There’s this guy in our hay barn

After the last time, the Hubbit and I promised each other never again to invite someone to share our home. For years we had (irritably and messily) shared an office, while the spare bedroom just sat and looked pretty for months on end until I succumbed to guilt and suggested to Himself that some or other lost soul really needed it … and he never bloody said no! And, despite my best intentions, almost every attempt at sustained hospitality ended with all parties seething.

There was Sewerbreath, a close friend whose marriage broke down a few weeks before we were due to leave on a prolonged visit to South Africa. “Come stay at our house!” we warbled. “Bring your dog! You can look after our animals, and it’ll give you three months to get on your feet!” While we were gone she fell and broke some necessary bone or other and wasn’t able to work. We returned home jet-lagged and unfazed. “It’s Christmas! You can’t be homeless over Christmas!” we caroled. “You’ll soon be back at work, and meanwhile you’re welcome – it’s fine!” She got a job at a grocery store early in the new year. “Congratulations!” I trilled. “No need to pay rent – save up for a deposit on your own place! And don’t worry about the food – three is as easy to feed as two! – just check in before you leave work to see if we need anything – save me making a trip to the store in between my regular shopping days!” So then I learned that expecting a grown woman in her forties to “check in” was offensive, and things pretty much went downhill from there.

I kicked her out the following April, seven months after she’d moved in. I forget the specific reason, but I think it was either because she refused to clean her bathroom (removing the crunchy toothpaste from her sink after she left was an exercise in archeology!) or because I got fed up with her attempts to allure the (blissfully oblivious) Hubbit.

There were the teenage daughters of old friends of mine, who wanted to leave the Pacific island where their parents were missionaries and start life in America. They didn’t have work permits, but were going to find jobs under the radar as tutors, nannies, house cleaners – you know the sort of work – to cover their personal expenses while they studied at the local community college, or maybe online – they were going to figure that out. Only … they were so tired after years of missionary life, they felt they deserved a little vacation. So for eight or nine months they lolled around, not studying, not working, not volunteering. I tried to engage with their parents via email, only to learn that these delightful young ladies had access to the parental email account and were deleting our messages as fast as I sent them. When their parents quit the mission field and returned to South Africa the girls decided to go home, and we sang the hallelujah chorus and waved them away.

There was Peter Pan. I call him that because when I met him he seemed joyous and wild and a little bit magical … but in truth he was more of a Lost Boy. He arrived one day with Wonder Woman’s teenage protégé, to spend a few days helping out, camping in a grassy corner of our farmlet, and canoodling like bunnies. Less than 24 hours later the protégé roared away down our driveway, and I went outside to find Pan standing outside his tent and looking forlorn. Well, we needed help and so did he so we invited him to stay, and that year was pretty good. He was a hard worker, giggly and zany (he was high a lot of the time), the animals loved him, and I fell a little bit in love with him myself – nah, don’t be stupid; he was sort of like a beloved nephew. Since my actual nieces and nephews were all clear around the other side of the planet, and my grandchildren-by-Hubbit were by then not speaking to me, I felt the lack of a young person to love and mentor and indulge. And as someone who had been severely abused and neglected by his parents, he lapped it up. After a while he went off with a girl, but he kept in touch and it was all good.

Verruca arrived shortly after Pan left. She showed up with someone who’d advertised on Craigslist, looking for temporary accommodation for her pet chickens. I’d invited the chickens to rough it with the flock of not-pet-but-very-happy chickens hanging out in my veggie garden, so she came to take a look and brought Verruca with her. They arrived just in time to distract me from a full meltdown caused by several hours spent trying to sign up with WWOOF because the Hubbit and I desperately needed, but could not afford to pay for, help on the farmlet. Only the WWOOF website kept crashing, and I was brimful of angst, gloom and fury. Well, Verruca looked around, and gazed longingly from the river to me, and said, “I don’t suppose you need someone to help you out in return for a place to stay, do you?”

The Olde Buzzard and the Hubbit, down at the river near where I met Angelo and Charlie (see below). The Fogies also spent a year with us. Memories built despite some stormy weather, and kept close to my heart.

So Verruca moved in, and for maybe a week or two it was great – we were like sister wives (only with certain duties allocated, not shared). And pretty soon she started educating me about how the world really works. Like how the government is using contrails to rain down poison upon us all, and how Nibiru is going to destroy us all, and … oh man, she believed so many things! I wrote a lot of them down to share with you, but now I can’t find the list … It was a while ago. Anyway, I was enthralled! I was fascinated! Sometimes I asked questions, but that just annoyed her. I learned it was better to shut my trap and listen.

