28.10.06

SCORE!


Look closely.
Yes friends, it’s a Judas Priest coffee cup. You may not be able to tell from the photo, but aside from its obvious excellence, the damned thing is even embossed.
EMBOSSED, I SAY!
Where did it come from, you ask?
Well...
Three of us had gone down to Greely Street to watch one of Eleanore’s friends pass us on the last leg of the 2006 Portland Marathon. Well, we hoped she’d pass. I knew that if I suffered some serious lapse in judgement and sanity and had signed up for this mission, to run 26 miles, and friends were waiting here, at the 20 mile mark, they would never see me pass. I would surely be dead or on a respirator trying to finagle some form of painkiller from the attending paramedics at mile 7, and that’s being generous.
But she passed, we cheered, and then we headed back to the car. We drove it down to Interstate and Russell to jump on the Yellow line to head downtown, meet her friend, presumably, at a pub for congratulations and mouth to mouth. How she planned on being able to enter a crowded pub, sit down, order, let alone eat, let alone walk, let alone talk, after running 26 miles... let’s just say that if she could pull it off I’d feel like more of a fat lazy bastard than I already do.
We had some time to kill before the train came so we wandered into ECO PDX to look at some fancy wood furniture that would, for all intents and purposes, and barring any mysterious inheritance from a relative I had never heard of or a winning lottery ticket that I would never buy, I would never be able to afford. Quality craftsmanship indeed, awe inspiring even, but alas I could never see paying... well, being capable of paying $700 for a dresser that looked like a lacquered madrone tree.
Anyhoo, we browsed and then walked out and I noticed a black coffee cup on the sidewalk by the bus shelter. It had about 1/4" of coffee in it, with cream I could tell, not so sure about its sugar content, and wasn’t planning on ever finding out. I looked close at it and saw that it was a Judas Priest coffee cup. This blew me away. The next thing I noticed was that no one was around. The marathon had come by this place, but it was only the stragglers that were limping by at this point; the walkers, those who could pull a 35 minute mile out of their assess on this one occasion and then be crippled for the remainder of their lives after this, their moment of glory.
I looked around, and back at the coffee cup. No people around. A Judas Priest coffee cup. I had to have it.
Now, I’m not prone to picking things up off the street that I find abandoned. It’s not that I have any sort of aversion to scavenging, it’s just that I rarely come across anything I am driven to snatch up and claim as my own. That said, I had to have this cup. I walked timidly up to it, excited but expecting some burned-out hesher to come shuffling out from some unseen hiding spot and snatch it up, robbing me of my prize.
It didn’t happen.
I picked it up, dumped out the coffee. The cup was cold so I knew it had been sitting there for awhile. I touched the embossed excellence and felt blessed, like someone who was witness to one of those South American Virgin Mary apparitions. The only place around here, other than the bus stop, was the furniture shop we were just in. I knew I had to check and see if it belonged to them. If I didn’t I’d be wracked with guilt at the thought of stealing someone’s cup that they had accidentally left outside during a smoke break. So I took it in, praying that they had no idea whose it was.
"Hey," called to the guy behind the desk working on some spread sheet of sorts on his Mac.
"Is this yours?"
He looked up and smiled.
"No, it’s been there for about 3 hours. It doesn’t belong to us. You’d better take it or I will. That’s a sweet fucking cup."
I didn’t even hesitate.
"OK. See ya." and took off, jumped on the train, and I plan on drinking out of this cup for the rest of my life.
The funny thing is, I don’t even like Judas Priest.
But a Judas Priest coffee cup?
Embossed, no less?
I tell you, it’s the find of a lifetime.
Don’t ruin my day by telling me you can get them for $10 at Hot Topics.

26.10.06

JESU!


Jesu
Silver

This is the album I have always wanted, since day one, but never knew it. And when I say day one, I’m going back to the testicles here...DAY ONE. This is the sonic equivalent of getting nailed by a 50-foot tidal wave... you see it coming from out on the horizon, rushing in at quite a clip, and you know that there’s no way you can outrun it so you wait til it gets closer, closer, closer, then you throw your arms up to the sky, yelling one long tone with all of your might, blood vessels bursting, giving yourself tinitus with the volume and ferocity, every atom in your being focused on the release, the vibrating of the molecules joining in until all you are is sound... all of this passion and fury peaks and as the wave approaches you run headlong into its violence knowing with all you are worth that you can beat the bastard, dammit! Contact comes with unpredictable force and dizzying insanity, you are kicked about like so many leaves in a storm, drug through vast amounts of foam and debris, ancient kelp beds tangle around your rag doll limbs all akimbo and useless... the ground is a silky mattress of sand and you rip over it, under it, through tranquilized schools of metallic blue fish. You know you can hold your breath, ride it out, pretty damn confident, but just overwhelmed enough, terrified enough, to wonder... is it all just too fucking much?!
But tsunami fantasies aside, for the here and now, stand on the street corner waiting for the bus on a cold November morning, overcast and promising a deluge sooner than later, watch the thunder heads roll behind and over the brownstone across the street, through the alley between it and the Ethiopian grocery, clouds all giant grey and slow, and wait, bask in the music... so much heaviness, imbued with so much hope and beauty, has never before been witnessed by this species. This is perfection. Listen to it at maximum volumes and don’t be afraid to let it swallow you whole.

18.10.06

Top 10 Albums


I was required to answer this question the other day as I applied for yet another non-paying writing job for some shitty magazine that I would probably never read.
Of course, the list is never going to be written in stone, and its worth and validity can be argued endlessly (meet me at Goldrush Coffee on MLK and we'll do it in person. It's a date!), but for all intents and purposes, this is a complete list that is valid for, well, this moment. Give me 15 minutes, it'll change.

