I Killed a Dog

I killed a dog. You can sing it to the tune of "I kissed a Girl."
The dog in question was mine. I didn't actually kill her. The vet did. But I authorized it. I carried her to my truck and stood there teary-eyed in the driveway as the kids said goodbye and tossed a ball in with her. And I held her as the last bit of life spasmed out of her. Tonight I will retrieve her ashes. The reason I decided to pony up the extra money for an individual cremation concerns the kids. We encouraged the 13-year-old to go to soccer practice the night of the euthanasia, but his mother had to bring him home because he couldn't stop crying. On the other hand, the 9-year-old said he wanted a new dog that very weekend. I've put down dogs before, two of which were old and one that had bloated. But this dog has hit me particularly hard, probably because of the kids. And maybe the fact that I spent years intensely training with her.
Not to say that this dog didn't possess negative qualities. She was a high-drive German shepherd and liked to bark at anything--anything--that came by the house, like infants, other dogs, old ladies, birds.... The FedEx guy once refused to leave the bottom of the driveway to approach the house. One day son the younger approached me with a pair of scissors, pointing straight at me. She jumped off the couch barking, but did no harm. Likely because she knew the consequences of approaching one of our children with teeth bared. At the gas station, I had to close the back window and get out of the truck, for when anyone came near her vehicle, she went ballistic. The vehicle rocked, so adamant was she that nobody came near it.  She could be really sweet, however, unless you were within 15 feet of her food bowl. Then the growling and hair standing up and territoriality grew to frightening proportions for other members of the household. The poster child for bitches be crazy. Her breeder had said anyone else would have given her back. I wasn't scared of her, though. I put my hand right down in her food bowl. I could touch her while she growled. Near the end, though, she may have become more belligerent, and I took to fending her off with a chair while taking her food away if she hadn't eaten it within a reasonable amount of time. It was like lion feeding time at the zoo, and I acted like a circus lion tamer. I think she may have grown frustrated with her condition, since she lacked the mobility she had once possessed. Degenerative myelopathy, the canine equivalent of ALS, ultimately prompted us to let her go.
Before DM, she had enormous stamina and impressive agility. She would run 11 miles with me. She would scale the rock wall to the kids' clubhouse. She would jump four-foot fences easily. That all makes the debilitating disease even more disconcerting. Because her mental faculties, such as they were, hadn't declined. So at the end, she was just a happy dog at the vet's office, wondering what the hell was going on on the other side of that door as we waited in the room. What, there's another dog out there? Unacceptable.
Dogs are dogs, I know. But my kids hurt, and I hurt for them. Dogs become quickly woven into the fabric of lives. Still I think I need to take her outside. Still I look for here where she's not. Still I expect the barking at the garbage truck or the mailman.
We'll let the kids decide what they'd like to do with her. Perhaps we'll bury her under that front window from which she lashed out at all comers. She kissed me aggressively before she went to sleep, and after, I straightened her head and askew tongue. It's not fun seeing your dog like that, but neither was it fun seeing her struggle to stand up and falling and banging into walls and furniture. Bye, Kelsey.

Guns

So, I was at my son's soccer game recently, and I brought up guns. And every guy within earshot, from approximately 30 to 85 years of age, chimed in. I don't know shit about guns, but my father-in-law has given me a few. So these guns are about 60 years old. And I figured since I accepted them, I should know something about them. I've never fired either, but maybe I should know how to clean and maintain them. And make sure my kids never get their hands on them. One of these guns has some nice engraving, which some gun enthusiasts to whom I showed them to went crazy about. Ok, old guns, nice engravings, surely some collector would try to rip me off with respect to them. So, relative to home protection, well, I have a German shepherd who goes ballistic at the slightest provocation. Isn't that enough? So far, yes. And I keep the ammunition way separated from the firearms, lest a child find one or the other. But, guns, let's let everyone within earshot gather around.