And then … I don’t know, I guess she had a revelation. She realized that our water was contaminated. She stopped eating anything we raised, and would consume nothing but energy drinks and canned soup. (Of course I bought them for her – I’m a sucker!) But she just got sicker and sicker, and eventually I took her to the doctor, who diagnosed Hepatitis A. “Yikes! That’s contagious!” I said, hurling myself at Google, where I learned that it’s common in homeless shelters (she’d lived in several) and among addicts (she’d lived with her addict daughter and son-in-law prior to moving here). Then she announced that she was going to sue us for making her sick. Testing our well water (clean and sweet) and ourselves (ditto) had no effect. The situation got ugly and depressing and – as I read up on Washington State law pertaining to eviction (not good for property owners. Not at all) it got scary.

But one day she up and left, and suddenly peace was restored, and the Hubbit and I agreed “Never again”. Only then Pan came back and of course we figured he’d be okay. We knew him. He was practically family. It was a bit stressful that this time he had a bunch of friends who liked to hang out in our shop or my kitchen, and often some stayed over, but I loved Pan and kind of enjoyed having a houseful of youngsters, and the Hubbit tolerated the invasion. Only pretty soon it became clear that Pan had … changed. I’ve done some reading since then about mental illness that emerges in young adults and … well, I don’t want to write about that. I already told you how it ended.

So after that the Hubbit and I agreed never, ever again under any circumstances for any reason to invite anyone to live in our home, double pinky promise. To reinforce that promise, while he was in rehab for the months following his altercation with a tractor I transformed the spare bedroom into a Hubbit Hole just for him. It’s inconvenient not to have a spare room when the Girl Child or the Young Bull come to stay, but a lot easier to tell myself “We don’t have room” when, in fact, we don’t have a spare room.

And then, a few weeks ago I was down at the river with Argos, and there was this guy with a Chihuahua. Conversation ensued. The Chihuahua – a cutie who occasionally answers to Charlie – needed to be spayed and vaccinated, so I got that done, which led to more conversation. In the middle of all this conversing we had the mother of all windstorms. I pulled together some food and a tent and went down to the river – did I mention they were living there? Under a bush? Well, technically, under a piece of tarp, but shrubbery was involved … Ugh, sorry, I digress. My point is, I went down to check on them, and Charlie came hurtling out of the bushes and leaped into my car with a look of the most profound relief, which was followed by a look of bewilderment when her papa didn’t join her in this comfy place out of the wind, and then plummeting dismay when he took her in his arms and disappeared back under his bush as I drove away.

We really don’t have a room.

But we have a row of horse stalls, and the end one – where we keep hay in winter – is empty. Or was. It now has a tent in it, and a random assortment of other stuff, much of it rather smelly. When the heat gets unbearable (right now it’s 108F out, and the heat wave is only getting started) they come inside and cool off. (They’re watching Penguin Town on Netflix as I write this.) Lying in bed the night after they moved in, I started feeling guilty that I had a comfortable bed and a house, and they have so little. A better person, I thought, would invite them inside. But then I slapped myself upside the head and counted their blessings. They have shelter from the weather, a fridge and freezer, drawers for storage, a place to cook, and food any time they ask for it. They have electricity and wi-fi, and the use of our guest bathroom. They have walls and a door and privacy. Cops don’t hassle them to move on. Bikers don’t roar up and start a middle-of-the-night party a few feet from where they’re hiding under their bush. They can ask for a ride into town when they need one. And that’s as good as the Hubbit and I can make it and still be okay inside ourselves and with each other.

I wish I could say “It’s all good,” but really it isn’t. The thing about most homeless people in this country is, there are reasons they’re homeless. There are reasons Angelo has been kicked out of most of the places he’s lived in. A few days ago I got so mad at him I was ready to dump him back at the river and let the damn heat dome cook his skinny ass! I didn’t because of Charlie, and a little bit because that’s not who I am, and mostly because I heard my hectoring voice getting shriller and angrier and … I was ashamed.

The thing about not being homeless is, you hold all the cards. You have all the power. It doesn’t matter how broke you are, or old, or sore, or disappointed in yourself or your life … if you have a piece of this earth you can call your own, you have everything. And if you have the power, you can’t use it against someone who is powerless and still feel good about being you. So the next morning I sought Angelo out.

“Hey,” I said. He looked at me warily. “Can we agree to a truce?” I asked.

He sighed with relief. “Oh,” he said. “Yes please.”

Charlie – never so happy as when she’s with her papa.

He is a good man – Charlie told me so. He is also a profoundly annoying man, moody, often irrational, desperately needy, and not very clean. Keeping my temper in check is going to be hard. But we promised him a place through the summer, until we need the stall back for hay. In return, he helps out – sometimes with begrudging carelessness, and sometimes pouring his heart into making our lives so very much better. I’m hoping we can make it work.

