Your Sad Story Welcome Here

Hello and belated Happy New Year and welcome to Buddhist in the Bible Belt. If you're a regular around these parts, you know that this blog publishes every Thursday, approximately, with the occasional special bulletins and mini-posts. We're all about things Dallas, things legal, things wacky and, oh yeah, Buddhism. And wacky Buddhist legal things that happen in Dallas.  You can contact me by commenting below, and you can follow me on Twitter, @jenstrikesagain. In case of an emergency, oxygen masks will drop from the compartment above your seat. Please secure your own mask before you assist your child, or someone acting like a child, or maybe Rick Perry. That it? I think that's it. Okay:

For God's sake, don't tell anybody, but I actually wrote a letter to an advice columnist yesterday. I don't normally do That Sort of Thing. I am not, as a rule, the sort of person who writes to advice columnists. I'm more the kind of person who reads advice columnists, mocks their advice, makes fun of the people who write in to advice columnists and occasionally leaves snarky remarks in the Comments section. Nonetheless I wrote to an advice columnist, because after having this problem for most of the last 45 years, I have finally come to the conclusion that I may never solve it.  And while Tarot cards are great for solving some problems, they're annoyingly vague a lot of the time.

Here's the issue. Ever since I was a child, people have walked up to me and Just Started Talking. And by people, I mean total strangers. It doesn't matter if I'm alone or out with friends, attending some gathering or just at a Starbucks trying to get some writing done. I can be just sitting there, minding my own business,and somebody will drop into the chair next to me, heave a big sigh and start telling me his (it's usually a guy) life story. Joan and I used to joke that I have a tattoo on my forehead that says "Your Sad Story Welcome Here." But, like so many other things, It's Not Funny When It's Happening.

I have no idea why this happens. Not a clue. My friends tell me that I'm a good listener, and that I have a calming effect. In short, that I soothe people. That's nice, I guess, but I hope it doesn't mean I have some soothing mandate because I'm about to have the tattoo removed, permanently.

The reason I wrote to the advice columnist is that I have finally, after forty odd years, gotten fed up.  It happened last weekend at a Starbucks. Twice. I was there with a group, kind of on the periphery (it was a sizable group) and the lady in charge was talking.  Then the woman sitting next to me decided she needed to tell me all about the novel she was writing.  So I missed the first half of whatever the lady in charge had to say.  I'd finally gotten a sentence in edgewise (something like "Excuse me but I'm listening") when another woman came in, sat down next to me, and began expounding that God told her to come to this meeting and she wasn't sure why but there must be a reason and maybe I was supposed to help.  So I missed the second part of whatever the lady in charge had to say.  And I wanted to be at this presentation.  I was actually interested.  That's why I didn't get up and leave, which is usually my first defense.

It's been a week and I'm still smarting.  I have, as they say, had it.  So I've been trying to come up with alternative strategies.  Joan suggested I try raising a finger (not that finger) or a hand, like a cop saying "Stop," and saying something like, "I'm trying to listen" or "I'm working" or "I'm in the middle of a conversation with my friends, here, and you're kind of intruding."  Good thought.  And I can think of plenty of other breathtakingly rude things to say that might permanently offend someone from wanting to talk to me, but unfortunately they're breathtakingly rude, and, well, I'm not trying to be un-Buddhist-y in public.  But I did have an idea that might just work.  It's maybe time to dig out my old friend, Public Embarrassment.

I got this idea from airline flight attendants.  I dunno if you've noticed, but if a passenger starts to get uppity with a flight attendant, the first thing he does is get LOUDER.   The idea, of course, is to get other passengers to look over there to see what's going on.  Usually it works, and the passenger in question, shriveling up under the glare of excess eyeballs, quits being an asshat and does whatever the flight attendant's telling him to do. Sometimes it doesn't work, the passenger gets louder, the flight attendant gets louder still, and the whole thing ends with the police being called. But that's kind of rare and there's usually alcohol involved.

So here's what I'm thinking.  I try once, with the upraised hand (or finger) to say, "Excuse me, I'm listening" (or working or trying to save the free world from imminent destruction by some supervillain's death ray).  Once. If he/she doesn't shut up, I will STart TAlkING LOUDER until everybody's staring at us. I'm definitely not above Making a Scene.  In fact, there are times it's the best way to solve a problem. Case in point: Walking with my then-girlfriend in an outdoor mall right before Christmas. Some guy came up to us, wanting to take a survey. We said no, politely.  Then we said no, less politely.  And then when the guy continued to follow us, I turned around and said, "SHE SAID NO.  BUZZ OFF."  The whole place came to a screeching halt for a second, the guy with the survey slunk away, and then life went on as usual.  As long as you know that all the people staring will by definition also be staring at you, and you're okay with that, this works. (And just incidentally, the guy with the survey caught up with us later and apologized.  So you just never know.)

