Huh. The one time I really felt like using OD in the past four months and it’s down. One forgets how much ones mom lurks until one is in mid the fuck Michigan and one’s mom is the one who tells you OD is down.

(this next bit is not about my mom. Um, it explains itself)

That cold anger? Not really so cold. She killed my dog. He didn’t have to die; she could have done what she’s done with so many things and just ran away, abdicated responsibility, just not showed up. She managed half of that. She managed to not tell me. She still hasn’t really, just responded with some half assed after the fact horrified posture.

 

I guess that’s the punishment in this country for killing a fat happy little dog in his prime for no other crime than just being a dog. If you are half way human you have to live with the horror and if you’re not you have to live out your days as a cold hearted bitch. It’s not direct enough for me, but I guess it’ll have to do. She doesn’t even need to do any work for it, I’ll carry her horrified cold hearted bitchiness on her behalf just in case she forgets.

 

It’s not like I expected to see Levi again, it’s just the world was a better place knowing he was somewhere panting and grinning and chewing on a couch, and now it’s not. The world. A better place. It’s not. Not only is there not a Levi in it but Sunny also killed my wife. Oh, it gets worse kids. I am not a lone voice crying in the wilderness. I’m not sure how it is where you are, but there seems to be a lot of horror going on everywhere from where I’m sitting.   Wherever violence isn’t escalating it’s already broken out. I can’t grieve for everyone, I’m not expected to. Just one fat little dog, but he was my fat little dog and I was his person and I loved him.

 

I thought I could do this slowly. I thought I could take a burst of hot anger and make it cold, in part because there is too much hot anger in the air right now, in part because hot anger hurts. I thought I could grieve slowly, I mean because I sort of have to, I’m not over the loss of Herschel yet and that was a mercy, that was to keep him from anymore pain. I guess I forgot the months of hard heavy grief, of the huge Herschel sized hole that was so damned apparent everywhere. There isn’t a Levi sized hole here, I don’t know why I thought I could skip that part though. There isn’t supposed to be a Levi sized hole anywhere. He was barely out of being a puppy, if he was in human years he wouldn’t have been allowed to drink in the States. He was a happy healthy dog.

 

I tried to wear blaming myself, not to take any responsibility off of Sunny, no, she put him in a position that was dangerous and had him killed for being a dog. Not a pit-bull, not rabid, not gone crazy, just preying on prey. I could repeat some of the details, but I suspect the ultimate source no matter how solid the source I heard them through is. I mean I don’t believe the details, even the ones that ring true and have no other reason to be in the story; I was told the cops tried to taze him but he ran, they found him at the neighbors licking a poodles face. That sounds just like him. And something meant to be horrifying and mean; He acted like he didn’t do anything wrong. That sounds like him too. Humans are way too flexible on morality to put that shit on a dog, there’s big humans out in the world eating snack humans acting like they are doing something right. As a species humans fix morality to suit their purpose. Dogs don’t. Levi was a dog. I loved him especially for being a dog.

 

Levi should not be in the past tense. The great big wide world is going bat shit. Levi lived in a small world, he liked his world small. He liked to get under the blankets and sleep pushed up against my side until he got too hot, crawl out of the blankets and do the same thing on top of them. As long as we were fur to fur everything was all right in Levi’s world. I can’t do that for anyone else and Levi can’t do that at all anymore. If y’all are done with this world how about you leave it for the dogs instead of blowing it up?

 

Oh. Yeah. And Sunny killed my wife. I wasn’t planning on doing anything with her, but I kind of liked the idea of an aging hippie chick out there skipping along barefoot with a guitar strapped to her back. I loved that Sunny for a long time, and then I loved her less and didn’t trust her at all, but I didn’t want her dead. At least there is a Levi hole somewhere, there’s a zombie that bears my wife’s name without the good sense to lie down and leave a hole. I’m not suggesting homicide or suicide, I don’t care what happens to the zombie, the person I had loved died when she gave the ok to kill a happy healthy fat little dog who I wasn’t done loving yet, who had a decade of barking at snack dogs, chewing up couches, crawling under the covers, playing tug of war with the shirt sleeve someone was still wearing.

