THE LOST DOGS OF LANGSTON.

Entry 28.

Well Langston itself has a little bit of history, but don't we all? It used to be underwater and everyone here moved to Texas. It was a thriving river town in the early 1900s, before the automobile took over as the next new thang and river transportation became the thang that was on the way out. There were 500 people here! A blacksmith shop, four doctors and nine stores! Nine! Also a school. Captain Jackson, who was the mayor of Scottsboro actually for three terms while he was married to Paralee, and while they lived here in this old tottering fan-sucked farmhouse presumably (because I bet the mayor likes to get out of town every now and again) had a lumberyard here too. I have asked everyone about this but no one knows where it was. I guess wherever the lumber was. And I suppose there were lumberjacks there, also.

So now when you look at the Encyclopedia of Alabama on Langston, which is kind of interesting, or at the Wikipedia page on it, you'll see that we are about 3 percent African-American here and maybe 1 percent "other" races...mostly white...we are a little white town and we're not that big on per capita income, matter of fact a lot of people here live in poverty.

Which is why we either need to do a documentary film on The Lost Dogs of Langston and get the Hollywood people out here to hire these people as extras or interview them as main characters or however documentaries are done. And put a little Hollywood cash in their pockets, spread that stuff around like manuria, as an old high school friend of my mother's used to say.

Or maybe I need to build a sculpture garden in the back yard, and get some attention for Langston for that. Magazines will cover it and maybe someone will make some sort of film there. Maybe they'll make videos there and cover the town too. We have pretty horses and pigs and fields and mountains and very loud chickens and wild dogs and lakes out here, there's endless scenery that they could use.

All in all I am trying to think of something to help ALL the people of this town and I don't know what that thing is or is going to be but I'm trying to think of something.

Maybe they don't want any help. There's always that possibility. In which case, it's much better not to help them.

One thing about the wild dogs. A friend told me, with regard to the breed of one of them, that dogs of that type have about a 2-mile wandering range. There are 5 square miles of land area here in Langston, and 3 square miles of water. I guess part of the town is on a lake but I don't know how they mark that off. I just take it for granted because Wikipedia says that's how it is. So, that makes five miles that you can actually walk on, meaning that this one Anatolian Shepherd dog covers about half the town on her usual wandering during the night and/or day.

Which would mean that, with eighty-something families in the town, that about half those families could maybe be feeding her at any given time. No wonder she didn't look starving when she first appeared here...or maybe it was the second time, since I think she visited me sometime in 2019 when she was only about half grown and I got on the horn to try and get a home for her and she disappeared. With forty-something families possibly feeding her, that's an awful lot of food choices for a wandering dog in a small town to be able to have. If indeed all of them are feeding her. And even if she does weigh ninety-something pounds.

Maybe that's why she has to wander, in order to get enough food. Maybe just one owner can't really feed her enough.

Well now she lives in my barn and I have to decide whether to just let her go back with her pack to wander with them after her heartworms are banished, or to get her another home, or to keep her here and eventually give her to these other two friends who kinda love her and want her and would give her a great and wonderful nurturing home. For various reasons they can't do that right now and as the dog barn is convenient, she has a sort of halfway house to stay in where she can be comfortable except for running with her pack, which I wouldn't let her do if we all decided she was going with my friends eventually. Which I would much prefer. Rehoming takes a long time anyway unless you get lucky which I sometimes do, but I would rather trust my luck and not push it, if you know what I mean. And I'm sure you do.

So now I'm wondering, if this town is 5 parts land and 3 parts water, of its 8 parts total, should I get a boat? Everyone else around these parts seems to have one. It's like a Langston thing, having a boat and a golf cart to run to the Quick Stop in. How would you keep all the dogs and cats on a boat, tho'? You'd have to get them little water wings to wear all the time and that would be endless maintenance and jumping off the boat whenever they fell off it to catch them and put them back on it. You'd be a swimming rescue ninja in record time. Unless they never fell off, in which case you're gonna have to work out with weights inside the boat or just swim a lot for yourself.

Or maybe I could just leave them on the farm with John Smith the tenant farmer of Paralee Jackson, or his modern-day version, and I could go sleep on the boat during the good weather. And watch the fireworks from the middle of the lake whenever possible. Which I suppose is rather special and beautiful because it's kinda rare, once a year on Fourth of July is when they do it and it's awesome to watch fireworks while you're on a boat.

Maybe that's why it's so awesome, because it's so rare.

But really when you think about it, there's maybe 270 people in this town, and Wikipedia charts it out for you how many of those are young, or old, or living below the poverty line, and it's kind of like well, this is about how many people we had at Lowe Mill when I was there before, and I didn't know them all but I wanted to help them all as much I could. So I made it a goal (which I didn't accomplish) to buy at least some art from everyone. It was a very ostentatious and auspicious goal and extremely ambitious as well, because people kept coming and going and there was always more art. In a place like that, that's what happens. My goal becamse more and more massive and more and more unreachable. I never will ever achieve it, probably.

In a tiny little town like Langston, you don't get quite as much activity.

I wonder if we need to change that or just keep it like it is. One wishes to bloom where one is planted, one truly does. One wants to see one's neighbors thriving. One does! Even if one doesn't ever see one's neighbors in person, one likes to know that they are all thriving.

I don't think all my neighbors are thriving and I wish there was something that could be done about that. But I have not figured out if a sculpture garden is the answer to that quandary or not. I need a little time to figure things out. Some might say, We already got the Rock Zoo in Jackson County, what the hell we need a sculpture garden for? They already got Ave Maria Grotto, what exact sort of sculpture garden are you talking about? Didn't they take old Howard Finster's place apart eventually? Why would you wanna bother to do something like that? Well Nikki de St. Phalle did one in Tuscany that's marvellous and people come from all over the world to go to it. It's amazing! Yeah and she spent all her money and the last ten years of her life doing it, and she had arthritis pain the whole time. And her husband was runnin' around with a big bunch of other women, too, sashaying all over the jet set in his sportscars with his ascots just a-flyin'. Is that what you want? Well that's none of your business now is it. No, it is not. And no, I do not want the arthritis pain and yes it would be nicer if it were something affordable and yet doable at the same time.

European husbands run around sometimes. It's just a fact of life over there. Nikki de St. Phalle didn't need a husband to be fabulous. She just was. The presence or absence of a husband does not determine that much about whether a sculpture garden needs to be built.

Or not. It's just kind of a hypothetical thing right now. All you need to get from hypothetical to real, though, is to add in the letter "r" and drop "hypoth" and "tic." It doesn't take much.

Some might say, Help yourself first. Don't worry about all those other people. That might be wise advice. One wishes to stay in the flow. One doesn't want to make waves. And it is absolutely true that if you do what you really need to do for yourself, pretty soon the rest of the universe falls in line and behaves accordingly. And all the waves that get made are the ones that were supposed to be there anyway.

But out here in the wilds of Jackson County, if it's your own damn land, then you can damn well do whatever you damn well please on it, I reckon.

And should they all be dog sculptures?

It's a thought. Uncle Wiggily was a thought, too, once. And he became an institution. A corrupt institution, yes, but an institution all the same.

If only you could figure how to keep the corrupt out of the institution before it ever rises up. That, my friends, would be the key.