So why did I write to the advice columnist, you ask.  Well, two reasons.  One, is I'm not sure how polite it is to Make a Scene, even a small one.  Second, in case it doesn't work.  Because I gotta have some kind of winning strategy in place before the next time it happens, or I'm likely to tear the head right off the shoulders of some poor innocent fool who just wants to know the time of day.  And that would definitely be un-Buddhist-y.  Cheers, all.

Completely Inappropriate

This is one of those posts that's probably not going to make it to Facebook.  Which means Joan and maybe two other people will ever see it. (Thank you. Both of you.)  But hey, if you can't have a few stealth blog posts that might offend a bunch of people, what's the point in having a blog?  Actually, what is the point in having a blog?  I haven't figured that out yet and I've been doing it since 2008.  That's a long time to do something for which you don't know the point.  But I do know this; I feel better when I do it. So onward.

I called my mom the other night around ten.  This was a mistake, because if I call my mom around ten I'm probably going to call Rhett or Marcia or Kristen or Kevin around 10:15 to vent about whatever my mother just said (because Joan was asleep), which pretty much guarantees I won't get into bed until 11 and won't get to sleep until 11:30, when my brain winds down, if indeed it ever does.  That said, however, I called my mom the other night around ten.  She said, "I'm glad you called," which is kind of nice to hear, and "Did your aunt send you a Christmas present?" Which is, uh, not.

I have eight aunts.  Four of them are still living and all the same, I knew immediately which one she meant. The one who lives with her, of course. (Insert joke about my father and his two wives here. On second thought, forget the joke.) "Yes," I said, because she had.  A pretty nice one, too. "Well, did you send her a thank you note?"  Another thing I'm not accustomed to hearing, though I heard it when I was, oh, eight or ten.

"Christmas was two days ago, Mom," I said.  "Well, you shouldn't wait.  You should write it the same day you open the present," she said.  "Mom, there's no mail on Christmas," I pointed out.  "Well, there's mail the next day.  You're already a day late." (Yes. She said that. She said that.) "I have the stationery right here on the table," I said, which I was making true as we spoke. "Good, then it won't take you long," my mom said.  "Mom--" I began, and she said, "Yes, I know, I'm still telling my children to mind their manners.  You need to send the note. Immediately."  

So I said I would, and we went off to something else, and 10:15 came and I was already on the phone to Rhett, winding down from that conversation. By 11:45 I was in bed, staring at the ceiling and wondering what the fuck.  And the next morning I did send the note, because I said I would and once I've said I'll do something, I have a hard time letting myself off the hook.  Here it is three days later and I'm still wondering what in hell just happened. I mean, the last time I checked, I was I think about 45 years old.

Why is this bothering me, you might ask.  Everybody's mother has her overbearing moments.  Well, for one thing, there are people who write thank you notes and there are people who don't, and I'm firmly in the former category.  Just ask Joan.  I do a great imitation of my mother when I need her to sign one. People who know me know this.  Second, it was the way she said it.  Not just the being-overbearing part but the lowering-her-voice-and-muttering-into-the-phone-like-she's-trying-to-get-around-a-kidnapper part.  That says, to my discerning ear, that said aunt is right there in the room and she's trying not to be overheard.  Which leads to an inevitable conclusion that I don't like, and that's this: There is no privacy when talking to my mom anymore.  Or my parents in general for that matter.  Anything I tell Person 1 will be immediately known by Persons 2 and 3, regardless of the content.  Which makes it damned hard to find out what someone wants for Christmas.

The other thing that's bothering me is that she was so overbearing.  My mother is not a very touchy feely person, and I'd describe her as "clingy" and "hovering" right after I described her as "stupid" (which she most definitely isn't).  I mean, she's nice, but a helicopter parent she is not.  Unless whatever's going on is somehow affecting her directly.  So what I suspect here, and I'm probably right, is that Aunt was leaning on Mom about the thank-you note issue and Mom, rather than telling Aunt to either mind her own business or ask me about it her damnself, decided that she had to make everything Fine again.  Remember, the Scandinavian household is eternally under siege by the tyrannical army of Fine.  If everything isn't completely Fine, it's the end of the world.  Trust me, I had to tell her I was gay.  Cue the catapults and the battering rams.

In case I haven't mentioned this part in a while, Aunt has something on the Aspergers/autism spectrum. Never officially diagnosed, just kind of obvious if you ever look at a symptom list. One of them is that she'll get fixated on something and won't let it go. Can't let it go, I think now (having listened to her complain about someone smoking on an airplane, back when that was allowed, for eight hours between Atlanta and London).  So if something happened to cause her to think that I didn't get the present, or didn't get it on time, or--whatever, she might have been obsessing for days about when she was going to receive a thank-you note. And just because Mom lives with her doesn't mean she's figured this out, or knows how to handle it even if she has figured it out.

