Nothing Out Of The Ordinary

I'm not sure if it's the constant argument I'm having with my brain (shut up, Brain!) or just the fact that pretty much absolutely nothing of post-able interest is going on in my life right now that I haven't managed to write anything in awhile.

What a fucking sentence! Let me just read that again and decide if it's cool or if I want to punch myself in the neck.

I'm cool with it. The sentence stays. Also, if I take it out, this sentence I'm writing right now won't make any sense, so I'm pretty much stuck in.

So maybe it's the approach of Kurban Bayramı that got me thinking about animals. For one thing, everywhere I go has been awash in kittens lately. The neighbor took in an abandoned litter of 4 about a month ago and recently released them into the garden, where they frolicked merrily and got underfoot unnervingly. The kids loved them and you could scoop them all up at once and have an armful of kittens.

I was fine with them living outside.

They're for real.

On campus, the friendly, randy male everyone likes, the one who gets to come to class sometimes, fathered his second litter. He may have fathered a 3rd by one of his daughters from the first litter. They are all impossibly cute. The recent thunderstorm apparently caused them to scatter in terror, but if that's the worst thing to happen to any animals in this blog post, they should be counting themselves very, very lucky right now. Even if they are wet.

The thunderstorm, by the way, is continuing to be fucking fabulous.

Anyway, the neighbor found another litter of 3 too-small kittens that maybe were orphaned or maybe abandoned because they were sick. They needed bottle-feeding, except then they all got the shits and they smelled gross and had goopy eyes. They howled constantly and she was up every couple of hours feeding them and, even though animals are nice and cute and stuff, I daresay she took that whole thing a bit far. Then they started dying one by one and since I don't hear them howling right now, I assume they didn't make it.

The other morning, I saw one of the healthy released kittens dead in the street. I haven't seen any of the others since then. I couldn't tell if it was car-dead or killed-by-another-animal-dead, but I kind of feel like sending Spider and Havuç to the cat farm was an okay idea, if anything because I don't have to know if they're dead or not, or see the blood coming out of their mouths. Except for the washing machine thing, but that was different.

Speaking of dead, White Dog. White Dog! Remember him? I do. He's been around since we moved here. He was a good dog, the kind that walked you home at night and didn't ask for food and chased all the other dogs away. Anyway, for a half year or so, he hadn't been well. He'd been walking for awhile like the hip dysplasia was getting the best of him, and he'd clearly lost his mojo. For 2 weeks, all he did was sleep in a decreasing pile of construction sand.

Then I noticed White Dog was gone. Figuring he didn't have another winter left in him, I clung to the tiniest shred of hope someone had had him put down. Which is sort of what happened, but not exactly. Turns out some fuckhead dickass neighbor called the Belediye to complain about the dogs lying around in the street. So the dog catcher came round and collected White Dog, Black Dog, and Zeytin, an exhuberant new lab-ish young dog that needs to learn some fucking manners. Some neighbors took responsibility for Black Dog and Zeytin and got them back. They tried to get White Dog back too, but since they weren't his real owners, they couldn't. Quite how the Belediye determines whether someone is a real owner or not of a street dog I'll never know. So White Dog got the Big Sleep.

I don't believe in Heaven, so this will have to do.

I just hope they were nice to him in the process. He was a good dog.

And then, of course, there's Kurban Bayramı. Like last year, I was kind of gearing myself up again this year to go and watch the sacrificing. Except I just found out last week that LE will be staying with me over the Bayram because BE is going to be with Cengiz Amca's family down on the Aegean Coast. So that's my excuse this year for not watching the killing. I keep telling myself this.

Might be a bit much for the wee fellow.

No, really. Not having been exposed much to animal death as the Circle of Life, the boy might not admire the cultural edification of slaughter and butchering as much as I would, theoretically. Lots of cognitive dissonance to deal with there. I asked him the other day if he wanted to go watch the sacrifice, and he was all, "But hurting animals is bad."

So that's it. I'm afraid a bit of sacrificing might make the boy a vegetarian and then I'll be stuck cooking vegetarian food for the remainder of the time he lives with me.

Imagine this person tells you he only wants to eat vegetables because hurting animals is wrong. Do you say "Eat yer fucking meat and shut it?" Really?

Maybe we'll go watch next year, when he's all grown up.

P.S. Check out what happened today!

It's momentous!