Enlightening Nonsense

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Perhaps I am a little cocky. “No!” you shout in the same way the fellow recruits called out in unison to John Candy’s character Dewey “Ox” Oxberger in the movie Stripes when he said, “Perhaps some of you noticed that I got a slight weight problem.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD4xwK13lGk

I never think that anything bad can happen to me. I’ll walk through bad areas, alone in nature, confront seedy people… “What’s the worst that can happen to me?” I think, “That they’ll kill me and I’ll be done with this miserable life? Big whoop.” But while I don’t necessarily care about my own personal safety, I do care about the safety of my beloved Abandon, mostly because I love her but also because I am responsible for her well being and I take that responsibility seriously.

I’ve studied dog training via books and DVD’s and in practice with my girl to the point where something just seemed to click and I was like Keanu Reeves in one of his typical poor acting moments in “The Matrix” when after he was plugged into the martial arts training program he snaps out of it and says, “I know kung fu.” When Morpheus responds, “Show me,” I am not sure if he is saying, “Show me your kung fu skills” or perhaps, “Show me your credentials as an actor because judging from your piss poor acting skills it is hard for me to believe you’ve ever taken a single acting class in your life.”

“I know dog training.” And if Morpheus told me to “Show me” I would bring his black ass to the many clients I’ve had who have raved over the changes not just in their dogs’ behavior but in their understanding of how to best communicate with their dogs to foster a better relationship with which I have helped them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vMO3XmNXe4

With this confidence, I also thought that I was in control of any situation that may put Abandon at risk, minus starvation from my broke, animal compassionist ways that has resulted in me feeding her nothing but twigs and berries. I found out last week that I was wrong. I am not sure whether this happened because I was not in control, I used poor judgment in assessing the situation or if, as the phrase goes, sometimes “shit happens.”

They say things come in threes and this was a day where this incident would prove the third or a string of three opportunities for me to test my inner calm in action. The first incident involved me working out lightly for literally 10-minutes at a gym I freelance train out of before my client arrived and being told by one of the owners that I would have to pay $20 for my “workout.” I remained relatively calm, mostly out of survival, because I knew with the least provocation the bitch would say, “You know what, you can’t train your client here anymore!”

The second incident happened when my parents, in for dinner and a show, started giving me their repeatedly unasked for opinion about my lifestyle choice regarding remaining “under the radar.” In this situation I didn’t fare as well on the calm scale, as we tend to take family and friends for granted and think that any controls on our behavior our unnecessary and I succumbed to the common denominator.  And then there was number three…

It was about midnight and I was walking with Abandon to go on our nature walk that we traverse most days. To get there, we walk on a sidewalk that is adjacent to the park, often separated by a two-barred black metal fence with spaces in between the bars. I saw three pit bulls off-leash on the grass and walked Abandon up to them.  One of the pit bulls came up to Abandon. Separated only by the open fence, the young male caretaker told me with some urgency, “He’s not friendly.”

I have heard this so many times, almost every time in reference to a dog whose tail is wagging, and usually assess that it is the human’s misinterpretation that aggressive play, or even any play, is “unfriendliness.” More often than not the dog ends up smelling Abandon’s ass and saying, “Nice bouquet,” and there’s no problem. I assumed this was going to be another case of the usual.

Without provocation, suddenly the pit bull was on our side of the fence attacking Abandon. I shouted to Abandon “DOWN!” and tried to separate the pit bull from her. She listened to me but the pit bull was like a fish and I couldn’t seem to get a grip on him to get him away from her. Strangely, I seemed to remain unusually calm and continued to work to separate the aggressive dog from my own. Then the other two pit bulls, like sharks in water smelling blood, came over and started attacking Abandon.

Now let me make it clear, by “attacking” I don’t mean some Cujo, mouth-foaming, teeth-glaring attack but the dogs were still biting at Abandon and now with three of them there, I didn’t have enough limbs to separate them and every time I tried to grab one of them, they seemed to slide through my hands like a greased penny. At this point the caretaker of the initially aggressive dog was in the mix trying to separate his nightmare. I still remained calm in the maelstrom.