This is not Aunt's fault.  She never asked to be Aspergers/autistic.  She does things sometimes that are completely socially inappropriate, and she doesn't pick up social cues that the rest of us use.  Ferexample, when a topic of conversation comes up that makes someone uncomfortable, other persons in the conversation will usually drop hints that it's time to change the subject, ie, "How interesting.  Fred, so good to see you, how is that merger thing going at your office?" Don't do this with my aunt.  She won't get it and she'll go straight on with whatever the topic was.  If you want her to drop a subject, you have to tell her.  "Aunt. Stop it." Or "Aunt. Drop that subject, please."  Which, if you're me and you grew up in a Scandinavian household in which virtually nothing was ever openly discussed (see Tyranny of Fine, above) seems amazingly rude.  Especially when directed at an older person.

So here are my unpalatable options when something like this happens.  I can just let it happen and tell myself in a Buddhist-y kind of way that I don't have to respond to something just because I don't like it.  I can call Mom back and say, "Um, I'm 45 years old, don't you think that was a little inappropriate?" and see what happens.  I can say to Aunt, "Aunt. Stop it." Which, if you think about it for half a second, really isn't rude. I mean, you communicate with people using the language they understand, right?  And if I, who know she has this Asperger's thing and that certain things just don't compute, find her difficult to deal with sometimes, imagine how total strangers must feel.

(Luckily, she is a pretty good mimic of normal behavior, when she wants to be.  A trick I wish I had picked up somewhere down the line.)

That's a lot of baggage for one stupid thank-you note, but hey, that is just the way I roll.  And whose interactions with their grown parents/aunts aren't layered with decades-old coats of meaning? Anyway, that's my domestic drama for the week.  What's yours? And did you write your thank-you notes yet?

Talk Thursday (on Wednesday): Caterpillars

My parents fly into town today, and who knows how much time I'll have to do anything over the next few days. So, let's blog. The topic du jour is caterpillars. I think I'm supposed to call to mind the little fuzzy guys that start crawling up my oak tree at this time of year, soon to make little cocoons and emerge later as nifty-looking butterflies and pepper moths. (I love pepper moths. There's no two alike, just like snowflakes.) More moths than butterflies, at least around here, but some very creative moths we have in Dallas. The trouble with moths, though, is that they tend to fly into the house by accident because they're congregating around the outside light, and then you open the door, which is right by the outside light, and they zoom in with you, and presto! They're cat toys. Caesar likes nothing better than to chase moths. Chloe will yell at them if they're out of reach, which is pretty funny, actually.

But the kind of caterpillar I generally think of looks like this:

Mainly that's because I live in Dallas, where despite the recession and talk of no government funds, some road or another is always getting torn up for repairs. Right now it's the 635 all the way from the I35 interchange to the 75 by my office. I usually come up from downtown and miss most of the fun, but I can see it out most of the office windows and let me tell you, it is not pretty. If you gotta drive in North Dallas, you'd do well to take the surface streets.

Then there's this kind of caterpillar, which tends to show up at my idiot neighbor's house. Have I mentioned my idiot neighbor lately? This little guy showed up to dig a big hole in his back yard, while I watched (and secretly videotaped, in case he's a serial killer and he was digging an underground bunker to hide the bodies.) It turned out to be for a below-ground swimming pool, of the sort that requires proper drainage, a four-foot locking fence, and a city permit. None of which he bothered with. Did I mention he's an idiot? I should have figured he didn't have the smarts to be a serial killer. At least not for long. (Course, if I disappear after writing this blog post, check under the pool.)

Now, really, I should not be complaining about construction. After all, it brings jobs. (You know, those things that the Republicans were so excited about for five minutes, before somebody mentioned birth control.) And it doesn't affect me all that much, because I can drive around it (some people can't) or go through it at times of day when it's less likely to be jammed with angry motorists (and Caterpillars). But there are days when I'd like to look out my office window (or somebody else's office window; my office doesn't have a window) and just watch our resident hawk zoom around, instead of the big yellow trucks moving back and forth. I'm just sayin'.

Talk Thursday: Year's End

Aaaaaand suddenly it's the 29th of December. I'm not sure how that happened. I'm pretty sure I haven't missed any days, but how so many of them squeezed into that little span of time between January 1 and now, I can't explain. It seems like the older I get, the more time slips into fast forward. Somebody told me once that it had to do with my relative perception of time; the longer you've been alive, the greater the frame of reference you have for which to view time, so a year seems to go by faster at 45 (when you've had 44 years to view how long a year is) than at 9 (when you've only had eight years). To which I say, hooey. Sounds like something Einstein came up with when he was tossing a ball around on a spaceship and trying to prove that it got to its destination before it left. There's no excuse for clumsy theories of relativity.

Anyway, I'm at Afrah, munching on a piece of pita bread and trying to figure out if I have any great rituals to mark the passing of another year. I know I used to, but that was back when A. I drank alcohol and B. I felt like it was necessary to actually go out on New Years Eve. That I can't remember what they were is, you know, just par for the course. I got home, that's the important thing. At some point I began staying home, which was just, you know, smart. The year that 1999 begat 2000, Joan and I drank an entire bottle of Asti Spumante and began firing a cap gun off the balcony of our overpriced San Diego apartment. Then Joan staggered back out onto the balcony and yelled, loud enough to be heard in Tijuana, "'Sokay, everybody! 'Sjust a cap gun!" because she was worried somebody might call the cops. So far as I know, no one did, though a scared little voice floated in and said, "Thank you," very faintly from another balcony. (Call the cops. Ha. In our fine Texas neighborhood, a whole gang of morons, no doubt led by my idiot neighbor, open fire on the sky right around midnight, and the cops don't even bother to call back.)

