THE LOST DOGS OF LANGSTON.

THE LOST DOGS OF LANGSTON Entry 2. I guess this is a Faceblog...or something...and again, remember that my dear friend Alan Burkett made up the title for all this that's happening. Shelby Lee has found her forever home with another coon hound and some pigs and chickens and two great people. She is gonna learn to be a real coon hound and it's the most successful thing that's happened to me all damndemic year. She gets to sleep on a couch and sit in people's laps and there just wasn't time for any of that, well I would sit with her on a little stool in the mud room and just give her as much attention as I could but meanwhile with Stevie Ray being the main man of the house I couldn't have dogs all over making him nervous so they mostly had to stay outside and in their crates and play or be in the crates in shifts because Tinky and everything because Tinky. If Tinky would just cooperate. But she will not. She's the wiredest weirdest dog I have ever known. She used to go up and down the metal shed in the back yard, just licking the panels. Up and down up and down. I don't know why she did this. Some say it's to relieve her anxiety. She kept on watching for her people to come back when she was first in the yard and I was first trying to feed her. I kept telling her they weren't coming back but she didn't believe me. We tried Prozac, Harmony pellets from Front of the Pack. Thunder Shirt...Tinky never whined until Shelby started doing it and then Tinky picked it up...Tinky could get out of her cage, up onto the dog food can and over the baby gate and into the cat box. Tinky will stop at nothing to get attention. She wants to be Number One Dog. Tinky, I say. If you wanna be Number One Dog, you have to act like Number One Dog. But then I don't know what to teach her. One thing a high strung dog can do well is let you know when someone arrives. If you're watching for the UPS man all afternoon because all's you have is a window and it's for six hours or maybe more and you have to get the shipment of whatever it is for your next project or whatever, well it's great to have a dog who can let you know to hightail it out there and pick up the package before the other two dogs grab it and pull the red dress you ordered out of the plastic package and drag it across the yard and eat part of the zipper out of the middle of the dress. The red dress with the velvet cutout pattern and it's shipped from maybe the UK? They can do that now...and you are upstairs caulking and caulking until your caulkers are sore, to keep brown recluse spiders in their walls like the Cask of Amontillado and you don't hear the UPS man and it's only just beginning to be autumn and so it's just turned kinda cold and it's dusk and it's kinda windy and the leaves are flying everywhere and you go out to the gate and just in the nick of time you see your Louis Sherry chocolates all over the lawn, only two boxes this time thank god, and the box is torn up and all over the yard and the freezer thingies are chewed into and the metal boxes just about got chewed through and you manage to grab the boxes and luckily the chocolate inside is still safe and it was Roscoe and Little Dog this time who made off with your packages. And now Little Dog is dead because someone smacked him with a car and you had to call the police to get him into the back of your car and you knew what was happening, you had just finished a cabaret and were sitting down to watch what you did and suddenly you hear this sound that just doesn't feel right and Roscoe is barking his head off and you grab the car key because you have a feeling what's happened and you run out there in your purple wig and your Aunt Sofonda dress under your jacket and park the car next to Little Dog who isn't really that little. So you can't pick him up. The neighbor has to come also and help the policeman put him in your car and you hightail it to the vet, thank goodness you remember to get your driver license and lock the gate and off you go to where he will get care, he has to wait a few days because it's almost the weekend and then he has his surgery to amputate his back right leg and you wait and then three days go by and one day they come in, it's a Saturday and he's dead...probably threw a clot...and you are devastated because you were really looking forward to having him come home, you built a fence for him and everything and it's just downright Christian of you to do that for someone else's dog anyway and anybody who tells you you're going to hell is just plain arrogant and stupid because you're NOT you're NOT going to hell and so you block those people because they are full of lies. And it's a pandemic and you wish you had run out with your mask on and all you had in the car was a towel and it takes weeks to get around to washing it but finally you do and you get Little Dog's ashes back in a white marble urn with his name on it and that's all you have left of Little Dog. Which makes you really sad every time you think about it but then there are all the others to care for so you don't have too much time to be sad. And for someone to tell you you are going to hell during a PANDEMIC when you are busy trying to save dogs as fast as you can and also cats well JEEZUS that's just LOW and they're crazy anyway and I can't believe someone would be as ignorant and stupid and power-hungry and manipulative and EVIL as that And I wonder what I did in my last life that was so heinous that I deserve to run into somebody like that in this one I mean WHAT WAS IT THAT WAS SO BAD and then you realize you should have been focusing on Tinky, but there are house things to do and dog things and there are a number of things and it's hard to focus during a pandemic But aren't you lucky, you're going to HELL and getting a new red dress and chocolates that dogs have eaten part of so I guess your soul is kinda impure anyway, you'll have to safety-pin that dress together. And those people and their hellmouth, well you wish someone would smack them upside the head like Lily Belle did to you when you had to go get your retina stitched together with the laser because she hit you so hard but then you remember in the Tao it says that compassion wins the battle and holds the fort and so you think well they're just ignorant and poor things, that's all they have to hold onto is their little story of heaven and hell and trying to save people from whatever it is they think is looming so they can feel good about themselves, check another one off the list for them but how they would dare to do that to someone with a rather precarious mental state is just playing with fire and I sure wouldn't do it but then that compassion just feels so much better than being all sniggity with someone so maybe you should just forget about them, say a little prayer for them or something so they can go out and save somebody else because you've got to save dogs and you've got to get back to this particular type of work and thinking about other people's thoughts just doesn't have any place anymore because something has to give and Jesus will have to pay attention to them this time because you just don't have the time to do that, and you know He does.