School Days

Recently I visited the Catholic school I attended for grades 6th, 7th and 8th. The reason for which arises from my son's middle-school experience. Despite his steady academic performance, he has had difficulty adjusting to a large, public middle-school environment with a diverse demographic that draws from a large swath of our township.
Some people say we never really get out of the high-school mode. To some extent, I feel like I've never really gotten out of middle school. So, K-5 I attended public school. For 6th, 7th and 8th grades,  Catholic school. I served as an altar boy. In fact, I was pretty much like the captain of the altar boys, until I quit. The priest who was in charge didn't molest me physically, but, alas, psychologically. At any rate, now my kids want to attend the same Catholic school to which I went. So when I recently visited that school, emotions came to the fore. Some three decades-plus later, I find discomfiting the thought that that I haven't fully progressed beyond the time I spent there. After having visited, or, rather, revisited, the school I attended, I'm still partially caught in the same mind-set.
After we went there, I dug up my yearbook from that school (yes, I still have my middle-school yearbook), replete with all the messages from the girls about how we became such good friends and how they wanted me to visit them over the summer and how much they loved me.  I imagine that the girl upon whom I had a crush, all these years later, would be the same person. I've even had dreams that I was back at that school, and Sister Luke, having aged not at all, was there to greet me. It was her brother, at the time a priest,who most messed with me psychologically.
I've read articles that say kids these days spend too much time with their parents, depriving them of taking risks of their own, and I've read articles about people who home-school their kids because of the damage inflicted by the school setting itself. Primarily high school. Apparently, studies have revealed that most people on Facebook connect with their high-school friends.
Perhaps I should have learned something from having encountered, a few years out of middle school, that person upon whom I had a crush and treated badly: She didn't appear to have much recollection at all. Such is the curse of memory.
So now my own kids are at or approaching the stage that I feel I've never completely escaped. Do, experiences at this stage of life disproportionately affect who people become? And what do I do about it? Should I be supportive and engaged, or should I give them more latitude to become the people they were meant to be? So far, I've tended to be involved, largely because they seem to want me to be.
One article addresses self-perception versus the perceptions of others. I was a jock and a good student, but I never considered myself as self-assured as others did. Apparently there are ramifications that carry through to adult life. I struggle as much now as I did then, but nobody really knows. And for my own children, how do I decide when I haven't escaped middle school myself?

The Creek

Much of my youth revolved around a stream that ran through the woods in which we rode our bikes on well-worn paths, smoked cigarettes after school and tried to thumb through illicitly obtained Playboys, some of whose pages stuck together after being left out in the elements, requiring delicate page-turning and the reward often turning out to be an unsatisfying one breast.
We hid our cigarettes in drain pipes. We rode our bikes on what eventually would become I-95 but was then just hard-packed dirt before contractors put down the asphalt. We would venture down to the train tracks and place pennies on the rails, which would melt into copper dots, blemishes on the silver, as the train passed.
We always just called it "the creek." We fished and shot BB guns and collected crayfish. The creek wasn't the stuff of my adulthood, the Rocky Mountain and Yellowstone trout rivers that I have fished, with pelicans and eagles and bison and bears in the vicinity. Or the rivers of northern Maine, where the moose seemed ubiquitous. No, the creek sustained catfish and carp and eels and sunfish, which I exalted in catching in my boyhood as much as I do trout rising to dry flies now. There we collected garter snakes.
Now my association with the creek involves driving over it on the long-completed interstate, but it still runs through my blood nevertheless, since there was born an unflinching fascination with nature. Parts of the creek, as seen from the roadway, appear narrower now than in my youth, and I'm unsure if that results from a changing perspective with age, since, in retrospect, everything to a me as a youngster seemed grander than the reality, or an actual overgrowth of vegetation. The house in which I grew up, the street on which we lived, our backyard, all seem relatively smaller to me now than before. Part of that might stem from my living in a bigger house on a wider street now. I can say with some confidence that areas of the creek have shrunk, with the vegetation beginning to clog it like an artery.
The cornfield that abutted the woods through which we traveled has long since disappeared, having given way to an AMC multiplex, at which I took my kids to see Iron Man 3, which sucked. Along with the movie theater, restaurants and an ice-cream parlor have displaced the cornfield. We used to steal ears of corn from that field, particularly in anticipation of Mischief Night, the Halloween eve on which one engaged in mischief. We would remove the kernels from the ears and, I think, throw them at houses and cars. We also used to write on car windows with soap. Such was our mischief. All the while we feared the farmer, for legend held that he rewarded such pilferers of his crop with buckshot in the ass.
On occasion I drive through the neighborhood in which I grew up, wondering what has become of some of the people who lived in those houses. Some of them I know about. My best young-boyhood friend lives in his parents' old house. My next-door neighbor growing up lives in my childhood house. But chain-link fences now block the entrances through which we used to access the dirt paths in the woods that led to the creek. Why I don't know. To prevent the nefarious types of activities in which we used to participate, like smoking cigarettes and leafing through Playboys?
Part of the creek passes by softball fields. After my mother had her first stroke and lived with my brother, and he let her wander off when they were grocery shopping, the police and my older brother and I drove around separately looking for her. The grocery store sits on the other side of the creek from the softball fields. I pulled into the lot at the fields and saw a few police officers driving through and flagged them down to ask if the were looking for my mother, also. They said they were. I asked them if anyone had checked the creek. They hadn't. So I did. I imagined finding my mother face down, dead in the creek that provided so much of the lifeblood of my youth. The circle come around, the mother who birthed me drowned in the creek that nourished me. The police eventually found her alive, wandering through the rainstorm.
Sometimes, though, I wonder what it was I sought as I sifted through the sticker bushes to the creek's muddy edge.

