THE LOST DOGS OF LANGSTON.

THE LOST DOGS OF LANGSTON. Entry 5. Well I promised to tell you about Angelo but it's a little like Jacques le Fataliste, he promises to tell the story of his amours and he keeps getting distracted. Sort of like my life here now. So Angelo might have to wait but it's weird how you can build a barn for one dog, or actually two dogs, and then end up with another dog somehow getting it. Humans propose but life will dispose. Or something like that. Anyways the barn got built but meanwhile other things happened. A house burned down across the street. That was wild. It was real pretty and arresting to watch. A tractor caught on fire a few months earlier. A guy ran into the post office in his yellow car, fell asleep at the wheel and knocked the entire corner off a cement block building. It had to be taken down. A man died, leaving 500 goats behind. Plus,you know, family. Death is kind of a big thing in a small town. We had the election. But no one's talking about that. Not anyone in THIS house, at least. The dogs all vote for steak. That's what they want. And cheese. Also lamb chops. Voting would be simpler if it were set up the way dogs do it. As for me, I've had plenty to do, no worries there. I haven't been ANYWHERE. I've been to the drive-thru pharmacy maybe three times (once for gum), to the vet's parking lot, to my Scottsboro friend's front yard a time or two but we wore our masks and sat fifteen feet apart outside in the sunshine, then we got paranoid and stopped visiting until we could get our shots...which we are in the process of doing...and then I tell you what, I'm gonna keep on with these KN-95s until kingdom come. I could have saved myself endless suffering if I had worn the damn masks twenty years ago. There would have been so many flu seasons that I would have sailed right through without missing any work time or any fun. No sore throats! No coughing for six weeks to three months trying to get rid of the damn stuff! No malaise, no fever, no trying to fall asleep when you can't breathe and can't get comfortable, no having to eat nothing but chicken soup because you don't really want the hot fudge sundae, no being tired, no none of that! I'll be a mask-wearer until the day I die if it means avoiding even the common cold. For me, colds are NOT common. They are a HUGE interruption into the daily flow. They are a big pain in the ass and I will seek to do without them TOTALLY as long as I possibly can. I don't like being sick. It hurts. I don't like hurting. Thirty-plus years of migraines is more than enough. Speaking of interruptions, I've had another one, it was caused by caulking up the house. I was intending on caulking up ALL the cracks so brown recluse spiders wouldn't visit through them, and just stay in the walls, like in the Edgar Allan Poe story. I caulked and caulked. On caulk tube Number 28, my fingers started swelling up and my wrist started hurting. I had to get my mom to bring me a wrist brace (I think I mentioned before that I'm not going anywhere much at all until my vaccine is completed and the two-week waiting period is up. I have been to get gas maybe four times and have saved tons of money on fossil fuel this way) and my fingers started turning purple. The next day it was better. I figure I have one of those repetitive motion injuries and I have sworn off caulk guns for the time being. I have also gotten to where I can kinda use my left hand to work them. So I'm still trying to protect myself and my pets from the spiders by being as proactive as possible. Also it was my pandemic project; I had hoped to caulk up as much of the house as I could before the vaccine got close and I've pretty much done that, there is just still more to do and it's not moving as fast as I would like. So I put the Tiny Cabaret on hold for awhile because it just kinda hurts to play the piano. I may start ignoring it though because I'm getting used to it. I'm getting used to not being able to straighten my hand out because that's just what it's doing right now. I'll go get an x-ray after I get my vaccine. After I get my second shot, life can start up again. I can't honestly say that i'm 100 percent thrilled about that. I have really enjoyed hiding from everything during this pandemic. I have been doing a lot of inner work and I hope that doesn't fall by the wayside when everyone comes back out again. But all of that is boring. You'd rather hear about Roscoe and Cinderella, wouldn't you? Roscoe still needs catching and taming. He used to belong to the man who died, the one with 500 goats. But I sorta think Roscoe was always his own man. No use trying to catch him in a fence. He'll just climb over it. No matter what kind of fence you have. Well if it was a 20-foot-high prison fence with glass bottles and wire on top of it, sure, he probably couldn't climb over that, but he'd find a way to dig under it at that point. I'm sure he would. Unless it was electrified so that he couldn't dig under it. But then he'd be miserable. Roscoe was born to wander and do as he pleases. He stays around here but he's his own dog. You can't catch him and neither can I. He just lives in his own world. But who doesn't? Cinderella went to a guy who really loves her and will do anything in the world for her. That's why I named her Cinderella...because I wanted her prince to take her to the palace. Well he has, in a manner of speaking, and it's a great relief to me. Cinderella spent three months living at my vet's because she had heartworms and there was nowhere for me to treat her here with everybody else all living inside like they were. It just logistically wouldn't work and the rest of them almost haven't. There was also Tobias, a tiny Yorkie mix who was causing Cinderella (before she left) and Roscoe to bark their heads off one day, growling and sputtering like angry apartment dwellers. He found a home very quickly thanks to another wonderful Huntsville friend, with a lady who had recently lost her other dog buddy. It worked out just grand and his flea allergy went away. Lucky dog, Tobias! I named him for my psychic who lives in New Orleans but is relocating soon. I can hook you up with him if you like, he's awesome. One day Cinderella and Roscoe brought the puppies. This was in 2019 before the pandemic was ever even thought about. They had had five and the one of them was Little Dog and I think that's the one I picked up and put in the car one day as they were all wandering down the road with some of the adult dogs in the pack. The pack changed from time to time...different "furmutations." I would feed them all, get on the horn to try to find homes for them, and they'd disappear. I saw at least nine different dogs in this so-called "pack." Someone said stray dogs were intermarrying with coyotes somewhere around here and they were all living together in this huge commune. How they'd eat would be sort of a mystery to me unless they're really good at catching squirrels and making up huge pots of rabbit stew. There was a pop star/dance hall girl from the 1800s who ended up that way...in a "third-rate apartment, eating rabbit stew." Whereas before, during her youth and her career as a pop star, she probably dined on caviar and champagne. Her name was La Belle Otero and she was sort of a prototype of Madonna. Something like that. Kind of a sad story. Let's all of us move on to happier things.