1) Mercury Rev "Deserter’s Songs"–This is just a serene album, it makes you feel perfect, pretty, centrally located, and infused with a faint throbbing purple light that originates somewhere deep in the pituitary gland.
2) Tom Waits "Closing Time"–When I finally get around to drinking myself to death or intentionally snapping my heart into two jagged and rusted pieces, this album will be playing in the background.
3) Lou Reed "Transformer"–Even if the majority of this album were complete monkey shit, which it isn’t, but if it were, it would still be worth buying for the song ‘Perfect Day.’ It may be the most perfect song ever crafted by junky or by teetotaler.
4) Squarepusher "Big Loada"–It’s as if ENIAC himself fell out of a 15 floor window and landed square on my head. Thanks IBM, and thank you drugs for making an electronic album that is capable of giving you an aneurism and a 30 point boost in your IQ all at the same time.
5) Napalm Death "Scum"–It was the first. What else can you say? No one had done anything like this before. Sure, it was followed up by 11 million metric tons of shit, a fraction of it from the very same band, but this was a moment in history, when parents found out that maybe Ozzy Osbourne wasn’t that bad after all.
6) Controlled Bleeding "Phlegm Bag Spattered"–When you really want to get those fucking people out of your house, NOW, this is all you need. Makes Napalm Death sound like a Frank Sinatra back-up band. You’ve got to give them credit for not even considering melody or structure. Just one big sonic ‘Fuck You.’
7) Third Eye Foundation "Ghost"–Yet another sign that electronic music doesn’t have to suck. It can have as much heart and soul as any organic album out there. And this is one of the spookiest albums I own.
8) Elton John "Greatest Hits"–The first one, with all the great songs. Him and Bernie wrote 7500 songs and most all of them sucked, but the sun shined on their asses at least 11 times, and when it shined it fucking shined like a supernova on overdrive. Awesome sing-a-longs, ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,’ and a big ol’ load of nostalgia. I listen to this album 15 times a week and still love it.
9) Bonnie "Prince" Billy "Get the Fuck on Jolly Live"–This album punches me in the heart every goddamned time. It’s the most tender, sincere album I’ve ever heard in my entire miserable live. If you haven’t heard it, you’re not alive.
10) P.J. Harvey "Rid of Me"–One always suspected that chicks could really, really rock in ways never before witnessed, and this hit it home. Polly has a bigger dick than any man in the universe, and that makes her so fucking bitchen that if I were to fully realize the extent of her awesomeness, my neck would snap.

Fragments...


I'm not all that political. Yeah, I'll get bitchy and drunk and talk all kinds of shit about politics but really I spend a lot more energy looking up the release date of the new Tom Waits album or whether or not the talks on a remake of 'Adventures in Babysitting" are getting anywhere.
But today I see that Bush signed a new National Space Policy. Now, I haven't looked the thing up and am not even going to try to pass off that'd I'd understand even 15% of what exactly it was getting at. I will rely on distillations via the newspapers and I have to say that I laughed, cringed, whatever when i read that the new policy "rejects future arms-control agreements that might limit U.S. flexibility in space and asserts a right to deny access to space to anyone 'hostile to U.S. interests.' "
If that, I mean, fuck... "deny access to space"? Can we do that? Do we own space? I'm no expert in the legalities of it, but I'd have to put my money on space being an open access joint, an Interzone if you will. Can we just up and claim an infinite vastness off-limits to anyone who rubs us the wrong way?
It boggles my mind, really. It hurts my mind, more accurately.
The nerve of some people. It amazes me that shit like this can get through the process without getting laughed down and shit on by proofreaders and analysts. Who works in that place, and why is it allowed?
Deny access to space?!
Jesus fucking Christ. The more I type, the more irritated I get. I sat down with this in my head as a laughable aside, but as the words spell out in front of me, I want to kick something really hard.
-------------------------
Anyhoo, on a lighter not (No young man, you cannot go into space until you build your pipeline!) I've started reviewing music again for a local rag called CRAVE. It's way metal and hokey, but I hope to stumble upon some free gems while trying, as per requirements, to not completely lay into bands as make them cry and/or want to kill me when they offend me with their meager offerings.
My first batch, I got a bad CD from The Problem, and I also requested to review a Phoenix album they posted. I was thinking that Phoenix was the band from the Lost in Translation soundtrack, but it wasn't. It was some Jesus-fueled metal/rap catastrophe.
This batch I asked for a God CD they were posting, knowing that it wasn't THE God (not up in the sky, but of Kevin Martin fame). It is a "Pagan & Viking Metal" band from Portugal. They suck, but that's besides the point.
What really irks me is that for all of the things one could name a band, why would someone use a band name that was already taken? I'm willing to allow, in the case of Phoenix, that two bands could exist off the radar and one could make it, leaving the other to look like a chump even if they had been around longer and not gotten famous due to sleeping with Sophia Copolla (SNAP!).
But in the case of God, I assume that the first God never got too much distribution in Portugal, but with these fine days of Google, I mean, c'mon, put a little work into it, people.
Hmmm, I just actually tried to Google it and all I could find, without referencing Kevin Martin or Justin Broderick, was Lamb of God... or Church business.
But still... I don't know. There are so many things one could name a band, why use a one word name? The odds of it already being taken are pretty good.
How about "Little Jonnie's Hyman Finger Puppet Theatre"?
Or, "Plabstton"?
Or... shit, I don't know. Just don't use any words that have already been around for over 75 years.
All I ask is that you use a little creativity, people. Sure, the first God band got lucky, and Phoenix, well, I'm sure there were a lot of them milling about but only one got freaky with Francis' daughter.
Here, a little help if you are in a band and thinking of calling yourself Pavement.
Really, there's no excuse for the world to be home to 2 Dr. Dre's. There's just no excuse at all.
So stick around and next week I'll review a CD from a punk band from Alabama called Dexy's Midnights Runners and a piano lounge band from Denmark called Op Ivy.