New Years Eve is the one time of year I kind of miss alcohol. Not enough to go back, but there's something kind of homey about lolling around on your couch, pleasantly drunk, playing "spot the facelift scars" on Dick Clark's head while the crystal ball (made in Ireland, by the way, at the Waterford Crystal Factory) descends over Times Square. This is, of course, assuming I can even stay awake until midnight; I'm pretty sure that last year I curled up in a blanket, rang in the New Year with Maine and Florida and promptly fell asleep. And that was without alcohol (six years sober, y'all.) I'm gettin' old, Zeke.

So, apart from falling asleep, I don't really have any rituals to ring in the New Year. Every year I plan to get the house clean before the ball drops, and every year that kind of doesn't happen. House blessing? Burning sage? Casting a couple of spells? Nah. Never happens. The guns go off, if we're still conscious we hide under the dining room table, and in the morning we're about the only two among our circle of friends who aren't hung over. Which is great, but no claim to fame, really. We're also the only two that probably didn't go anywhere.

Some friends at work who happen to be from Mexico were talking today about "the grapes." Apparently on New Years Eve in Mexico and other Latin American countries, you try to swallow one grape for every time the bell tolls at midnight, and each one begets a wish. (Allergic to grapes over here, so can't do that, but that's an easy way to get a dozen wishes, if you ask me.) There's also something you do with a suitcase, but I was a little unclear on that. Maybe you put grapes in it. In France they're fond of fireworks, in Russia everybody's supposed to be quiet for the last twelve seconds of the old year, and in Scotland your year's luck is determined by the first person to set foot in your house after midnight. (Ouch. I wonder what happens if the first person is a lost American tourist with a full bottle of whiskey, a set of plastic bagpipes and a really bad map of Edinburgh? I mean, that could herald the Apocalypse.)

What do Buddhists do for the New Year? Well, hey, if they're part of Brother ChiSing's gang, you have a New Years Purification Ceremony. (Buddhists are big on ceremonies.) If you're more Zen, you're probably just going to meditate quietly somewhere. And if you're me--well, yeah, you're probably hiding under the dining room table. Dang, but those guns are loud.

Happy New Year, everybody!

Talk Thursday (on Sunday): Accountability

Tonight marks my last night of ferret-sitting, which is both interesting and sad. I've gotten kind of attached to the little weasels, though I have to admit that they, uh, stink. (Not their fault, really; like skunks, polecats and mongooses (mongeese?), they belong to the family Mustelidae, which translates from Latin as something like, "little weasel-like critters that stink.") The white one (I've forgotten their names) is trying like hell to pull the book away from underneath the door so she can go romping down the hallway, and the brown one is somewhere in the closet doing God knows what and making some strange noises. I hope I don't have to go in there after him. I mean, a man's closet is a pretty private place. Kel is a good friend but I'd still hate to get in there and find out he has, say, a selection of fine evening gowns, high heels and pantyhose or something. There are just things I'd rather not know about people.

Which brings me (however obliquely) to the subject of this week's somewhat neglected Talk Thursday topic: Accountability. That is, the condition of being liable to, answerable to. or otherwise responsible for. I'm accountable for these ferrets, for example. I need to make sure they get back into their little house and that all the doors to that house are well latched. The ferrets will tell you (in ferretspeak, which seems to consist of squeaks and chirping noises) that I'm good for that. Which is to say, I have accountability. In this grand topsy-turvy world of ours, I, a human being, can be counted on for that one thing. We haven't all tumbled into the maelstrom just yet.

Then we take a look at what's going on in Congress and dear God, are we sure about that whole maelstrom thing?

Look, I try to stay away from politics. It depresses me. Especially when we have Joe Joe the Idiot Boy and his seven dwarfs (dwarves?) running for the highest office in the land, railing about what a lousy job the current man-in-charge is doing. (To which I say: You think it's that easy? Go try it sometime.) Besides that, though, we've got all the dwarves (dwarfs?) in charge of doing stuff like deciding about taxes, utterly unable to come to a decision about one lousy tax that they've been talking about for better than a year. It is, ultimately, a complete failure of accountability with these people. As in, they've forgotten who they work for. And to whom they're accountable. And that it has nothing to do with some election that may happen a year from now. And before I get off on a rant here (too late), I'll just ask one question: Is anybody else as sick of this bullshit as I am?

Don't tell me to write my congressperson. He's like talking to a brick wall. My Senator's an even bigger problem; she's retiring and the one Democratic candidate who was going to run has changed his mind and bailed out of the race. (Again, lack of accountability. So what if he'd spend bazillions of dollars and ultimately lose?) I'm to the point where I don't know or care who to complain to about this mess. I just want it fixed, so they can go back to doing things like, I dunno, fixing the economy. Working on the ginormous national debt. Stabilizing Social Security and Medicare. Getting our troops out of Afghanistan. The little things in life. You know. Showing some accountability.