His dog now clamped on to Abandon’s side with his teeth and wasn’t letting go. Dogs tend to have loose skin, perhaps as a protection for just such a situation, and it is often the skin that is bit and not the underlying meat and potatoes and this was the case here. While still doing my best to separate the dogs from Abandon I told the guy, “Get his mouth open,” and was still remarkably calm, as Abandon was whining.

I don’t know how long we wrestled with the dogs. It couldn’t have been more than two minutes but those two minutes seemed like an eternity, the same as it would feel waiting in Purgatory for a decision whether you will be sharing a room with Hitler or Mussolini in Hell. We finally got Abandon out of there and I seemed to ignore my girl and focused on holding the pit bulls until they could all be controlled by the humans. Apparently one of the two girls who was the caretaker of one of the other pit bulls took Abandon a distance away and tied her leash to the fence.

Now the guy with the aggressive dog was shouting at his dog, as his hand was bleeding from being bit by his “best friend.” “NO!!!” he shouted in anger and frustration.

“Let me see your hand,” I told him, still remaining calm.

He kept saying, “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!” and I just focused on his hand and said, “Make sure you ice that when you get home.” When all the dogs were contained, I got his telephone number and told him that I do dog training and would work with him so he was more in control of his dog.

The whole time beyond the cool calmness there was a nagging in my gut that I couldn’t ignore. “Who gives a shit about this clown or his soon-to-be euthanized dog—WHAT ABOUT ABANDON?”

Abandon was sitting about thirty feet away, leash tied to the fence, whining a little in the distance. She wasn’t whining from pain or injury but from me being away from her for so long.

I finally turned my attention to my own dog and went over and knelt down in front of her and did a cursory check to see if she had any gaping holes that needed attention. Now the nagging whisper turned into a loud bitch that couldn’t be swept under the rug, “AND WHAT IF SHE WAS SERIOUSLY INJURED? YOU’RE THERE HANDING OUT BUSINESS CARDS??” What the fuck was I doing?

I don’t know if my calm was a survival instinct of keeping my head so that I could handle a difficult situation without my emotions getting in the way of what needed to be done…or maybe a slight detachment due to shock from the urgency of a situation that required extreme action—action that might have necessitated kicking a dog in the head if need be.

The guy started to come up to me and ask if she was okay and I said, “Just go home and take care of your hand. I’ll be in touch about doing some dog training work.” ARE YOU FOR FRIGGIN’ REAL?? CAN YOU FORGET THIS CHUMP AND FOCUS ON YOUR DOG FOR A FUCKIN’ MOMENT?!” Giving Abandon a pat down, it felt like there might have been a little cut on Abandon’s side but I wasn’t sure if it was just dirt or dried spit. I unhooked Abandon from the fence and we walked away.

Dogs mostly live in the NOW and it is humans who usually bring dramas that have already past and from which your dog has long moved on into the present to become traumas. There was a case on The Dog Whisperer where a big dog had slid on the newly waxed kitchen floor and slid hard into the glass door. It was Cesar Millan’s, peace be upon him, assessment that had the human not made a big deal about the crash, the dog would have probably shaken it off and that would have been the end of it. Because the human freaked out and probably rushed to the dog with an energy of panic and fear and was like, “Oh my god, Rover are you alright boy?” Rover! John, Rover just smashed into the door!” the dog thereafter refused to walk on the kitchen floor.

I started walking with Abandon and didn’t give her any, “Oh my god!” energy and she was walking almost as if nothing had happened. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she said to me, “I wonder if the fireflies will be out tonight.” She seemed pretty much over the situation, although I did notice that out of character she didn’t wander too far from me when I let her off-leash on the nature trail. But I was not and then the floodgates opened not only of my emotions but of my tear ducts and I spent most of the rest of the walk crying.

I am responsible for her safety and I did not keep her safe. Perhaps I should have close-fisted that pit bull until he opened his jaws out of unconsciousness and sledgehammered those other two dogs with kicks rather than trying to surgically remove them with a scalpel. Wasn’t the safety of my little girl worth going to any extreme?