16.10.06

The Final Curtain Call

And a terrible blackness descends, wheels start to spin, the cogs begin their creaky rotations...
What was was then and there is a new and decidedly terrifying newness coming at a rapid clip, treading ruthlessly over hearts, smiles, creating gashes that aren't going to heal readily...
This is it, folks, for those of you in the know. It has come to a head, and forever there will be a wound in this fucked and stupid heart of mine.
And her's, a heart like no other, full of things I'll forever envy and cherish, undeserving of this disaster... I will loose sleep, and be afraid, and cry, and worry, and wonder, and withdraw... but life must go on and the road only goes forward.
Life won't wait, dammit.
((Rebirth)) -we've got to hang onto the treasure that thirves and breathes in all of us, the glimmers of hope that are impossible to extinguish, that will flicker and glow through any and all catastrophes.
"Hold your heart courageously, as we walk into this dark place."
The only real thing one can do at this point is to not let the bitterness and pain take over.

Never let anything destroy you, dear Shoe.

I love you, and I'm sorry, and I know, with all that I have left, that you are strong and bright and magical and that through the darkness you can emerge from this stronger, a ray of excellence, and become more confident than ever before because there is too much greatness in you to be taken down by a ham-headed dipshit such as myself.
You were magic before me, and you will exceed that beyond...
As for me... well, form a line to the left, knuckle up, and feel free to punch me square in the balls.

11.10.06

While we're on the subject, the coincidence is crippling...


Yet again, too much death...
But a word or two is in order...
So, without further ado...
A Eulogy for the Devil Cat

On October 9th, 2006, the much maligned and feared Ya-Ya Ba, short-haired mutt cat bred of questionable and no-doubt inbred Jaxanke stock, and native to Missirah, dot, dot, dot, Tambacounda, dot, dot, dot, Senegal, dot, dot, dot, West Africa, had a terrible run in with an automobile at the intersection of MLK and NE Stanton in the water-logged and too-hip-for its own good town of Portland, Oregon. She is survived by a not particularly smart or affectionate son, Higgins Ba, named after the arch nemesis and occasional gay lover of Thomas Magnum, P.I. extraordinaire.
Ya-Ya was not friendly in any way, shape or form, and she was generally feared by most visitors to her home, be it animal, human, or child. She showed up in our compound so many thousands of miles and light years away, dangling upside down by her tail, gripped in the hand of a child who wanted to know if we wanted her, as they had, they claimed, just rescued her from the jaws of a curious, hungry and/or wild dog. Knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that they had just gotten tired of torturing her for kicks.
We took the near-fetal cat in and fed her powdered milk (VITA-LAIT!) from a dropper until she was old enough to eat left over ceeb u jenn and maffay. She then learned to catch and eat her own food, most notably 7"lizards and grasshoppers. She tried repeatedly to devour mice and gekkos but they inevitably ended up in a chewed and half-digested mess on the floor.
A relationship of trust and savagery developed between her and her new human parents. She played rough, like a pit bull, and as a child flew happily (was thrown) through the air and bounced off of mosquito nets at night until it was realized that she was not, absolutely NOT going to sleep the night through trapped in the net with her parents.
Her taste for blood progressed from grasshoppers and lizards to humans and she took to terrorizing Senegalese children and adults alike, not quite a difficult feat for an animal, insect, or frog. We took great delight in witnessing the hell one single cat can play on a meeting of teenaged girls (they run, scream, and abandon their flip-flops while making tracks for distant lands).
After much thought, her parents decided that she was, strangely, too domesticated to be left in the village after they returned to America. So, she was packed into a cat carrier, driven on an 8 hour trip across the country in a beat up and barely alive Peugeot, given a rabies inoculation, issued a Visa for America (much to the disgust of any Senegalese person who found out after we told them we couldn’t take them back with us... "You’ll take a CAT, but not ME?! You white people are damaged!")
After a small hold over in Dakar at our American host parent’s house (mansion) (Hey Pat and Oliver! We miss you!), she was heavily drugged and set off on a 15 hour flight to America. She was understandably confused and terrified, and 10 seconds after the plane left the ground in Dakar International, she shat her box. Life isn’t worth living until you’ve had to clean a cat and a cat box of shit at 30,000 feet in one of those airplane bathrooms. It was discovered, upon removing Ya-Ya from her box in order to clean it that when drugged, cats will not, CAN not, land on their feet when dropped. Make a note of that.
After one more ass-vacuation and too many hours to count she arrived in America and began her adventure as a spoiled cat. We found that shortly before leaving the village the cheap whore had been knocked up. She gave birth on a couch in Los Angeles to 3 babies before having her tubes tied to prevent any further ‘incidents.’
It was immediately apparent that she did not get along with any humans other than her ‘parents’ (we suspect she hated white people) or any other animals except for raccoons and her children (she did appear to make friends with a baby donkey in the village, but nothing came of it). But as with any love she gave, whether it was to her parents or her children, it was rife with scars, blood, and swearing. She never quite learned that baby cats could not play like full grown cats and she had to be restrained occasionally. But for the most part, she was a great and caring mother.
The sturdiest and most bastard-like child, Higgins, was chosen to accompany her to her new home in Portland, Oregon as it was presumed he was the only one who could handle her vicious playing techniques. It proved to be the correct choice and in time, as he grew and expanded, became much more adept and kicking ass than she was.
She enjoyed her new life in the Pac NorWest and had a fine time wandering the neighborhood and hanging out with the raccoons that deposit copious amounts of shit on our roof.
Sadly, but predictably considering the traffic on her street and her inability to understand the weight and velocity of automobiles, she was taken down by a hysterical woman who ended up screaming on her parent’s porch at 5PM on an already doomed and ruined Monday evening.
She was rushed to one vet, then to another that was in a position to deal with emergencies, and upon hearing the prognosis (burst bladder, never walk again, irreparable spinal damage) it was decided that it would be the best, as painful as it was, to so goodbye. She was administered a massive dose of anesthetic, softly scratched about the head and shoulder area, and told she was loved until the darkness descended.
To all who feared her, it is now safe to visit us again. For those who loved her, thank you. For those of you who know from experience (rub nostalgically those raised scars, all white and puckered), there is now a void on the world where she once terrorized, and, rhetorically speaking, of course, we all know that the only thing that could serve as an understudy to her life, a replacement if you will, would be a pissed off and rabid wolverine.
We miss you, Ya-Ya, and will never forget the love, the hell, and the roughness of your tongue on a forehead at 3 AM. You are one of a kind, and the tears burned hard and bright. Take care, and one day we will be together again, if you buy into that kind of feel good bullshit.
Memories never die. Scars last forever.
Bismilahi.