I might have to come on here to vent occasionally. I hope that’s okay.

Playing God with cats and dogs

I’ve just got off the phone with the vet clinic that helps with our “more complicated than spay/neuter and vaccinate” cases. Later today I may get a call requiring me to decide whether a cat should live or die.

This is never an easy call. It particularly sucks when money is a big part of the equation.

Take this cat. I haven’t met her; a friend, who is associated with the pet rescue Kuja and I started last year, picked her up. She’s a sweet kitty, except when she’s not. Loving and affectionate, until she whirls around and bites or smacks you.

Also, she is ferocious in attacking other cats and dogs, so we can’t find her a foster home, and finding her a forever home is going to be hard.

All this makes her a challenge and a pain in the arse … but it’s not a reason to kill her. Instead, we sent her to the vet with a request for evaluation. Maybe she’s mean because she’s hurting, and we can fix the hurt and let her sweet self come out. Or maybe she’s sick in a way we can’t help, and we’d do best to end it for her without more pain.

I emailed the vet – because putting things in writing is the best way to ensure that all involved have the same information. Then I followed up with a call to ensure that they’d check their email. And now we wait.

This is what I asked them to do:

1. Sedate her. She can’t be properly examined without that.
2. Check her mouth. Her behavior suggests she’s in pain, and also she drools a lot. If her teeth are a really terrible mess that’s going to cost a fortune to fix, or if she has some condition that will continue to hurt her, euthanize.
3. Test her for FIV and FeLV (feline immunodeficiency virus and feline leukemia). These are incurable, highly contagious diseases. There are sanctuaries where infected cats can live together as long as their quality of life holds out, but that’s not an option for a highly territorial kitty, even if we could find one with room for her. So … if she’s infected, euthanize.
4. If her mouth is a reasonably simple fix, and she’s disease-free, she gets dental, spay and vaccinations … and, we hope, eventually a new home. In the meantime she’ll continue as an outdoor cat, cared for by her rescuer. Perhaps if her dental issues get fixed she’ll become a gentler, sweeter kitty, and bringing her in to live with other dogs and cats will be an option. That would also make her easier to rehome. One can hope.

Making these decisions is hard, and it’s harder knowing that, if we had more money, we’d simply fix her up and then figure out what to do next. And it’s hard not to feel guilty, knowing that if she were a dog we wouldn’t even be asking the question. For both Kuja and me, we care about cats and will try to help them … but dogs are people. You don’t order a person’s euthanasia unless you really and truly have no options.

Take Zeus, the German Shepherd the Hubbit and I took in last week. There were no questions, no discussion. I simply let Kuja know, “He needs a vet – I’m taking him to Urgent Care,” and she said, “Of course,” and that was that. Several hours and more than $400 later he was back home with a bucket on his head.

It helps that he’s the sweetest, most mellow German Shepherd I’ve ever known. It helps, but it’s not the reason. We’d have taken him in anyway.

It bewilders me, though, that a dog like this could be starved, apparently for most of his life, and then thrown from a moving vehicle onto a gravel road. Who does such a thing? How does a dog to whom such a thing is done continue to love and trust humans?

Zeus. The wounds on the outside are healing, and soon there won’t even be scars. On the inside there’s nothing but love, trust and gentleness. Well, except where Argos is concerned. All the German Shepherds I bring home hate Argos, because they try to get him to line up straight and … he’s a Malinois. Lining up straight simply isn’t on his itinerary.

In cases like this, I find I have to make up a story, just to try to make sense of it. So this is Zeus’ Story According to Belladonna:  He was bought as a puppy from a breeder who didn’t worry too much about bloodlines, but who probably didn’t let him go until he was old enough to leave his mom and his litter. While he was a puppy his family loved him and played with him, and there were probably other dogs in the family as well. But as he got older, he became an outdoor dog. Every day his food bowl was filled, but only with the cheapest food – Alpo or Old Roy – something that goes in, fills the belly for a little while, and passes through without leaving any nutrition behind. His coat got coarse and dry and sunk into the gaps between his bones, and he failed to grow as big as he should have.

Maybe his owner was old. Maybe they died or went into a home. However it went, something happened that separated him from the person who loved him – not enough to have him inside, or groom him, or feed him good quality food, but enough to win the whole of his big old Shepherd heart … Something happened, and he became the responsibility of someone else. Someone who didn’t want to be bothered with him. Someone who loaded him into the back of a vehicle, and drove down a country road, and then accelerated fast and gave him a shove and sent him flying onto gravel that tore the fur and skin off his face and neck, pitted his body and legs with puncture wounds. And then they drove away. And a few days later the Hubbit and I took him in.