I’m reminded of the piss-poor job of the local and Federal government’s handling of the New Orleans levy breaking and subsequent flooding situation. They forced everyone into a stadium and then didn’t provide for them the proper water or sanitation. You can’t force someone, or many someones, into a situation where you don’t give them a choice about it and then not provide what they need. Didn’t I have the same responsibility concerning Abandon’s needs? For the most part I dictate where she goes, with whom she interacts and what she eats and if I can’t provide for her what she needs in these situations then perhaps I should not compliment “Brownie” for doing a “heck of a job” for one that is at best shitty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO2xi0uLnj8

(Notice the mindless Nazis that clap here and probably would just the same if Bush had said, “I’d like to fuck an elephant in the ass.”)

What made things worse was that I had no one who I could talk to about it. It was too late to call anyone in my family, whose first concern if they asked, “Is she alright?” would be if they had to outlay any money for a hospital bill. My friend Owl and I hadn’t seen each other or talked in a month or so and I also didn’t need her to annoy me with Buddhism as she shared “What the Buddha would have done in that situation…” Two of my friends since elementary school are married with children and would probably give me a lecture on how “I have a family now, X, and late-night calls are just not a part of this structured lifestyle” to which I’d end up hacking their children with a machete and find myself in even more difficulties.

While Nussy has kids, too, he would be up screwing around on the Internet and wouldn’t really care how late I called. The problem with him is he doesn’t have A.D.D. but N.A.D., meaning No Attention Disorder (not to be confused with the slang term for the testicles) and I would find myself irritated by constantly having to ask, “Are you listening?” and have him answer, “What? Uh, yeah, you said something about going out for a bite?” And then there was Ogre. We hadn’t talked in about two weeks and if I called her I couldn’t be certain if I would be using the situation just to try and get her into bed and even I would feel a little sick as I blurted out, “I feel so bad! I could really use my penis in your vagina right now.”

I didn’t really need someone to give me advice or empathy, just a shoulder to cry on and some arms to wrap around me and maybe a vagina to stick my penis inside of. I felt alone, that the only one who cared about me and Abandon more than their life obligations and their resentment and Internet porn was me.

The next day I text messaged the guy and asked how his hand was. Apparently I was still being politically correct, or rather, a political douche. But then I let him know the gravity of the situation.

“We do need to talk…first of all for me to help you with training but more importantly for you to understand the seriousness of what happened. Your dog(s) could literally have killed my dog. You should NOT put others in a situation that could cause them or their dogs harm because you are not in control of your dog & have him off-leash. This is a very serious matter. Divine grace came in but if my dog were dead, I couldn’t even tell you what I would do. I literally don’t know. I might have cried. I might have killed.”

He responded: “Yeah ur right I’m sorry”

I can’t tell you what I would do for certain in any future situation, as I am not a crystallized human being following his life like a football playbook. Sometimes when Abandon is lying so still on the floor or on my bed I imagine that she has died and a sense of detached numbness overtakes me. I am guessing that if she died I would initially get flooded an overwhelming feeling of emotional numbness in my body and start to cry uncontrollably.

But what would I do if another dog killed her? Again, I can’t determine with 100% accuracy but it is possible that I would kill the other dog, throwing all discussion of non-violence off the New Age negotiating table. If someone stabbed or shot or killed my dog, I would most probably beat him until he was dead. If someone kicked my dog—probably beat him until he is laying on the ground either unconscious or in a serious hurt and then maybe drag his ass to the local precinct and press charges.

The next night we went for a walk I brought a knife with me, determined that if some dog bit onto her and wouldn’t let go that I would use it to either pry the dog’s clamped jaw open if it were on a non-vital part of Abandon’s body or stab into its throat or skull if it were in a life-threatening part of Abandon.

It only took a day before I stopped walking with a knife on my belt, the steel weapon replaced by the weapon of awareness and a determination to be alert and prepared to do whatever is necessary to keep my little girl safe.