Remind me never to run for public office. I've about had my fill of chasing weasels.

Ferret Sitting and the Collision that Wasn't

I forget how I got talked into this, but some friends of ours are out of town and I've been drafted into ferret sitting. And lizard and cat sitting, but, primarily, ferret sitting. No, that's not really them in the picture. I've been trying to get a shot of them with my cell phone for the last twenty minutes and the little darlings won't hold still long enough. (Well, okay, to be totally honest I've got dozens of shots of them--of their backs as they run away, blurry images of something that looks like a fuzzy worm, a floor panel, half of a guitar--the list goes on.)

Apparently, ferrets have to be let out of their enclosures to run around for about an hour a day or they go stark staring raving mad. I can understand this. One of these two is exhibiting symptoms already, unless those impressive leaps and whirls were actually the chasing of her own tail (and I think they might have been). The other one's been in and out of my backpack several times, and tried to abscond with an empty water bottle on one of the trips. If we could bottle the energy these guys have, we could probably free the nation from OPEC. Seriously, I get tired just watching them.

Changing subjects at right-angle turns: I dunno how many of you watch American Horror Story, but if you don't, you're missing one of the best shows on TV. All the same, one of the conceits of this show has to do with this haunted house being the hub of evil, or one of the hubs of evil, anyway. If you die there you get stuck there, and can't leave the house except on Halloween (don't ask me why they would make an exception for Halloween; I don't write the silly thing). Another one of the conceits is that being dead isn't all that different from being alive. In fact, you might die and miss it completely. Spoiler alert! Violet, the fourteen-or-so-year-old daughter of the family that's unfortunate enough to be living in the house, accidentally killed herself and didn't figure it out for weeks. And it's terribly unfortunate that I'm such a fan of this show, because today I wasn't in a terrible car wreck.

Or was I?

This is what happened. I was coming back to the office from a doctor's appointment. The traffic on the freeway was moving at a pretty good clip; then suddenly it came to a halt, as traffic will do. All the cars in my lane slammed on their brakes. Including yours truly. But I slammed mine on a little too hard, and it had been raining and the road was slick and I went into a skid.

The whole time my brain was yelling at my leg to forgodsake let up on the brake pedal and pump it (my car not having antilock brakes), and the whole time my leg was having none of it. It was pushing the brake pedal all the way to the floor and to heck with what anybody else was doing. I slid down the lane and to the left and right into the guy in front of me. I heard the screech of brakes behind me and was pretty sure the guy behind me was going to crunch me like a bug. There was no way I could possibly avoid slamming into the guy in front of me, and I was going to hit him pretty hard, so I did what I always do in a dire situation. I closed my eyes.

Nothing happened.

After the two crashes should have taken place, I opened my eyes again. Nothing. The guy in front of me was still in front of me, a foot or two ahead. The guy behind me had stopped behind me and a little to the right. And I? I was still sliding, but I hadn't hit anything. And I finally got my leg to unlock so I could pump the brakes and crank the wheel and regain control of the car.

A second or two ticked by. The screeching of brakes gradually stopped. Everybody just sat there for a second. Then, as if we'd all caught our collective breath, we slowly started to pull forward again.

So I drove back to work. Parked the car. Went up in the elevator. Greeted the receptionist, to make sure people could see me. (She could.) Called Joan to make sure people could still hear me. (She could.) So apparently, I am not dead and this is not American Horror Story. But, on the other hand, here I am in a strange room in a strange house, watching two pint-sized weasels roll around on the floor and typing this. That's not exactly normal, you know. And I don't know how in the hell I didn't hit that guy in front of me. Even if the guy behind me managed not to hit me, I should have plowed into that guy ahead. His grey minivan should be a mangled heap of metal in an insurance-company scrapyard right about now.

(Says the litigation paralegal.)

Well, anyway, I ate a sandwich from Afrah a little bit ago, so I'll take that as one more sign that I'm still breathing. But seriously, if I get to my OA meeting tonight and nobody can see me, I might just freak right the hell out.

Mini-Post: Requiem for a Lizard

One of my cats got ahold of a small lizard last night. Don't ask me what a lizard was doing in the house. I'm sure it regrets its rash behavior. After Joan determined that whatever the cat was playing with wasn't a six-legged creepy crawly that would make me scream like a little girl, I went in and got the lizard away from the cat. I picked it up with a napkin and tried to determine how bad it was hurt.

Answer: Bad. The poor thing was bitten almost in half. Yes, I know this is just part of the food chain and all that, but I don't have to like it. Quickly I rushed outside with the lizard, put it down on the porch and stomped on its head.

After which I, uh, was sick.

