Black Doggerel

so I set my alarm for 6am this morning, in order to be washed, awake and ready for the Bathroom Ripping-Out Guys at 8am like they told me to be. And I didn't sleep through it or switch it off in a half-daze, and I was fucking well ready.

BUT THERE ARE NO BATHROOM GUYS. THE BATHROOM IS A LIE. THEY'RE NOT GOING TO DO MINE TILL FUCKING WEDNESDAY.

RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE

I was telephoned this morning by a cheerful man from the DWP who did his best, in the manner of a religious zealot knocking on the door, to convince me that losing my appeal would be a Good Thing full of Fresh New Opportunities for Productive Work.

I was not at any point rude to him, and I only cried a little. He, meanwhile, confirmed for me that the medical assessor had totally failed to get it on a grand scale, as he had actually STATED in the report that the fact that I was able to walk my damn dogs indicated to him that I clearly would have no difficulty putting myself through the mill of qualifying for fucking jobseeker's allowance.

I discovered that he had a computer in front of him, and I asked him to google Gail Grinds - she was the Florida woman who died after not leaving her couch for seven-odd years. Unfortunately all the news reports about her that remain accessible on the Internet rather completely miss the point there too, and so did Excessively Cheerful Phone Guy; he assumed she was simply 'too fat' and there was the end of it. I attempted to point out that... hey, one doesn't just decide overnight that you're too fat to get up and walk to the toilet. That something like this just DOES NOT HAPPEN without some kind of overwhelming, self-preservation-negating terror or misery or inertia that goes far, far beyond any amount of weight gain.

I don't know if he got it. I told him to google Spoon Theory as well, as he had never heard of it ("Too intelligent for me!" he said in an obscenely cheerful, almost proud tone). I don't know if he'll get that either.

I always remember Gail Grinds, and the dismissive, casual shallow nastiness of those news reports and blogs makes me die a little inside. Because that could so easily have been me. There but for the grace of Dog.

Fuck knows, I don't want to make a long fight out of this. But it's looking increasingly like I'm being backed into it - a fight I doubt very much I have the strength or resources to ENDURE, never mind fucking win.

Still, apparently they've at least started paying me the statutory reduced rate until the appeal's decided. this at least should mean I won't have to sponge further off my mother or get evicted from my fucking home while the gears grind. Small fucking mercies.

ETA: They have not, in fact, begun to pay me. I am clearly going to have to chase that up by phone-tag. *headdesk*

Dear Demonchild Snotmonkey,

Yes, you. The same child I had to bark at when you tried to slap Spike. Now, I presume you were raised speaking English, because your older brother communicates just fine. So what part of "please stop trying to wave big pointy sticks in Spike's face" is it you're having a problem with?

I DO NOT WANT MY DOG TO BITE YOU. This is only half true. After the 5343675th time of my having to tell you that a. you may not play tug with him and b. you doubleplus extra specially may not play tug with him with a big splintery pointy wooden stick, I'd actually really enjoy seeing him playfully break your tender little fingerbones like little sticky chicken wings, and I bet it would help solve your selective deafness problem too. But he doesn't need the dangerous dog laws landing on his head just because you can't keep your damn sticky hands to yourself, so FUCKING STOP IT YOU LITTLE MONSTER.

More importantly, (because I am not your mother and I couldn't care less about your finger bones), if I let you keep teasing my dogs with sticks you're going to poke one of their eyes out. And believe me, anything Spike at his worst could do to you is going to look like a gentle pat compared to what I'll do to you if you injure my dogs. Got that, Damien?

No love,

Your neighbour who sometimes wishes her dogs didn't love children so damn much.

P.S. No, you can't throw it for him to fetch either, especially not into the road when he's on-leash. I really wish I could slap you sometimes.

*sigh*

where do you draw lines?

( In which I rant and wail ineffectually about backyard breeding, once again )

I AM SURROUNDED BY TEH STUPID.

Remember the idiots with the dogpile and the inability to work out what a leash is for?

Well, I just ran into Puppything on the lam while walking my dogs (fortunately I saw it before Spike did). Being the good neighbour I am, I nipped home to put my dogs away and nipped back out with a leash to take Puppything home. I'm not the only good neighbour round here, because I got back out there just in time to see my friend Mo, the owner of Spike's mini-Border Collie girlfriend Ella, had beat me to it and returned Puppything home already.

Ella's owner has lived across the road from The Idiot Family for some time (and has returned their continually-straying dogs more often than I have) and she was even more ranty about their pet-owning habits than I was.

Turns out they're backyard breeders. Why am I not surprised? Apparently, their last dog was kept only long enough to breed and sell a litter of puppies before they gave her away. Puppything appears to be destined for the same fate - I hadn't realised she was even female (I guess Spike never got close enough to check, because he wouldn't have barked at her if he'd known that) but she's in season already. She's less than a year old. I'm taking bets with myself whether they're going to mate her deliberately - but it's probably academic. Their dogs escape three or four times a week anyway. If their Jack Russells haven't already gotten to her it's a dead cert that something will.

It gets better. They used to have rabbits too. The rabbits had babies - as they tend to do if you don't speuter or separate them. (Who'da THUNK it??)