A Note

To readers who have suggested that I should write a book or write more frequently, thank you for the interest. And for those of you who come across this blog and don't realize, there are currently more than 100 posts overall covering a span of a few years. The blog archive exists on the right side of the screen through which one can navigate to older posts.
For me, writing can be anxiety-inducing, gut-wrenching, challenging and sometimes cathartic. The subject matters I touch upon sometimes dredge up emotions that I often would rather keep compartmentalized. As with many endeavors, I find getting started to be one of the more challenging aspects. And I want what I write to be worthwhile, and I want to maintain quality. The inspiration doesn't always arise. I also question whether what I have to say contains any value. That self-doubt creeping in on me. But apparently the subjects upon which I touch do hold value for at least some people, and that's something.
I have a Twitter account but don't post. I don't often consider such relatively short declarations to be worthwhile: "Saw 'Iron Man 3.' It sucked." Who cares? But when presented with an opportunity to elaborate with some insight, perhaps therein lies value, or at least mildly entertaining content.
Some writers take years between books. And those who don't generally involve the mainstream, less sophisticated types. I don't begrudge people reading that stuff. Who am I to judge? And sometimes, albeit infrequently, I read those kinds of books myself because they can be entertaining. But then I find the prose nauseating and return to books about the history of the American West or the Civil War or the Revolutionary War. Or guys like Ivan Doig or Tom McGuane or Cormac McCarthy. I recently read "The Count of Monte Cristo," since that book has endured and is a "classic." I did find the story entertaining, but the writing disappointed me. Maybe something got lost in the translation, but apparently, even in its day, the book wasn't considered weighty, like "Les Miserables."
"The Count of Monte Cristo" started out as a serialization in a French newspaper, according to the foreword of the version I read. Sometimes writers got paid by the word or the line or whatever, so they had incentive to pad their works. Hence, a "condensed" 600-page book with small print. That ain't no Hemingway.
So much clutter exists in today's information-technology-saturated world, and I have done nothing to promote myself. I generally don't tag my posts with keywords that will get Google hits (Pam Anderson nude). The thought of it brings me unease. So I figured I would rely on word of mouth, meaning that if someone found this blog and read something they considered worthwhile, then they could pass that along. Some days the hits on this blog spike, other days next to nothing. Maybe that's a function of not writing frequently enough, but sometimes I have nothing worthwhile to say, or I'm just too blue to summon the energy, or I have an idea that has been germinating for weeks or months that I haven't quite pulled completely together in my head. I get solicitations from people asking to have my blog on their websites, which are compilations of blogs or whatever, and they say I'd get thousands more hits. I also receive solicitations to write about depression for websites.
First of all, I consider my blog to consist of much more than a vehicle to provide insight into depression. Am I a depression expert? I write about what I see through my prism, and if someone can relate to that, then that can be gratifying. But I also write about family and life as I see it in general. And about how wondrous precocious kids can be. And the agony of seeing them struggle. And the guilt associated with not being a good enough person or parent. Or just about how "Iron Man 3" sucked and Robert Downey Jr. owes me money for the price of admission. Or about how I'm sick of goose shit or people texting while driving. Or religion. So, that said, I'm going to start working on another post, the rudiments of which have been chipping away at the periphery of my mind for weeks, or months, or perhaps years.