Don't get me wrong. I think I did the right thing. There wasn't any helping the poor little guy and he must have been in terrible pain. He's not anymore. But it's been ages since I killed anything. When I have to deal with a spider, I usually catch it and take it outside. I'll wave off mosquitoes, but I won't slap them unless they're biting me. I'm going to have to call an exterminator here, because we've got a hornet's nest someplace near the house, but I'm putting it off. I'm trying to figure out how I can call an exterminator who will somehow get rid of the hornets without killing them. (Right.) Any Buddhist exterminators out there? Hello?

I know people kill things all the time. Bugs, mice, rats, other pests that interrupt our households. Heck, even raccoons. I know it, but I don't like it. Killing things, I mean. I won't tell other people what to do, but I don't want to have to do it. Ever. And it occurred to me that maybe the best requiem for this little lizard is that I did react so strongly to having to kill it. What kind of person would I be if I killed something, shrugged, and went on about my business? And what kind of statement would that be, to this lizard? That would be saying that its tiny life didn't matter. All lives matter, however small.

Talk Thursday: The Aminal Life

Total k swum in July: 8.15 (25.8 to go!)

Well, kids, my last feral cat is gone. Her name was Frost (is Frost?) and she was a calico. She lived in the shed next to the house and showed up twice a day for feeds, and while she wouldn't come anywhere near me, she'd sometimes act like she was going to get close enough to sniff my hand. Anyway, I haven't seen her since the beginning of June, and because she was so regular, I have to think she's probably really gone this time. Gone to where? Don't know. Fatal case of truck or stray dog or coyote, I expect, or maybe an illness that she couldn't fight off. Another time she disappeared for about a week and came back dragging a back foot. It seemed to get better by itself (which was a good thing, since good luck catching her, taking her to a vet, and then catching her again to get the cast removed). But I think I'd have heard from her by now if I was going to hear from her.

So my backyard menagerie, which once numbered twelve (count them, twelve) feral cats, is down to zero. Unless you count the orange guy, who lives a few houses away and comes by for

extra meals and some loving-on. There's also a couple of grey cats that happen by every now and again, but I'm completely without any squirrel patrols, and the big ugly scary bugs that more or less never came into the house are, uh, coming into the house. (And the internal cats are completely useless, by the way; they come over and stare at the bugs with great interest, but don't do a darn thing to kill them. Cats not being Buddhists, they could kill with impunity; me, I have to yell, "JOAN!!" and try to ignore the fact that Joan stomps on them, rather than catch them and take them outside.) Yesterday I bought twenty pounds of cat food and couldn't figure out why I was doing it. Then, this morning, when I found the bin of food on its side halfway across the deck with the lid partially unscrewed, I remembered: The raccoons.

Y'all might remember last summer's bout with the cute furry and dangerous little masked

denizens of the aminal kingdom. They're attracted by the cat food, of course, and since I wouldn't stop feeding the external cats just to get rid of the raccoons, they had a nice source of food all summer long. I hadn't seen any in quite a while, though the last encounter was particularly cute; this one hid behind the food bin, stuck a paw out and scooped food out of the food bowl, pulling it behind the food bin to chow down. As if he was invisible back there.

Anyway, I thought they'd moved on to greener pastures. Perhaps it's the absence of Frost, but The Raccoons Are Back, People. And they're polluting the waterer by washing cat food. So I took the seemingly necessary step of putting out a small dish of water next to the food bowl. Maybe they'd wash in that, and leave the waterer alone. As it is, I've become the local watering hole for half the block and I'm filling the waterer every two or three days. When Joan saw this, she said, "Jen, I get that you don't want to chase away the raccoons, but is it really necessary to put out a finger bowl? I mean, what's next? Cloth napkins and a sherbet appetizer?"

My dad called me last night. He and Mom are visiting relatives in North Dakota, and my aunt and uncle had been hearing strange chirruping noises from the basement at night. My uncle finally went down there with a flashlight and a baseball bat and found not a prowler with a speech impediment but four baby raccoons. He and my dad caught them one by one and relocated them outside, under the porch. When my dad tried to walk away from the last one, it crawled out and followed him. Yep, Dad had become Mom. Luckily, the Real Mom showed up and put a stop to this nonsense in a hurry. So you might say this ridiculous fondness for pesky wildlife runs in the family.

(By the way, my aunt and uncle are selling the house in which I spent the only really happy part of my formative years. I'd kill to keep it in the family. Can anybody lend me $1.8 million and a speedboat until my first runaway bestseller? Anybody? Hello?)

Talk Thursday: On the Road

Longest road trip: In 2004, Joan and I piled 2 cats, a box containing a crock pot and various kitchen supplies, some suitcases, a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff, and ourselves (did I mention 2 cats?) into a 1998 Corolla and drove from San Diego to Dallas. It took us four days, including an overnight at my parents' place in Phoenix, and was not what you'd call fun. The cats were relatively well-behaved most of the way, though they seemed to want to sleep on the floor a lot (read, under the accelerator pedal), and for some reason Caesar wanted to stand on his back feet, rest his front paws on the windows and howl at every eighteen-wheeler that went by. But really, they were pretty well-behaved until we got to Abilene. I'm not sure what happened in Abilene but they both just freaked right the hell out. We had to stuff them back into their cat carriers. Caesar promptly flipped his off the seat and began rolling around on the car floor; I had to pull over, put him back on the seat and strap him down with a seat belt. I then drove 90 mph all the way to Dallas, somehow managing to avoid state troopers entirely. Thank God once we got them into the house, they calmed down. We lay on the floor on an air mattress most of the afternoon, panting for breath and wondering how long it would take our furniture and stuff to show up. (Answer: Four more days.)