Guess what they did when they couldn't cope with the rabbit explosion? They set the whole lot of them loose.

Yes, I did hear this second-hand, but I did see a loose rabbit two or three times near the hollow oak tree on Woodbury Avenue back when I first moved here. Of course, this is prime suburban fox country round here, so at least the poor creatures probably had a quick death and benefited some other animal - but still...

bloody hell. like i wasn't already stressed enough, we just got attacked by four loose dogs on our evening walk.

no one's hurt but Spike's back hair is still standing on end.

( Cut for blow-by-blow account and rant about idiot dog owners )

*headdesk*

*edit: apparently not male. I still haven't looked for myself, mind.

I am so FUCKING FED UP WITH FUCKING FIREWORKS, I can't tell you.

It's a fucking WEEKNIGHT. It's RAINING. But some prick is still letting off what sounds like a full professional display, and he's doing it about twenty yards from my flat. I've just had to spend half an hour on the floor in the hallway with a hysterical collie wedged in my armpit. I did hope shutting ourselves out of the lounge and shutting all the windows would reduce it a bit - if it did, it wasn't very noticeable. it sounded as though they were letting the fucking things off in the stairwell.

It's shredding my nerves as well, though not as badly as poor Spike's. When I heard the first one this evening I leaned out of the kitchen window and yelled "WANKERS!" at the top of my voice. I couldn't help myself.

I'm going to spend Saturday night at Mum's. Her house is more soundproof, has more muffling soft furnishings and isn't near any schools and churches that might be having displays - it'll still be bad but it'll be a fucking sight worse here.

I feel like I'm sitting out a fucking siege. I swear, I am getting very close to the point of going out and jamming a rocket up someone's arse, I really am.

It says something about how fortunate - or perhaps merely optimistic - I am when the only thing capable of moving me to vicious rantage is the arseholes who don't pick up after their dogs. It's especially annoying when they use the same dog walking routes as I do, because I know my dogs are far more attractive and memorable and conspicuous than theirs - meaning that unless I pick up after their stinking unfortunate malnourished curs myself, people are going to jump to the conclusion that I'm the disgusting bastard leaving a trail of shit everywhere I go.

I did have a vindicating moment last week when I witnessed a couple with a Shih-Tzu in flagrante delicto. I gave them my very best Winn Adami smile and asked them with excruciating politeness if they needed a plastic bag. I watched gleefully as the miserable worms discovered under my relentless burning gaze that, oh my, what a surprise, they did have one after all. I didn't shift my eyes or my smile until the pavement was clean. It was glorious.

Autumn is getting into its stride here, and since our street is lined with beautiful mature oak trees, we are inundated with grey squirrels. They sit on fences and chatter at us, they flaunt their tails from the tops of fences and they play chicken in front of us while poor Spike is reduced to a frothing predatory frenzy. He's getting much better at climbing trees, and since he can now get six or eight feet up a branchless trunk without much effort, I'm getting good at catching him in my arms on the way down. Every trip round the block to have a pee has become a mixture of obstacle course, suburban safari and rock star tour: "Hey, that's the amazing tree-climbing dog, isn't it? Wow! Can I have his autograph?"

I only let him climb the ones I know he can't get too far up, and those only if the ground underneath is springy turf - although part of me longs to see how well he'd manage a really climbable tree, the only way he knows to get down is falling out - and although he lands on his feet as well as any cat, I haven't forgotten that it's my job to stop him biting off more than he can chew. It still attracts a lot of attention.


In other news, the rest of my head space is entirely taken up with the collaboration - also known as The Fanfic That Ate My Brain. When captain_lila shows up I shall beg her for permission to show you her Klingon stories - read those, and read my Brinkmanship, and if you don't see why I'm all moist and breathless with this particular creative process I'll damn you for an anhedonic minion of soulless orthodoxy, so I will.

Getting back to it now...

I can't drink enough to have a real hangover, but I am not, today, quite my usual perky self... also, breaking my record of keeping five IM windows going at once hasn't made my brain feel any sharper.

But it was great talking to you all anyway. I especially liked the photos. You know who you are. :D

I find I don't, after all, own a copy of The Phantom Tollbooth, although I know I did not that long ago - fuck knows where it got to. I stopped at Waterstone's on the way back from Mum's with the intention of buying another - couldn't find it, so I bought a copy of Raymond E. Feist & Janny Wurts' Daughter of the Empire instead - yet another book I used to own that got lost or left behind at some stage.

I've never been without books at any stage of my life, however up or down it was. Even during the homeless years, whatever squat/tent/abandoned car/garage Mike and I were staying in, it was always filled with books, and neither of us ever went anywhere without one. That was only one of the reasons he and I were so close. For more recent friends - this post explains who Mike was - my best friend, my blood brother, who helped save me although he couldn't save himself. You would have liked him - all of you.

I have, in my own, quiet way, declared war on one of the most irritating posters on TrekBBS. It's not in my nature to be confrontational - but I am going to be notifying the mod furiously every time a certain "dysgenic motherfucker" raises his ugly, reactionary, bigoted, fundie trollish head from here on in. And my thanks to The God Thing for a flame that gave me shudders of pleasure to read it.

No, I'm not going to link it. Go look in QSF. It's well worth a read.