…And Then I Ran Out of Jokes.

Remember when I was funny?  Remember when I posted with dependable regularity?  Want to know what happened?  I moved.

I swear, I got away from Charlie the Miracle dog and his douche-bag of a mom, M, and I am literally incapable of producing a blog that doesn’t blow ever since.  I blame geography.

…Only that’s not the whole story, I’m afraid.  My blogging skills/schedule was largely dependent on the general mood I was in.  I’m good when I’m miserable.  In fact, my humor reaches impressive levels the less happy I am internally.

So in yet another way the-universe-is-fucked-up, the defenese mechanism I have exploited for years is kind of useless when there’s nothing to defend myself from.  When I am unhappy, I deflect the probing questions and sympathetic looks by throwing open the doors to my self-deprecating humor.  I suppose I must be thinking, “well, I might be black and rotten on the inside, but at least I can still make people laugh.”  Or something like that.

Imagine my surprise then, when I found myself comfortable for the first time in a very long while.  And with this comfort came a mental break that took me off guard-duty for myself.  I can communicate with people without the need to interject jokes to control the situation.  I employ my sarcasm less often now since I don’t need it to distract whoever is unfortunate enough to be near me.  I am, I cannot believe I am writing this, not angry.

That’s a lie.  I’m less angry.  I’m still frustrated with Democrats and my boss and the weather’s bipolar tendencies of late.  I’m still disappointed with certain folks and myself for my various shortcomings.  But I’m not (at the moment— knock on wood) pissed off at the air for being there.  I don’t want to yell at trees and the sky and God.  I’m just kind of… going.

Ironically, as I became less awful a person, my blog plummeted.  I think it’s more because I’m not passionate about things now… That’s not right either… I’m not passionately aggressive.  I’m still in love with politics and my family and my friends and good music and literature.  But I’m not forcing myself and my thoughts on the world, and I’m not (currently— knock on wood again!) trying to prove a point that I was never able to articulate well, anyway.  

And conssequently, I’ll be taking a break from blogging.  I neglected myself lately, and I was miserable… I cried myself to sleep for a long time, and I never looked in the mirror and asked why.  Choosing to wallow was sooo much easier and blog-worthy.  The need to grieve a number of things took priority over my own emotional well-being and to be frank, I got lazy and in the laziness, incredibly selfish.  Lately, I feel like I see a different girl in the mirror, and I kind of like her more than that teenage-esque bitchy-for-no-reason person I always thought I was. 

Sooner or later, I’ll return to the world of blogging with what I’m sure will be a wave of observations, but for now, I’ll keep if off the blogosphere.  I’m just done trying to be funny.

Everything works out in the end.  If it hasn’t worked out yet, then it’s not the end.

The Night Charlie Almost Died.

Lots to write about… this weekend in its entirety and the interesting lessons stemming from these past 72 hours, the awkward run-in dinner with my ex, the dog’s near-death experience, an update on Mr. Pretty, and of course- Yahoo! just predicted the date of extinction for Wild Tigers… Needless to say, I have a lot on my mind this evening.

But because of reasons known only to God and the Wild Tigers, I choose to write about the damned dog that I can’t stand.

Charlie is my roommate, M’s dog.  M, it should be mentioned, is a lackluster dog mom.  She’s home for maybe 5 hours of the week at best and ignores the animal more than I do.  My roommate and I pick up the slack; we walk and feed Charlie when we get home and deal with him as necessary.  So when I got home on Saturday night, I grudgingly did so.

Upon getting in the door, he was jumping up on my thighs and anxiously letting me know that he needed to be walked.  I sat my bags on the couch and dug for a plastic bag that didn’t have holes in the bottom and secured him to his leash.  We were a few feet from returning home when he managed to shake out of the leash and realized he was free.  Shit.

I knew from experience that chasing him would be hell on my feet and largely unsuccesful.  I also knew from experience that he would undoubtedly be a few houses down having  a feeding frenzy in the neighbor’s cat bowl.  It was a few minutes before I could coax him back home and regularly reminded him for the next ten minutes how unwanted he was and how much I hated his mom for being so absent a parent.

And then he started shaking.  And then, I started worrying.

After a few minutes of his weird shaking, I convinced myself he was cold.  Upstairs I found a huge beach towel and wrapped him up in it on the couch- which was unnerving because this dog has ADD and doesn’t sit still for anything.  The apocolypse could hit and he’d still try to eat a hole through your favorite pair of heels.  A few more minutes of shaking and I knew there was a problem.  I hadn’t noticed the blue marks on his face until this moment and thought that I was in for quite a night.

