming more difficult to find these choice nuggets since so many people are deleting and/or banning this couple. I guess that's why they started their own blog...to combat alt's "Leftest agenda." (sic) Which is funny because their earliest comments were telling people to stop posting about politics....and to stop censoring the right wing (I guess they knew they'd be so obnoxious as to get banned time and again? Because they made the accusations, obviously, before anyone banned them) while in their own blog they have it set to approve comments...which they don't and leave them hidden in pending.

When their own blog thoughts became coherent...my bullshit RADAR turned on. So I checked in Google...and sure enough...cut and paste idiocy.

So you can see why I wanted to but them...just out of spite for their sheer obnoxiousness.

But I have to admit....they are kinda fun to watch. I wouldn't think so if they were in any way in danger of making a valid and coherent albeit wrong-headed point. But they are just so confused (that's another thing...they can't seem to remember who've they tussled with and keep mixing people up...and belligerently insisting they have the right person...hilarious) and aggressive and vile and comically inept.

Gah. I updated the template for this blog and it screwed up all my links and some other stuff. If you see that I am no longer linking to your blog...it wasn't me...it was the system, man.

I have to rebuild the list now.

I Suppose I Should be Flattered



Out of idle curiosity I spent some time seeing who had been to my various blogs, how they found it (if not a regular or alt refugee), etc. I found one address who had been to my Desert Storm related blog multiple times...so I did some backtracking...and discovered they had found it via a google image search.



It's a teacher in another state who was making a web page on the history of Desert Shield/Storm for his grade school students.



And he used three of my photos on the page.



Which sort of baffles me...because almost all my pics are mundane and sort of dull. If you look around the web, the DS memorial or bio pages...the photos are so very, very similar. In fact, many are much more exciting, dramatic and demonstrative than my few surviving ones. He could have used any number of the thousands of the pics available online. But three of the five were plucked from my blog. Weird.

I guess it might be flattering...that some very young kids will be learning about a short, nasty and mostly eclipsed war and their visuals of it will include the image of my sad, filthy little sand filled tent.