Latest road trip: Last weekend, we drove to Glen Rose, Texas to take a tour of a wildlife rescue facility called Fossil Rim Wildlife Park. In this zoo, you're the one in the cage; they stick you into

a vehicle (an old school bus, in our case) and all the animals come out to see you. They gave us kibble to feed to the critters, prompting this giraffe to not only go after Joan for more kibble, but to try to steal her hat. And yes, it was hotter

'n' lots of things that are too darned hot, and we needed to have taken along much more water, and it was dusty and uncomfortable and so on, but still, a giraffe tried to steal Joan's hat. How cool is that?

Most surprising road trip: On another of those let's-get-the-hell-out-of-Dallas whimsies, we drove to yet another animal sanctuary, this one near Conroe (which is almost to Houston, in case you don't speak Texas geography.) This was to visit a wolf sanctuary, and we followed quite a few twisty turny roads to get there on the way down. On the way back, we came out of Conroe onto the I-45 and just turned north to get back to Dallas. Passing near Huntsville, we got the surprise of our lives: There, on the freeway, in front of God and everybody, was a giant statue of Sam Houston. I mean this thing was huge, monumentally tacky, and stuck out there in the middle of Nowhere, Texas, for No Apparent Reason. I mean, I guess you're supposed to pull over and take pictures of it or something? I dunno. But I was really surprised. Well, maybe appalled comes a little closer.

Scariest road trip: When I was a kid, we lived in Utah and my entire family -- well, two uncles and many cousins -- would fly in from North Dakota to go skiing at Snowbird every year for a week. It was awesome because we got to miss school, and because we got to see the sun; in Salt Lake City, the fog rolls in about mid-November and stays there until April, so if you want to see the sun, you have to go skiing. No kidding. Anyway, my parents had this old Ford Econoline van, which we'd cram with something like 15 people, plus all the ski equipment and luggage, and we'd drive this thing up this narrow, twisty, snowy, icy road to Snowbird, that frequently got wiped out by avalanches, hoping to God we wouldn't careen off a cliff and die horrible deaths. My dad would pile all the luggage in the back of the van and position random kids against the pile, including on top, so that all the weight would be in the back. Then he'd get us all to sing at the top of our lungs -- usually old camp fire songs, but once in a while something religious--so that we'd forget how frick'n scared we were. And there we'd go, this band of terrified, singing Icelanders, up the road to Snowbird. And somehow, every year, we made it in one piece. The gods have a soft spot for fools. And the nineteenth round of "Green Grow the Rushes."

Weirdest road trip: I rode in the back of a Brat truck from downtown El Salvador to uptown Chalchuapa, if Chalchuapa can be said to have an uptown. Chalchuapa is a town in the El Salvador Highlands (yes, there are highlands) where they've just in the last 20 years or so discovered the ruins of a Mayan city. They're slowly excavating some temples out of the jungle, and the tourists are starting to come to check them out, though because the location is so remote it's slow going. Still, I rode in this Brat in both sunlight and rain (it rains a lot in El Salvador), up these twisty turny mountain roads to Chalchuapa, and got to see this Mayan temple up close and personal. A nine-year-old kid walked me through it, and he was pretty knowledgeable, telling me all about the ball game that the condemned used to play for the entertainment of the locals before their still-beating hearts were ripped out of their bodies. (He then demanded a tip. I paid him and bought him a Coke.) We had dinner at a place called the Manhattan Bar and Grill, where the local specialty was pollo asado with shark fin soup. I kid you not. And on the loudspeakers in this fine establishment of the local haute cuisine played a fine rendition of Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again."

Next road trip: Well, it won't be a road trip because I'll be flying, but I'm going back to Utah to see the folks. And if we go to Snowbird, which we might very well do, the road will be dry and safe without a trace of ice. Which sort of negates the whole purpose, but it's still awfully pretty up there.

Sunday Scorekeeping: Raccoon 2, Jen 0

If you follow me on Twitter (@jenstrikesagain), you already know that I'm having an interesting adventure with that most cute and furry of all backyard pests, the North American raccoon (Procyon lotor). This probably came about because of the feral cats. When we moved into this house some six years ago, we found that a colony of wild cats (about five or six, though I forget the exact number) had already claimed the alley, portions of the yard, the underdeck and the roof of the shed. Being rather fond of cats, even cats that hated me and hissed when I got too close, I started feeding them and became the neighborhood crazy cat lady. However, I also trapped them all, got them to a vet, got them shots, and got them spayed and neutered (I think I scooped up a few of the local non-ferals while I was at it, but thus far none of the neighbors have complained or, in truth, have probably even noticed).

