Tuesday, October 23, 2012

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!



4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, so I did it this year (my second in Istanbul). I got blood smeared on my forehead (for good luck) and was generally taken for a journalist. As a word of advice if you ever find yourself in this situation: don't deny it. You will disappoint people. The description is in polish, but you can check out the pictures. This has taken place on the outskirts of Atasehir.
http://koszyczek.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/swieto-ofiar-wizyta-na-targu-bydla/

And at the same time, just about a km away...
http://koszyczek.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/tymczasem-okolo-kilometra-dalej/

Stranger said...

Wow, really nice photos. Well done to you for going to watch! I still really want to. And given my kid's reaction to the cow, it looks like I can ignore all of this year's admonitions in the paper to not let kids watch.

Which I found depressing anyway-- the Istanbul disconnect from agrarian life... Of course I'm disconnected too, but shit sure changes fast here.

Koszyczek, you once mentioned going out for a beer sometime. I failed at finding an email address for you on your site (which admittedly I can't read). So?

Anonymous said...

Hi. Yes, I did. Actually, I had this pain in the butt problem with my IE and I was not able to post comments on your blog and when I finally could I got so excited by this fact that the out of the blue comment was the result of this excitement. Anyways, that offer still stands and I found your email, so will drop you a line.

I am very curious of the changes you are observing. To me, the places for Kurban on the asian side were very much agrarian, but if you mean having it done in the garden, then I guess I have not witnessed that.

Btw, that captcha passwords for your comments are also a pain in the b. :)

Stranger said...

Beer offers never need an excuse.

IE sucks. I went to Firefox years ago and never looked back. Except now Firefox is starting to suck a little too and I'm starting to give into the shiny lure of Chrome.

I just meant about people becoming less agrarian, if newspapers are advising people to keep their children away from the slaughter. My MIL, who sure watched the slaughter as a child and who let her own children watch it, does everything the newspaper says and was bitching because she heard people let their children watch the slaughter.

I hate the captcha thing and it totally sucks.