Thinking about buying a Dog? My advice in a 2-minute song

Other than our procession of Collies and German Shepherds back on the farm for 20 years, who were busy all day and night managing the herd (and, amazingly, ‘corralled’ only the specific cows giving milk currently; excluding the ‘ temporarily ‘dry’ ones, for which they seemingly kept a ‘data-base’ worthy of NSA,) I’ve never owned a dog.

And will likely continue that practice until I discover that the Afterlife is actually a heavenly ‘kennel’, where humans spend their eternity feeding animals who, unlike cats, can’t even bother to bury their own poop. (I clean my sidewalk almost daily, sweeping mounds of stinking turds into the street.) Among quite a few other ‘inconveniences’, like not being able to sleep most nights because of some neighboring idiot’s baying hound. Add, that, unlike a cat, who can walk a whole shelf of delicate plants without knocking even one down, the few dogs I’ve been forced to suffer here leave in their wake a trail of wanton destruction. At least a bull in a china-shop can be made into hamburgers; a dog, in the end, is just another hole to dig… to bury it in.
To me, that is. Your mileage is almost certainly different, and I admit to being alone in asking why this creature was ever domesticated.

Ok, hope you can still enjoy the song though. The singer actually wanted to purchase a ‘man’s best friend’ from ‘Hairy Harry’s’. He just had piss-poor luck. I’ll save my money for a new future breed of canine which looks like a cat, buries its poop, oh, and purrs. Of course, my (currently) 14 kitties were all free, so there’s that.
Enjoy the song/JS

Lyrics:

‘Sold by weight, not by volume”
This critter isn’t all you made him out to be
I’m giving you your doggie back!

Well it started with a Pinscher but the neighbors tried to lynch her
Then you stuck me with that Setter, but.. I couldn’t pet her
Then I thought I got lucky but ‘Is this a pointer?’
All the money I spent and in the end I didn’t woint her

We had Sparky, and Barky, and Darth Vader
and the Mother of ’em all; I’m so glad we finally spayed her!

We had: Car-catcher, and ‘Car-chaser’
And that tired old greyhound you know you told me I could race her

Prices vary, here at ‘Hairy Harry’
There’s a sucker born every minute
You buy the box; Cash and Carry
Ya start bitching when you see what’s in it
I’m gonna give the doggie back

So Harry, don’t call me with your ‘Pick of the Litter’
In case you didn’t notice I’m a little bit bitter
I wuz just looking for a Man’s Best Friend
I was taken for a ride, and bitten in the end.

It was a motion picture; lots of action
I’ll never get no satisfaction

And I’m… giving you your doggie back

2nd try at posting this: WTF?

The Chilean Miners, Trump, and Death: Three Dismountable(?) Horsemen

Six years ago today, turns out, was when my life temporarily lost any hope of anticipating ‘all-is-well’ sleep-time calm. Hearing that men were trapped underground by a South American mine-collapse, with, at the time, scant hope of their rescue was, to me as a fellow human, a one-time underground excavator myself, and worst of-all, an ir-redeemable claustrophobe, an emotional Death Sentence. Initial reports mentioned, optimistically, a slight chance for a rescue… which could require 6 months. I actually , tell no lie, lived on a bread-crust a day for a period, out of curiosity and empathy, meanwhile glued to any news source. And tried not to think about life after, god-forbid, all hope had been officially abandoned.
But, as I’m sure everyone knows by now, Fate, tons of equipment, cash, love, luck, and techie-stuff did, in the end bring them all up to the surface.
So… one win so far.

(Claustrophobia did attack me again just last night, in a car on the way south to Israel’s ‘Maktesh Ha-gadol’, a geological depression in our Negev Dessert, where we went to view the Milky Way.) You may, , sadly, have last seen the tremendous splurge of stars crossing the sky from horizon to horizon decades ago. Junk lighting at night has almost completely wiped this view of our Galaxy end-on from the memory of whole generations.
At any rate, I was trapped, on the way there, for an eternity (ten seconds at least) by a malfunctioning seat-belt system. I’m sure my fellow passengers will now be forever convinced that I am probably insane, judging by my hysterics. I did, in my agony, recall the above miners though, wishing I could have emulated their heroic resillience. My seat-mate finally pushed the magic button and I was saved!

Ok, moving on, and speaking of insanity:
A remarkably similar sense of hopelessness has darkened my heart in the last few months. No, not the ‘big ‘C’… no… ‘The big ‘T’. I was contemplating thorazine, stelazine, diazepan, and Ethanol already by the mid-primary season, consumed by my manifest inability to handle having a joke like Trump as the President of my former country. I watched aghast as the shaky soil ‘over-burden’ shook, shifted, and settled onto the heads of my metaphorical ‘miners’, the American citizens and electorate. Until lately it appeared that we were doomed. I clutched at any polls suggested a happy ending.

And only this week do I finally feel less frantic, capable of perhaps reducing my anti-anxiety dosage a percent or two.
It appears, depending of course on the commentator, that perhaps I may not need to brace myself for the nauseating shock of seeing this orange-mopped bozo’s profile pix hanging above the Passport Control lines at JFK on my next visit. A gratifyingly large porportion of both politicos and thinkers has this week come to the conclusion that Trump-horror.com can and must be somehow derailed. P.T. Barnum’s one/per/minute estimate may account for the stubborn support among mad, white, low-info males, but we are lucky in having plenty of minutes left for the birth of decent and rational Americans, who without any profound love of Ms. Hillary none-the-less can still easily identitify the lesser of two ‘evils’.

Which leaves Death: the final frontier. I include it here as a common bond, not so much because it was the obvious ‘try not to think about it’ theme in Chile, or even because Trump’s bizarre, (and revealing) question to an interviewer :”If we have nukes, why not use them against ISIS?” foretells mass death-by neutrons during his god-forbid-it watch, but because..:
Because I’m not sure I can take this madness, this tension, much longer. Sure, at one point I ate green leafy vegetables mainly to up my chances of watching the first manned mission to Mars live, or, with larger portions, being around for first-contact with our brainy-but reptilian-looking pan-universal life-forms.
I’m kinda over that. And not ’cause I’m sick of spinach.
With 93% of pedestrians on my street here transfixed into zombies by their holy smart-phones, with the daily record-setting high temperatures failing to convince hordes of cognitively-challenged deniers of the need for immediate and drastic action, with the cultured world functionally catatonic in the headlights-glare of ISIS atrocities, and…. and with my big-picture realization that a trip to Mars will ask more follow-ups than it will answer.. (read: more lettuce for moi, ugh) I might as well cut my losses and exit the theatre before the climatic horror-scene turns the flick into what the critics, if any survive, will have to call ‘an epic tragedy’.
Thus, I may indeed tomorrow schedule, 20 years too late, a preliminary blood test. Dr’ Google will give me some feeling for what’s ailing me. My policy, you see, has always placed a priority on ‘die young, and leave a good-looking corpse’. After all my euphoric successes in life, for me to go out as a submissive ‘patient’ with a number on the back of my exposed rump is for me a deal-breaker. The only smart move is to know how long I may have… to erase files, to box up my awards and artifacts, and to go out proudly, under the Milky Way.
Hmm.. melodramatic much? IDK, having saved the miners, and possibly the American electorate, Victory over Death on my terms may be… um.. do-able/ JS