10.10.06

THE DOG (Salvaged from MySpace... sorry for the Re-Run)


About 6 months into our Peace Corps service we ended up adopting a dog from a fellow volunteer whose end date was fast approaching. The dog’s name was Vita-Lait, named after the top selling brand of powdered milk in Senegal. The dog had been around volunteers for about 2 years and had widely come to be regarded as somewhat of a pain in the ass. People in the know uttered swear words when they heard the name. When the heard of our plans for adoption, they looked alarmed, offered warnings or sympathy towards our impending relationship. We decided to take the dog because we heard through the grapevine that if no one in the volunteer community took it, Cheryl, the current “mother”, was going to have her village brother beat it to death. Her reasoning was that the dog had been raised and spoiled, and consequently protected from less sentimental Senegalese people, by Americans, and that if she was left to fend for herself in the village she’d be beaten to death anyway the first time she tried anything funny, like begging or jumping on someone’s lap. Either that or she’d be tortured by bored children. If Cheryl had the dog killed, she could go back to America knowing that at least Vita-Lait died a relatively quick yet still painful death. It was a strange anti-logic that manifests in a person when they live in the bush for 2 years. Things you would have never considered doing in America suddenly seem like a great and merciful idea.
This chore would have been no problem for a Senegalese person to carry out. Domesticating and loving your pets aren’t concepts that got too far in those parts. Animals are there to protect you and to eat whatever scraps that are left over, if they are lucky. Usually they just eat whatever dead thing they come across and sleep in a literal dog pile outside of the family compound. They are a step away from being totally wild and us Americans are a constant source of amusement and aggravation to the locals with our friendly and spoiled cats and dogs, pampering them and feeding them better than some villagers eat.
As easy as it would have been for Cheryl’s brother to cleave the dog’s head in with a tree branch, our bleeding hearts had to protest. We did have a large compound to ourselves that was kind of fenced in (another story in itself) and we were blessed with a larger than average mud hut, a 5 room mud hut. It was a mansion as far as round huts went. We didn’t live with a host family and we were on the outskirts of town and our neighbors were already used to the fact that we were weird, by their standards, so saving the dog from a brutal death was no problem and wouldn’t impose on anyone but us.
The dog had personality, if I am allotted an understatement, but we seemed to get along. Shoe had the occasional fist fight with the beast and it also loved to roll around in dead animals then lie against our bed at night reeking of death and garbage. She did have her endearing qualities though which saved her from returning to her original planned fate of being beaten to death, only this time by fed up Americans. She was cute in the way she insisted on being a 55 pound lap dog. Any sort of lap animal in 120 degree weather is basically intolerable, but she never caught on to that and daily tried to climb into our laps to cuddle or nap. She was also prone to frequent and unpredictable freak-outs. She’d begin howling and take off across the compound at such a clip, and so desperately, that it appeared her back half was 3 steps ahead of her front half. She’d do this for about 4 minutes, top speed and balls out, then stop, settle down and lick herself or sleep as if nothing strange had ever happened. It was like hell hounds were on her tail. We wondered if she had worms in her brain or something horrendous as her behavior was so disturbing and explosive. I couldn’t help but think of that poor little terrier from The Plague Dogs who was always scratching his head, thinking there were fleas in it.
Her charming habits were evenly balanced by her bad ones. As mentioned before, she enjoyed rolling in the dead livestock that littered the roadside dump right outside our property. There was nothing we could do to make her stop as she didn’t appear to be capable of learning anything. She’d go get smeared with putrefying goat juices, we’d scrub her down with soap and sponges which she hated, then she’d go do it again and we’d wash her again. She got 7 baths one day before we just gave up.
Vita-Lait was also a big fan of attacking our mosquito net. At night she’d come running out of the dark and leap into it, tearing it down and snapping the strings that held it up. Being woken up like this on a regular basis is something that a person simply cannot adapt to. It elicits stark feelings of panic and terror, which are usually followed by pure and uncontrollable rage. As a result she received a lot of punches and was called more than her fair share of curse words. But she was only playing and took the punches as us playing back. She was a tough bastard who played hard and had a heart of gold, but she was like a bull in a china shop.
Her most terrifying personality flaw was that she really got a kick out of charging you at full on freak-out speed when you weren’t looking and taking a nip at your Achilles tendon. You’d be walking along and suddenly hear this galloping sound bearing down on you. A glance back would present Vita-Lait coming at you at full speed, teeth bared, head down, attention placed directly on your heel. Luckily we always heard her so we were able to sidestep her attack or stop her with a screech, so it was never discovered what it was she was actually doing. I suspect she was just playing in her own special psychotic way, but I wasn’t ever in the mood to find out for sure. Having my tendon snapped by a lunatic dog 15 hours from the nearest competent medical help was not on my list of things to do.
All said and done, though, we grew to love her.
Part of the deal with us taking her was that Cheryl had to get the dog neutered at the local veterinarian. We were fine with taking on one dog, but not litters of the damned things. One was going to be a lot of work as it was. She took the dog to the doctor but it was right at the beginning of Ramadan, the month long fast that Muslims embark on once a year, and the doctor didn’t feel comfortable undertaking such a procedure while starving himself. The country became intolerable during this time of year as everyone was grouchy and pissed off and spitting all over the place as not swallowing your spit was part of the fast. A few times I’d been nailed with large, morning breath smelling spatterings as some asshole went to spit out the bus window, only to have it whip back in through another window and hit someone. I once saw a girl get douched by some old lady. She must have had a pint of spit saved up in her cheeks. It was rude. Knowing that, and assuming that the Doc would be hungry and tired and not up to par, it was probably a good idea, we agreed, to hold off.