 

Someone who I’m becoming very close too tried to warn me too, I eased her fears, the sunny I knew wasn’t going to let any harm come to my dogs. Now she feels she didn’t warn hard enough. I’m falling in love with her, have been, not to replace Levi holes or sunny holes, I really wasn’t expecting there to be a Levi hole or a sunny hole. I’m falling in love with her because I love her, there wasn’t any sunny or Levi when I started falling in love with her, and a full lifetime later when I resumed falling in love with her, Levi and Sunny were — alive. I can’t really say healthy and happy, I think Levi was probably wondering where the hell I was and Sunny was not healthy, but not dog killing not healthy. It was a happy accident and then a miracle that I found myself falling in love.

About a week before I found her I was at this little man-made lake with the anarchist and the conversation sort of floated this way and that as our conversations tend to floated past our dau

ghters towards conservative Catholicism and I asked him what he did for, um, recreation (I put the um in for y’all, in person I didn’t need to pause or hem and haw, he knew what I meant) He said sometimes he just goes to a prostitute. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone but a cop actually use the word prostitute. I asked him, um, why (again the um is for y’all, we knew what we were talking about) he said he had given up on relationships because he wasn’t any good at them. For the purposes of this entry for a downed site (I’m telling you, everything is down or falling) I ummed for about a minute and said I wasn’t any good at them either but I’m not done trying. He shrugged and we were talking about Spinoza or Lorca or acid jazz.

 

I wasn’t really shocked at the anarchist, though I suppose in a political sense I’d kind of like to know how he justifies the inherent exploitation in the john/whore exchange. I was a little bit more shocked at my own answer, because I had essentially given up and wasn’t bothering with whores; sex isn’t really the core of a relationship. The anarchist and I have a relationship and I don’t think we’ve even peed in front of one another. Sex is the expression of certain kinds of relationships; the ones that are the other way around are usually done before you can call them anything. I had a relationship with Levi, I loved him, and yes, we peed in front of one another all the time, but we didn’t have sex. I wasn’t his type. We did sleep together. I’m not really making light of this. We call ourselves dog owners, but it’s not like that, or it is the way a parent is a child owner; it’s more like a flowing relationship of protection and adoration.

 

That’s what I mean by I am falling in love, it’s what I meant by ‘I’m not done trying’. We haven’t peed in front of one another yet, but that isn’t a real standard, I was just using that for the purposes of a website that can’t manage to stand up straight. I don’t fill holes with people or dogs. Sunny had sort of pushed the Levi idea on me as a way to fill the Herschel hole, her entire life could read ‘My intentions were good but I didn’t understand’ — I don’t have an epitaph for the zombie. Levi didn’t fill a Herschel hole, he dug his own. I didn’t fall in love with Levi because I owned him or he was sort of Herschel shaped. I’m not really trying to pretend I even know anything about love, just saying I’m not done trying to figure it out and I know it when it crawls under my covers. Hmmm, would y’all catch an um here? I don’t mean that’s exclusively how I recognize love any more than I recognize a relationship by the degree of pee spilt.

 

I guess it’s all sort of cyclic, it’s not plugging things in and out of holes, if you put love into the world it has a way of looking for you when you’re out of sight. That sounds a little dim witted but in its own way I think it’s right. I don’t really know, but I recognize love when it crawls under my sheets. Yeah, no um. It’s not all internal, you don’t just love a dog, a child, a woman, you are also loved back so unless you are magical and can create things from your own head, half the love was outside already, you aren’t some wayfarin’ stranger any more than you are a lost lamb, not with love, sometimes it crawls under your covers when you weren’t even looking. Sometimes love has really good timing. As embarrassing as it might be it’s a lot better to be horrified in the face of love than horrified out of the sight of love.

 

I just mean I’d have a harder time separating all the threads if I started falling in love after sunny killed Levi and sunny. Falling in love doesn’t make grief any easier, but grief makes it damn hard to recognize who is crawling under your covers. I’m pretty clear though. In fact what are in this entry are the only things I’m clear on. Everything else seems to be crumbling without any obvious provocation, without any more or any less madness than was around any time in the last decade, or, god willing and the Aztecs ain’t right, in the next ten years, and yet everybody is on edge. I know what love and grief is, everything else is pretty foggy. It’s just been in the last three days I realized it’s not my fault, I mean it’s not just me, things really are foggy, except the concrete death of the fat little dog I loved and the concrete life of the slim woman I am falling in love with. All the edgy hostility in the rest of the world isn’t concrete at all; the events are the cause is blurry. It’s not just me. Like I am not expected to grieve for the bodies of Hamas and Zionists littering the Gaza strip, I am not expected to understand the why of — what’s the phrase? — The rough music. And I’m spent.