Black Dog

That's what some people call depression. I can't speak for other people, but the self-image that accompanies depression, that perspective of myself as flawed, makes me feel unworthy of others' affection. I've always had difficulty trying to understand why other people would want to be around me when I didn't want to be around myself. A certain torment exists in being unable to escape myself, to get out of my own head. Others have told me to let them choose if they want to be around me. Maybe that's why suicidal tendencies always have been so present. How else to get away? A friend recently told my wife that, at a gathering years ago, she was introducing me to people and I told her to stop because I didn't have anything to offer. On the contrary, she thought, I was one of the people present who actually did have something to offer. So a disconnect exists between self-perception and outside perception. Then I come across as aloof, a loner, antisocial, someone who just doesn't like people. Not entirely true. It's just that I tend to like fewer people than most other people do. I have a low tolerance for ignorance and rudeness, of which no shortage exists. Maybe that stems from such a longstanding inability to accept my own deficiencies.
Do the feelings of inadequacy come from within, or do they arise out of impossible expectations from, say, a mother. My mother never made a secret out of the fact that I was her salvation. Redemption through the youngest child. I've worked through the feelings of inadequacy in stages. First, a sort of denial, the gnawing feeling inside of me playing tug of war with the knowledge that I could accomplish. I thought accomplishment might lead to redemption, but no.And always guilt. As a younger man, achievement was to be the balm. Hence, good grades, good athleticism--self-worth through these accomplishments and validation by my mother. A good job. All a coverup, a facade. Nothin'.
Eventually the weight, the cumulative effect, and a crash. Electroconvulsive therapy. Too much to bear. The terrifying realization that you might not survive on your own. Your life lies in the hands of someone coursing electricity through your brain. Then shame. Shame in facing people who know the truth. My cover blown. Then an odyssey of prescription drugs that continues and likely will never end. Then the weight begins to build anew, and I struggle to keep it at bay. The job, the house, the kids, whereas previously I couldn't even hold myself up. The cycle repeating itself. So, how to deal?
The medications that don't really work all that well. Then there's alcohol as a lubricant. I tend to lubricate to excess. It killed my father at 49, and seeing as I'm in the proximity of that age, and a father myself, I'm forced to consider the wisdom of taking the slow route to suicide and the ramification that it has on others.
I wonder if alcohol is a symptom of the depression or a result of the depression? Alcohol in unsustainable quantities. Alcohol that makes my kids see me in disturbing ways. John Hiatt says "drink ain't no solution, I ain't had one in 17 years."
For Pete Townshend, however much he boozes, there ain't no way out. Kris Kristofferson talks about chasing the feeling. And Nick Lowe sums it up.
Here's a horrifying article from 1995.
And here's another, more recent.
People suffer. People bear weight. People cope differently.
A common refrain heard from people who have suffered from addiction refers to "hitting bottom." I don't know what my bottom is, but I haven't felt like I've hit it. I don't see myself as an AA-type guy. Hey, I've already said I like fewer people than most. And my experience with Adult Children of Alcoholics didn't go so well while I was in college or thereabouts. First, an older guy invited me back to his place. I thought, well, he seemed sympathetic, so, what the fuck? At his place, a younger, male friend of his showed up. Now, my weirdness radar wasn't going off yet, but then the older guy started playing French love songs on his piano. Ok, a little weird, but I was new to this kind of thing. And apparently naive. Finally, I got out of there, physically unscathed, but perhaps not psychologically, for when I related this experience to and older friend, he told me I was a "mark." As in, those guys wanted to fuck you. Aw, shit. I went back to a few meetings, and, naturally, a variety of different people attended. But for the most part, I got tired of listening to the whining. So, fuck it, I stopped going.
A friend asked me recently why I haven't been writing. I said I have been, just not publishing it. But, really, the truth is that the self-examination required to compose disclosures such as this can be daunting. Instead of being cathartic, the thought of it can be dread-inducing. And if it's not helping anybody else, then what's the use? Ok, I don't always write about, 'Oh, I'm depressed and I'm drinking too much.' Sometimes I just write about oddball or funny shit. But that stuff doesn't come along every day, and lately this kind of stuff has been occupying my mind. As they say at AA meetings, take what you like and leave the rest. As I write this, on the TV in front of me (NAT GEO WILD), some kind of African fox-like creature is trying to kill a vulture-like creature. (The fox wins, but the vulture put up a good fight). Then I think, hey, that's like me, one thing always tearing at the other.