Cheryl was leaving before the holiday was up so I ended up waiting until the holiday was finished and took the dog in myself. During the wait I saw the dog terrorize countless children and a fair amount of adults as well just by being herself. She never meant any malice but Senegalese people aren’t generally used to an animal hanging out and wanting to be pet, or charging them at top speed just for fun. Typically, if a dog was charging you on the street one of you was going to die.
Vita-Lait also got in a few more fistfights with Shoe-- they had their differences. It never happened while I was around, but I’d come home to find Shoe with some new scratch marks and a sore hand and the dog a little stand-offish. All in all, though, it was nice to have a distraction as we weren’t leaving the compound as much as we should have been. Having a dog around made life a little more comfortable, like we had some familiar, American-type thing around when times were desperate or lonely. Her presence also ensured that our daily load of unannounced visitors was cut by a third.
After the conclusion of Ramadan I packed the dog up in the bus, on my lap, and headed off for Tambacounda, the closest regional city. It was between a 40 minute to 4 hour ride, depending on the road and bus conditions. Usually it was a quick ride in a bus packed full (beyond full) of 300 year-old men and women, children who would break into tears at the sight of our white skin (always good for a laugh), and various other kalibantés, beggars, and curious folk who asked a bunch of questions that I only understood about 40% of the time. The appranté tried to hoist the dog up onto the roof to tie her neck to the luggage rack with the various other animals and I had to get firm with him and insist that yes, she was going to sit on my lap, and no, she most certainly wasn’t going to bite anyone. It took a lot of talking and I’ve got good money that says neither he, the chauffer, nor anyone else on the bus had ever seen anything like this before or considered it even remotely safe, decent, or acceptable behavior. This was nothing but funny, terrifying, and repulsive to everyone on the bus. A dog on someone’s lap, on the bus? If there weren’t sappy white people living in the country, they would have never seen such a thing. I had to pay a little extra, which I expected, and off we went with a pissed off and mortified person on either side of me. Vita-Lait sat politely on my lap and didn’t nip or sniff at anyone. It may be that she sensed she was outnumbered and if she tried anything funny I wouldn’t be able to do anything to save her. If she bit some old lady the whole bus would most likely have decided to kill her. No way was I going to get in the middle of that. If she made that bed, she was gonna lie in it as I headed off in the opposite direction.
Luckily it didn’t come to that, and we got to Tambacounda peacefully, leaving the remaining people on the bus to finish their rides in peace, undoubtedly talking all kinds of crazy business about the white guy in the cowboy hat with a dog on his lap.
We got off in the marché and made our way through the maze of people and stands and vegetables. Piles of root vegetables lay stacked on blue tarps, cheap Chinese-made clothes with pictures of famous soccer players, 50 Cent, Yassir Arafat, and Osama Bin Laden covering them hung in wooden stalls, alongside even cheaper radios and flashlights, kids with wheelbarrows full of sliced coconut, sacks of water and juice, whole pineapples rolled through the mass of people, and mountains of giant and cheap mangoes that had become a staple of our diet. Wilted lettuce and enormous cucumbers were for sale as were eggplants and wooden barrels of rice. Old women sold strange sticky-looking lumps of things that I never did end up identifying. It was beautiful chaos, bright fabrics blowing in the wind, women with full 15 gallon buckets on their heads, the little eczema-riddled children begging for change to pay for their Koranic school supplies (or their Koranic teacher’s Mercedes, depending on your opinion). I never got tired of going to the market, if only to wander aimlessly and find something new and peculiar, but usually to experience the overwhelming life of it all, the vivaciousness, the community. It easily beat going to the supermarket in America.
We headed towards Dr. Lo’s office, a cavernous one room block made of cement and steel. I walked in a greeted him in my bad French, he greeted back in his bad English. The room had one cement counter, behind which was a desk, a filing cabinet, an old refrigerator and some shelves sparsely stocked with various drugs. On the walls were posters advertising rabies vaccines ( a poster of a pissed off Rottweiler and some terrified children. As far as I knew , there were no Rottweilers in Senegal) and one for a cow vaccine that was totally indecipherable to me. I could tell someone how to go eat shit in French and Pulaar, but veterinary terminology in French was way beyond my scope.
I had wondered briefly if he even knew how to neuter a dog or cat. I assumed that vet training in Africa focused mainly on inoculations and treatment of farm animals, creatures that provided transportation, muscle, or food of some sort. I couldn’t imagine many Senegalese people would even consider dropping $70 to get a pet fixed, as they shouldn’t. This was purely a 1st world concept, but Lo assured me he had studied this in school and knew exactly what he was doing.
He said something to his assistant, i.e. the guy who mopped the floors two times a day and waited around on the front steps to be sent on an errand and/or keep the beggars out. He acknowledged the doctor’s words and walked out the heavy metal doors, shutting them behind him from the outside. I heard the unmistakable sound of the door being padlocked. This told me that I was locked in here with the Doc and Vita-Lait and that I presumably wasn’t going to be leaving until this was over. If the building hadn’t been entirely constructed of cement and metal, I would have been a little nervous about some electrical fire breaking out and immolating all of us as the ‘assistant’ sat outside smoking Houston cigarettes and sexually harassing girls.