How do I afford this, you ask. Well, if you live in Dallas, there's a couple of organizations that can help you out. One is Feral Friends Community Cat Alliance, and another is Kittico. Both organizations have the same basic idea; feral cats will never be house cats, they don't like people, they have rotten lives on the street getting hit by cars, eaten by dogs, starving and getting diseases, and the best thing we can do for them is make sure they don't make any feral kittens while giving them sufficient food and a safe place to sleep. Makes them better neighbors, too; if not in heat, they won't howl, and if fed, they won't dig through trash. Both organizations work for free, or nearly. In fact the only time I had to actually pay big bucks for neutering a cat was when I scooped up a mom cat, already pregnant, and had to take her to the McKinney SPCA because everybody was full up. That cost me a hundred bucks, not to mention a day's pay. I figure I've singlehandedly prevented about a thousand kittens by now, so it was worth it.

Anyway, my little colony of cats went up as high as twelve at one point, but street cat life is hard and I'm now down to one. I call her Frost. Two or three hangers-on come over from local houses for extra meals once in a while, but for the most part it's me and Frost. Frost always has a dish of food outside and a bowl of water, and it's this that has attracted other backyardigans. This very hot summer I ran through water like, well, water; I think every squirrel in the neighborhood, to say nothing of birds, small rodents and other cats, were drinking from the bowl. And now, just recently, we have this raccoon.

No, not that one; that's just a representative photo. But she does look a little like that. I first suspected I might have a problem when I found the external food bin turned on its side and, uh, opened. The bin opens like a submarine hatch and is hard for me to manage on cold mornings. I couldn't figure out how in hell a cat (or, say, an opossum) could do that with just paws. Course, if you have opposable thumbs, less of a problem, right? Guess what has opposable thumbs. Yeah. See above.

The next day, I found the water fountain knocked over on its side, the water gone, and the water reservoir on the other side of the lawn. Also odd behavior for a cat or an opossum but quite logical for a raccoon, which likes to wash its opposable thumbs before it eats. I don't know why, they just do. I am not a student of raccoon behavior.

So I called Tracy, my time-traveling neo-craftsperson animal trainer friend and champion closet-door opener, and laid out the evidence. She agreed that I probably had a raccoon, and should try to trap it because it might be rabid. Rabies is bad in North Texas this year. I have a trap, so I took it out and baited it with bread soaked in agave nectar. (The correct recipe is marshmallows, but I didn't have any marshmallows. Excuse me for living.) Set the trap, went to bed, waited. The next morning I opened the door and found the trap on its side, the door open, all the bread gone, and the raccoon nowhere to be found. I called Tracy to report this and she said, "Oh, definitely a raccoon. Better luck next time."

Trouble is, I wasn't sure there'd be a next time. If Madame Raccoon could defeat a Havaheart trap, she was pretty smart. Hard to know what I'd come up with next time. Besides, I asked Tracy what to do if I caught her (for some reason that hadn't yet occurred to me) and she said, "You'd call Animal Control and they'd come get her." And then what? "Rabies is really bad this season," she repeated, emphasizing the words really and bad. Getting the hint, I asked if there was any way around the whole Aminal Control solution. She said, "Well, you could take her somewhere else and release her, like a public park or something. But don't get caught. It's illegal." Nice. But it beats killing her, which, you gotta admit, is kind of un-Buddhist-y.

Yesterday, Joan and I went to the State Fair of Texas, probably our first visit of many. Last night about 10:30, when we finally got home, I carefully opened the back door and turned on a flashlight to check out the feral cats' food bowl. Whenever I have to go out there at night I break out the flashlight; there's all manner of creepy crawlies known to hang around the food bowl, and they freak me right the hell out. The last thing I want to do is step on one. Instead of creepy crawlies in the bowl, though, I got a full-face shot of one very startled raccoon. "Oh my gosh!" I exclaimed to this fuzzy critter that doesn't, as far as I know, speak English. "Hi!"

In response, she retreated a way, though not all the way down the porch. This is good. Raccoon wary of human means raccoon probably not rabid. Then Frost, my sole surviving feral, came bounding up the porch for her evening meal. When she saw the raccoon, she hissed and took a swat at it. Raccoon immediately backed up another couple of feet. Very good. Raccoon wary of cats means she knows her place in the universe. And another hint that she's probably not rabid.

I filled the bowl, then called Joan in to check out the raccoon, which had waited patiently under the table for Frost to finish her meal before she ventured in to check out the leftovers. This morning Joan and I had a Discussion about the raccoon. The Discussion pretty much finalized that we're not going to try to trap her again. Much as they're not exactly welcome visitors, this particular one is not getting into the trash (why bother, there's plenty of cat food!), not rabid and in general not bothering anybody. I'm not sure what we'll do if Madame Raccoon shows up next spring with a litter of raccoonlets, but I guess we'll cross that frozen wasteland covered with ice when we come to it. (That's a Texas winter, in case you were wondering.)