On a whim I called my mom (it’s what I do), who said “eh…. just wait 30 minutes and call me if it doesn’t get any better… I’m sure he’s fine.”  Unfortunately, ten minutes after hanging up the phone, Charlie’s shaking got noticeably worse and his tongue was out the side of his mouth.  Bundled up in the towel and on my lap, I knew the dog wasn’t cold.  I knew this was much, much worse than I was prepared to deal with.

And then his limbs stuck out like somebody had pulled some sort of cord that I couldn’t see and his eyes rolled back violently in his tiny head.  Holy shit, I thought, I killed him.  Kneeling down on the couch next to him, I did what I saw on Grey’s Anatomy: make sure he was able to drain the fluid from his mouth so he didn’t choke, in case he did live.  Dating protocol I couldn’t manage, but learning how to cope with seizures (even in canines), I apparently had acquired.

While holding Charlie’s head off the side of the couch and coaxing him to stay alive, I saw my phone lighting up.  Tears were streaming steadily down my cheeks while I explained to my mom that Charlie was dead, or near dead anyway.  After figuring out the next steps, she agreed to contact M at work and explain what was going on, and hung up the phone leaving me with an almost dead, very rigid and frothing at the mouth dog.  M called shortly after to say she would leave work as fast as she could and meet me at the following animal hospital… it was on me to find a way to get him there.

As soon as I rolled Charlie onto the floor he started seizing again.  Even though I was certain there was no way he would live through yet another episode, his tiny heart was still beating when I placed my hand on his rib cage.  Funnily enough, as much as I was present for all this, I was having incredibly significant conversations with myself on some other level.  Of course I was physically consumed by keeping him alive and reminding him he just needed to “hold on.”  But on some other level, it occured to me that I have never seen anything die.  Yes, I had attended a funeral or four in my life.  Those were hard enough… but I had never witnessed anything passing on, and I sure as hell wasn’t prepared for it then.  Something switched on in that instance.  I decided I wasn’t going to watch Charlie die, even if I couldn’t stand him and his mom owed me money for three months of bills.

I was running out of options at this point and knew I couldn’t carry him alone without triggering another seizure.  It’s hard to guess how pathetic a sight I was when my neighboors answered their door, but they did.  I had run accross the lawn to the only people who had seemed friendly in our apartment complex and the two co-eds came sprinting after me as I tearfully explained Charlie’s situation.  One very gently helped me carry the rigid animal to my car and the other followed behind, closing doors and picking up cups and things we spilled along the way while we bulldozed our path toward the front door.

Alone again with Charlie while he panted and shook on the way to the animal hospital, I kept one hand firmly on his rib cage.   As if I could keep him alive by forcing my life into his.  I swerved down unfamiliar roads without lifting my fingers- half out of a need to ensure his heart was still beating and half in a way to remind him he wasn’t alone.  He didn’t get to die because of me.  I didn’t even like him, I sure as hell wouldn’t give him the option to blame me for his death.

And in the end, I got Charlie to the hospital in time.  I ripped the door open in hopes of finding help to lift him from the car, and didn’t find it.  Fine, I thought, I’ll figure this out.  My keys dropped to the floor with my cell phone and I lifted a quickly fading puppy into my arms and ran back through the doors.  The sense of relief I had when I was able to hand over a half-alive dog to the hands of a seemingly capable vet-tech at that instance is kind of inexplicable.  I didn’t kill him.  I kept him alive.  He held on.

He’s just a dog, and I understand how insignificant it seems.  But I had never seen anything die, let alone close to die.  And struggling to keep something that I so sincerely disliked was an emotional rollercoaster for me… I knew that I had (as bad as it sounds) found a way out of the continual hassle that this dog was.  But watching him struggle, and seeing his big brown eyes look at me like he had faith that I could get him through this didn’t leave me very many options.  In fact, for the first time in a long time, I prayed.  Through my tears and curse words and confusion, I managed a prayer to God that he just show me, guide me, make sure I didn’t do more damage to this poor puppy than he already had suffered.

And generally, I’m not a largely religious person.  But, I believe miracles come in all sizes.  This dog is a moron, and eats all kinds of otherwise inedible things.  But, he lived through three seizures in my presence that evening and various other ills for reasons I don’t understand.  Yeah, it’s just a dog… but it goes to show, sometimes life comes in dog-sized miracles.

PS. Charlie ate snail poison.  I never said he was a smart dog.  I’m glad he lived, and I’ll be trying to convince his mom to find a more suitable home as soon as I’m prepared to have that conversation.