I resigned myself to what ever fate had in store for me and hunkered down for the duration. The Doc shot Vita-Lait up with something that I wouldn’t have minded getting a little bit of myself. As she got woozier and woozier I gazed out the window. Past the bars on the window and in the adjacent yard was a soap making operation. About 20 strapping young men were carrying out the various tasks that go into making the rounded balls of peanut soap one could purchase just about anywhere in the country for a quarter. Big steaming cauldrons of science were stirred constantly, guys with gloves working hot lumps of soap into balls and laying them out in symmetrical designs on cooling boards, large bags of strange powders were emptied. It was a mesmerizing scene, these guys doing what they did every day, creating things that I took for granted, and doing it in ways that were essentially ageless. No machines, just fire, sticks, gloves, and wood. It was awesome and I let myself sink into it as sweat trickled down my torso in the 100 degree afternoon heat.
My trance was broken by Lo telling me that the dog was out. I looked over and she had collapsed under the lone plastic chair that was in the ‘waiting’ area. Seeing her out cold really hit home that she was going to be operated on, and I suddenly wondered where exactly the operation was going to take place. The only horizontal surfaces were the chest high counter and the desk, a huge institutional thing that would provide adequate cover in the event of an atomic blast. It was covered with the usual desk items–strewn papers, pen holder, a rarely if ever used in/out basket, a small calender and other things that one typically finds on a desk but could not recall specifically when later interviewed.
Lo walked to his desk and quickly shoveled everything to the side and into an empty box. He told me to pick the dog up and put her on top of the desk. OK, I thought, no frills here. I hoisted her up, she was like a bag of wet sand, 10 times heavier than I remembered. Not a movement or a sound as I transported her; she was out. I got her to the desk and laid her down. Lo rolled her over and balanced her on her back, spreadeagled. I wondered how this was going to work. There was no way in hell she was going to stay balanced on her spine like that for any length of time, she was a floppy hunk of doped-up dog meat. My unvoiced question was answered by the Doc when he pulled a few pieces of ratty rope from one of the desk drawers. It was that nasty, synthetic kind that had splinters sticking out all over and liked to jab you under the finger nails. The kind that could be used to saw off a child’s head without much effort, and it was stiff, impossible to fold back on itself, either from age or from intrinsic cheapness. This was a rope that had no time or love for sturdy knots. It was put on this Earth to rip and tear and provide an example to all those who cared to pay attention that this was most definitely NOT the way to make a quality length of rope.
Doc pulled on some latex surgical gloves then told me to tie the dog, spreadeagled, to the desk. I looked at him out the corner of my eye, looked at the rope, and back at the Doc. I was never a Boy Scout and anything beyond my own shoelaces was profoundly mystifying to me. How in the hell was I supposed to tie a dog up to ensure that it stayed perfectly balanced on its spine? In a sparsely furnished room? With this cheap goddamned rope?
He tried to explain it to me but his small amount of English, much like my small amount of French, didn’t cover the technical aspects of knot tying. I managed to make a loop and hooked it over one of the dog’s legs. He told me to tie the other end to a bar in the window 7' away. I looked at him to see if he was serious. He was. I did what I could but as you may or may not know, a dog’s leg affords no real place for a loop to grip. I got the one end tied to the window but the part on the dog just slipped up and off her arm. He stood there for a few more minutes, and I made a few more attempts, but finally I dropped the rope on the desk by the dog’s head and said, “Look, you take the fuckin’ gloves off and do it.” He had no choice but to comply because I was irritated, sweaty, bleeding from a stab from a rope fiber and really not liking where this whole deal was headed.
He took off his gloves and set about fixing the dog in place. When he was finished the room was a drunken spider web of natty rope and dog legs; I was utterly amazed at the spectacle of it. One rope was tied to the window, one to a desk leg, another to a chunk of rebar that was sticking out of the counter, and the last was tied to the refrigerator clear on the other side of the room. In order to walk around the operating space you had to crawl under and high step around. It was truly one big spider web with Vita-Lait in the middle like a fuzzy black widow waiting for some asshole to fly into it so she could rip their heels out.
With that finished, the Doc put his gloves back on, gloves that were less than sterile now what with all the rope fiber and dust on the table where he put them. He picked up a bottle of Betadine and proceeded to swab down a huge patch of Vita-Lait’s belly. He threw the lump of brown/orange cotton down and unwrapped a scalpel from its packaging. At least that’s a good sign, I thought. Sterile equipment was something I wasn’t really expecting. He took it and made a small 1" incision and stuck his thumb and forefinger in to find her tube. Standing there watching my dog’s blood slowly dribble out of the wound I morbidly, but not seriously, wondered what I would do if she ended up dying. It wasn’t a serious thought path, just one of those things you do when you want to feel that little tinge of pain in your heart, to remind you that yes, you are still alive and yes, you can still feel things. When you want that self-indulgent and purely selfish pain of mourning for something that is still alive, be it a person or a relationship or a animal.
“Swapping up these bloods.”
The sentence meant nothing to me.
“What?”
“These bloods,” he pointed to the general area of his incision with his tongue (a trait of the Senegalese, probably invented by women who always seem to be balancing something on their heads and without a finger to point with). “Wipe these bloods. There are cotton.” There was a package of cotton swabs on the counter so I grabbed it, tore it open and soaked up the blood that was coming out in a greater stream as he fished around in her abdomen for the tube. This was getting weird(er).
