THE LOST DOGS OF LANGSTON.

Entry 12.

Lily Belle. The Catahoula hound mix. About 55 or 60 pounds.

Dogs should be our markers. They should be not only the biological markers for the ecosystem, kind of like frogs are, and luna moths, but also the psychological markers for all human institutions. We should put them up as the sacred and holy animals of America, of this nation. We should forget about monuments altogether and just concentrate on dogs. Saving them, giving them good homes, playing with them, feeding them, doing everything dogs want and need for us to do for them. Dogs tell you what's really going on. They're our content, our most important content, it's the most basic and sincere and wholesome kind. If you have a dog, YOU HAVE A LIFE. NO NEED TO GET A LIFE IF YOU HAVE A DOG.

If you have TWO dogs, even better. More content. (I do not use content there as in happy, but content as in stuff going on to fill up space. Not that they can't both exist together, I'm just here using the one that is pronounced CON-tent.) More life. Dogs are really and truly humankind's best friends. It is just that way. They should be the sacred cows of this continent. For hundreds and hundreds of years! We shouldn't have to sign petitions EVER for some asshole starving his dog to death or some stupid girl leaving her dog to die in an abandoned apartment somewhere because she's a jerk and everyone should hate her for eternity. We shouldn't! It just shouldn't happen! The NATIONAL ANIMAL should be the DOG.

And LAWS should be MADE. To make life EXTREMELY GOOD FOR ALL DOGS in this country.

That would probably help a lot of people, too.

I got Lily Belle in May of 2018 or so. She was so cute. I fell in love with her on Facebook. Once you fall in love with a dog on Facebook, not even your smartest psychic can tell you not to go get that dog. Well they can tell you but you won't listen.

I have several psychics and they're all very smart. I don't mind telling you.

So now my heart is heavy because Lily Belle is going to live with someone else and that person's dog who needs Lily Belle to be his companion because he lost his companion. Lily Belle is a very good companion. She is wailing and doing that high-pitched frantic little bark even now lately because Shelby is gone to another farm and she is not in there with her to keep her company anymore while Tinky goes out on her mad raving spree trying to catch the bees in the new springtime yard. I think the bees taunt Tinky to see if she can catch them. She takes the bait.

I know Waldo the yellow cat taunts the dogs to see if they will chase him. He must be an adrenaline junkie.

So maybe I should have listened to my psychic and refrained from getting Lily from the pound that day because several months later she ran into the side of my head at full speed and I had to go get my retina lasered up.

But you know? I woulda lost sleep thinking, She's gonna get put down at the shelter. No one's gonna take her. No one's gonna go get her if I don't. I woulda lost sleep. I could never have forgiven myself. That one brown eye and one blue eye! Who could resist??? I couldn't! I didn't! She wobbled in from her surgery and put her head on my lap. There was no way I wasn't gonna take her home to at least try.

And how the hell else are you gonna get to be a folk hero without getting your eye smashed up by a well-meaning dog at least once? Tell me how.

So now Lily Belle is going to meet her new family and I feel more like a failure than ever. Where was that stupid billionaire I was supposed to meet who would come and love all these dogs more than life itself. Why can't I be an energy vampire and hex the energy out of all these dogs so that I can take care of them while they laze around like deflated Christmas yard decorations, all of us living our halcyon days out in calm and peaceful boring bucolic day-to-day scenarios. Where was the universe when I needed the universe. Blah, blah, blah.

I guess I'm not done enough in this plane of existence yet to be able to see the entire picture. I sure hope that happens someday. Maybe it's the last thing you see before you die. Would sure be interesting if that were the case.

Two of my other psychics tell me not to feel like a failure, about not being able to keep all these dogs. They tell me that I've gotten the dogs this far, I've saved them and now they're going on to their new homes and their next phases of life, and it's all good, I've done enough, I've done what I was supposed to do and now it's time for me to let it go and quit trying so hard. These two psychics want me to move to Albuquerque with them. I kinda want to go but I'm stuck on the farm like my granddaddy was stuck on the farm. Also I'm afraid of airplanes. Not the existence of airplanes themselves, just getting into them to go somewhere, that's what I'm afraid of. If you look earlier in my blog you'll find the story of my granddaddy's ghost. He did not travel much and liked to stay on his farm mostly. I think he was truly an earthbound spirit and I think I am one too. I can't move to Albuquerque, it's a Leo and Leo is not good for Aquarius. Or at least that's what I've always read, except in Linda Goodman's Love Signs, where everything is perfect for everybody of every sign in every combination. Or if not perfect, at least workable.

Maybe I should go to Albuquerque. But I'm really too tired to contemplate a move right now. Moves are some of the stressful-est things you can do.

With regard to saving dogs and other animals: we just do what we can and when our wrist and thumb aren't working we realize we are maybe trying to do too much. There are a lot of things that we don't know. We meaning me (I think I mentioned in an earlier post that "we" is my preferred pronoun). We sit down and sometimes we play video games.

We thought we were indestructible and that all this was our "pandemic project" and that it was something to do while we waited it out and that we were going to prevail because we were a total ninja, having dealt with meth heads (more about this later) and evil contractors stealing our money and leaving jobs undone and quitting drinking and brown recluse spiders and rat snakes getting stuck and dying in glue traps in our closet and neighbors who are "different" and pulling apart two fighting dogs and floods and sump pump failures and scary problems with the weirdass foundation of our house and people telling us we were going to hell and maybe a couple of threats of other things I won't even name because I am too scared of them to say them aloud. But we built a safe room in the garage here for ourselves because of maybe one of those threats, maybe two, and now you probably figured out at least the one.

Don't say it. Don't even think it! I'll hex you. You better believe I will. If I catch even a whiff of that thought on even the bare outer edges of any of my psychic perimeters, I'll hex the bejeezus outta you. I'll redo my boundaries! I'll put up the "wall of fire"!!! You'll never be the same!! Never!!

Yes. Deep down we know we are too cowardly to run the vacuum cleaner. We know. We're working on it. Deep down, we don't wanna be successful because of all the fearsome stuff that comes with it. We don't WANT success. We don't WANT our Chinese rug.

But we're gonna try at least something to have it anyway because by gum, we are tired of being scared of everything. And we are learning to catch ourselves doing that and putting a stop to it, is what we are learning to do. And I hope you're learning that too.

Lily Belle. She's a beautiful dog now. But she was SO CUTE when she was just a little pup. Remember this. They're gonna change. If you're an A to Z person with dogs, you can go all the way through. At the end it's very hard. It's very difficult. But it's very rewarding and you owe it to yourself to go all the way from A to Z with them. Chalk another good life for a dog up for you. A to Z. Go as far as you can. If you need help, get help. Try to forgive yourself for not being "perfect." Whatever that is.

She was so cute when she was little.