“You...metter... uh, put liquid in the seringue.”
“The what?”
“The seringue, the, the needle,” he stuttered, pointing once again with his tongue to a syringe and a little glass bottle, the ones you see doctors sticking the needle into, turning upside down, and withdrawing 5c.c.s of morphine for some burn victim. Doctors do this kind of stuff, not hibernating drug addicts floundering in West Africa. The feeling had been growing stronger, but now I knew for certain that this more than likely going to end in a bad way.
“What the fuck, Lo? I know shit about this stuff Where’s your assistant? Your appranté?”
The realization was sluggish and had been right out in the open for me to see the whole time. I was the assistant. My self-indulgent and morbid hypothetical musings regarding the murder of my dog had jumped out of my idiot head and into the room with us.
Lo wasn’t quite baffled by my outburst so much as he was by the fact that I didn’t know I’d be lending a helping hand. He presumably thought, “Fuck, it’s got to get done, he wants it done, let’s do it together.” I had no choice but to concede. Indeed, “Fuck it, it’s got to get done.”
“Filling it to middle,” he indicated again with his tongue. What could I do but go along with it? She was already out and cut open, and the door was locked so I couldn’t leave. I’d have to ride this out and file it in the “Experience” file it–call it a story to tell. That’s what I had to tell myself.
I gingerly unwrapped the syringe and stuck the tip through the diaphragm of the jar. The needle was so damn thin. I hoped to hell I didn’t end up breaking it off in the bottle. I slowly drew back the plunger and only half of what I needed came out. Shit Now if I tried to put more in I’d end up with a huge air bubble. It was here, in a mild panic, baffled, that I foresaw no possibility of heroin addiction in my immediate future. Indeed, I’d make a terrible needle jockey.
I took the needle back out and discreetly depressed the plunger to empty it so I could try again. I stuck it back in, not as far this time, keeping it below the surface of the upturned bottle, and succeeded in getting what I needed. I took it out, held it up to eye level, and tapped it like I saw on the T.V. I wanted to squirt some out to remove any bubbles but I had already wasted a bit. I had no idea as to what this shit was. I didn’t want to be shooting morphine or liquid cocaine all over the place. If it was good stuff, I had already wasted a bunch and wasn’t about to blow any more onto the floor. In the end I got the excess air out without wasting but a drop of whatever this stuff was. I figured that a little wasted narcotics was worth ensuring that the dog didn’t end up having a massive brain aneurysm at my fumbling and unlicensed hands.
I set the bottle down and turned back to Doc, hoping like hell that he wasn’t going to ask me to inject the dog. I was only going to play at this ‘assistant’ game for so long. A man has to draw a line somewhere.
What I saw when I turned thickened the doom that was getting heavy in the air. The 1" incision had become a 5" incision and the Doc had his whole hand inside the dog. He found the tube he was supposed to be working on and was pulling it up, slicing the membrane that was underneath it, holding it to all the other insides.
“Squirting water then...siwb, siwb? Sawb? Sawb the blood.”
“Squirt what water and what?”
“The needle,” he said impatiently like I was supposed to know all of this, like we went to vet school together.
Oh... water. It was just water that I had been trying to get into the needle. At least I didn’t waste any good drugs in the messy process, and though things were getting weird I was pretty confident that I wasn’t going to be required to inject the dog with anything. She was already out cold, why else would she need to be shot up again?
So I swabbed and squirted and he sliced and dug around the edges of her guts. He pointed to 2 metal claw-looking tools and told me to hold the incision open (it was more of a gash at this point). I just looked at him. What the fuck was this? I was pretty amazed at the magnitude of the assumptions that this guy was throwing around. What if I was the squeamish sort and had passed out at the first sight of blood? What then? The dog would be cut open, we’re locked into this cement box, the assistant is probably down the road drinking tea. The next thing he’d be asking me to hold the dog open and finish up the operation while he went and prayed.
Beyond my exasperation and confusion, I was stuck and we were in this together, for good or for ill. This was not the time to lay into Lo what with the dog half gutted and trapped in a k-hole. So I grabbed the claws, angled myself over the desk, around the ropes and through Doc’s arms. I got a precarious grip on flesh and fat, slippery with blood, and the claws kept losing their grip. Doc started pulling ropes and sacs out of the dog, gently, and laid them on the table next to Vita-Lait. He kept telling me to hold her open in an irritated tone of voice, like I was fucking around as a joke or because I came to work drunk. All I did was show up here, to this cell, to get my dog fixed and now half of her guts were hanging out and laying on the table beside her. If anyone should be getting short with anyone, it should be me towards him.
He kept digging, slicing, and pulling guts out as I did what I could to hold her open and swabbed up the ever-increasing amounts of blood that were showing up. Her insides smelled like fresh-caught fish.
Eventually the cut went from her lower stomach to the bottom of her rib cage and her entrails here just sitting there, the occasional fly landing on them to lick up some good flavor. The cut was about as long as it could get due to the boundaries of a rib cage and an asshole. His hand had disappeared up into her chest cavity. As we know, I am by no means any sort of veterinarian, my veterinary knowledge consists of only a hazy understanding of ketamine as a anesthetic and a recreational drug that is not all that recreational. Regardless of my lack of schooling, I did know that this was, beyond any sort of doubt, a fucking mess and that if this guy pulled this kind of operation in America he’d be killed.
He got a tenuous grip on some sort of tube that he pulled out of her chest, God only knows if it was the right one. He went to cut the membrane underneath it and it slipped and shot back into a mess of other tubes. He made a clipped “whoop” sound and tried to get it back but it proved extremely elusive. I sat there, watching all of this unfold, holding the dog open as his hands dug frantically around deep inside of her. I couldn’t help but notice that she was slowly filling up with blood.
He stopped digging and without looking up at me he said, “I am sorry.”
“Sorry?” I asked, not quite registering why he had said this. Was it because that with this 12" scar she’d never be a beauty queen? That the other dogs would make fun of her?
After a moment of me looking stupidly at him, he began to work again. He finally got a hold on the tube again as blood started brimming over Vita-Lait’s opening. Pulling up a bit of string, he tied a knot awkwardly around the tube, and when he pulled it tight, it cut through the tube and she started filling up with blood at a faster rate.
“Sawbs,” he said and we rapidly started opening swab packs but there weren’t many left. He apparently bought them that day and had no others on hand. I suppose it didn’t matter, considering the amount of blood involved. What we really needed was a wet/dry vac.
He stopped, hands full of soaking red cotton, and said it again.
“Sorry. I am sorry.”
I knew it then. This foot-long gash, the pile of fish-smelling entrails, the canyon of her chest and abdomen filling up with a lake of dense red liquid... it was all over. Dead dog, incompetent fucking doctor, stupid goddamned white person trying to neuter a dog in West Africa.
I crouched by the dog, letting go of the globs of bloody cotton, metal claws clanking to the table. This was going to hurt. As silly as it seemed, this was a close to repugnantly blood-soaked death that I had been, and even though it was a dog, it still was like a rusty coat hanger jabbing at my heart. I scratched her gently on the neck, where her kick spot was occasionally located, the spot that was more often than not coated with the crusty liquids of dead goat or donkey scum that she rooted in. The tears came, a lot of them. The Doc looked wrecked. Though he was an idiot (not as big of an idiot as I was embarking on this hair-brained scheme), this still hurt him and he was probably a little freaked out to see a grown white man crying over a dog.
Her chest was still slowly moving up and down, she was still flying high, alive but not here in the room with us. Her tongue was drooping out the corner of her mouth. It had stuck slightly to the table, pretty dried out after sticking out for 20 minutes. I poked it back to its nest and closed her mouth. It popped back open, her tongue lolled back out onto the table because she was so stoned. I crouched there scratching her neck, silently sobbing for a good 10 minutes. It times like this when you forget all the bad things about a person or animal, and your heart rips wide open as if it were a flawless angel laying in front of you, mortally wounded, and soon to no longer be a part of your daily experience.
Since Lo had bought all of the supplies today for the operation and couldn’t return them, and he probably didn’t foresee any dog neuterings any time soon, he shot the remaining 3 needles of painkiller into Vita-Lait. All I could do was weep. I felt hollow, dead, ruined, damaged, completely fucking responsible. I didn’t blame the Doc (well, I suppose a did a little), I blamed myself. What the hell was I thinking, bringing this whole dog-fixing concept, this zero-population growth idea for animals to fucking Africa? A place where domesticated pets exist primarily in the volunteer and ex-pat community. Lo had probably only studied the procedures in passing. Who would think that a bush doctor would ever need to tie a dog’s tubes where the 35.000 CFA price tag could feed a small village for a month or two? I suppose he could have been up front about it and said, “Hey, yeah, I heard about this in class years ago and saw a few pictures, we laughed about the concept, but really, this may not be the best idea.”
I blew it, so I sat and I cried and pet the dog and felt guilty. The Doc stood silently by and let me mourn.
Finally I got up, wiped my eyes. She was still breathing slowly.
“Sometime... it take long time,” he said, referring to her lethal injection.
I reached back down to the dog, gave her a scratch, a kiss on the snout, and said, “O.K.”
I stood at the counter and cried lightly for awhile. Doc tucked her insides back in, then stuffed the rubber gloves, the used cotton, and the wrapping for all the various things we tore open into her stomach cavity. He sewed 6 or 7 quick stitches into her that would serve to hold her closed for awhile, until the scavengers got a hold of her. He stuck her in a rice sack to be taken, hopefully by the assistant, because I’d punch him in the neck if he asked me to, to the dump.
That hurt the most as she was still breathing but essentially dead. Stuffed with garbage and thrown out with the garbage. I hoped the drugs took her somewhere pleasant and eternal, I know they did.
As bleak as the whole thing was, I knew that the Doc had dropped a bunch of money on this and I took out my wallet to offer to pay for the supplies. I could afford it, and even though he fucked up, I didn’t want him going under financially. I’m sure he worked wonders on sick cows and goats. Dogs just weren’t his forté. He wouldn’t take the money though, didn’t even think about it, looked at me like I was insane for even offering. I admired that and was happy because I knew that if he took the money then later on, when I was drunk, I would have gotten pissed and contemplated coming back and kicking his dick.
I put my wallet away, said goodbye to the rice sack, the doctor, and walked out, never looking back. I went back to the regional house and got good and drunk on shitty Senegalese beer with a friend who, like all of us, hated and loved Vita-Lait and would end up missing her more than we ever would have expected.

7.10.06

Fragmented...

“Look,“she said slowly, as the moon rose behind her, all round and full like something beyond comprehension. Time was stopped and sped up, nature and darkness blowing by in a blur of majesty, while her voice and movements came along like an avalanche in slow motion. “We’ll be lucky to get out the other side of this unscathed. Bad times are looming.”
“Unscathed?” I thought. “I’d count us as incredibly lucky if we got through this anything short of knee deep in blood.” Unscathed sounded so much cleaner, preferable, optimistic...