It isn’t fair that he’s getting whatever he needs – treatment at the Urgent Care vet last week, dental care and a neuter last Monday, a visit to a groomer next week, and meanwhile a safe haven, affection, good food, a warm bed, and the certainty of a safe and loving home in time for Christmas. It isn’t fair that he’s getting all this just because he’s a German Shepherd, and the cat has to go through a series of steps in order to qualify to wake up from sedation this morning because she’s … just a cat.

Usually I like to end my posts with some sort of neat conclusion. This time I don’t have one. It isn’t fair, and I can’t do anything about it.

Dumped dogs don’t wear collars

Sometimes a dent, a track of rubbed fur, circles their necks where a collar used to be. A couple times I’ve picked up dogs with wire twisted around their necks. One of those needed surgery to remove it, and the hair that grew back after the wound healed was a thin white streak in the dull gold of her coat. But usually, when people dump dogs, they remove the collar.

Later, when I’m trying to catch the dog and there’s nothing to take hold of, and it’s wary of the leash I’m trying to loop over its head, hoping that I don’t get bitten, I’m always angered by the absence of the collar, especially when you can tell there used to be one. It seems such a petty act of meanness.

But maybe they’re being frugal, saving the collar for the next dog. Or maybe there are tags, and they don’t want some do-gooder bringing the dog back to them. Or maybe … Oh, seriously, I don’t care about the maybe. Screw the collar. What kind of person dumps a dog?

Flurry is one of the Hubbit’s girls. She was dumped in the hills up behind our home. We got a call from the folk who manage the wind farm up there; they couldn’t catch her but hoped we might. I spent an hour hunched against the metal outside wall of one of their buildings, pretending it was shielding me from the icy late fall wind while chatting and singing and reciting poems at her. She was so cold, so hungry, so plain miserable; it was so, so hard for her to believe she could trust me. And when she did come close enough to eat, she was skittish of the leash. Dogs are so much easier to catch if they’re wearing a collar! Anyway, I slipped it over her head at last, and she didn’t bite me but danced and struggled at the end of it before suddenly rushing forward and crowding her whole furry body into my lap. We found her a home with lovely people … but the people had a grandma, and grandma had a poodle, and Flurry hates poodles. Eventually she bit grandma – presumably because grandma smelled like the poodle – and so she came back to us, and here she will stay, where we can keep her safe.

The dog Mama Bear picked up at a truck stop last Thursday had a microchip. She called me early – I was still in bed – and I headed over to her house, where she was late for work and fretting over what to do with him. He was sweet, a black Labrador mix, worried about his people but willing to tolerate our bumbling efforts to help him. She’d found him on her way to work when she pulled into the truck stop to get gas, and he was running from pickup to pickup, nose up, frantically checking each one. He wasn’t in bad condition and we figured he’d probably jumped or fallen out of the back of his own human’s pickup. (Why do people persist in letting their dogs ride loose in the back of a pickup? But that’s a rant for another day.) When I scanned him and found the chip, and then learned that it had actually been registered – which is not something you can take for granted; people mean well but they’re sloppy – we thought it would be easy – a simple matter of returning him to a relieved and loving family.

Mama Bear works at a prison where there’s a dog program – qualified inmates can apply to raise and train a rescue dog; it lives in their cell with them, and goes wherever they go, and when it’s trained it’s put up for adoption. There’s quite a demand for prison dogs. Many of them start out labeled “unadoptable”, and the focused, one-on-one relationship with their convict trainer turns them around, gives them a second chance. I guess they have a similar effect on the human who works with them.

Anyway, the head of the prison program said the dog – the microchip company told us his name was Blackie and he was eight years old – could go back to the prison with her and hang out in the dog area until his people showed up to get him. When I called the microchip company to trace his chip they wouldn’t give me the owners’ contact information, but they took my information to pass along. It always annoys me when people instruct the microchip company to withhold their information. I mean, seriously, do they think that someone who takes the trouble to pick up their strayed dog is going to stalk them? And how rude, to refuse to give me their information, but require me to give them mine! It makes no sense!

Except in Blackie’s case it did make a bitter kind of sense. His owners didn’t contact us, so someone from the prison contacted the microchip company again, and managed to get the owners’ information. They phoned, and the conversation went like this:

“Hello – is this Mr. X? I believe you’re missing a dog? You’ll be happy to know we have him!”

“…” Click.

So Blackie was homeless after all. It’s hard not to come up with a narrative in such a case, to try to make sense of it … An abusive new boyfriend, maybe, who dumped the dog … One imagines a conversation after the phone call: “Who was that?” – “No one.” – “Ohhh … I was hoping … He’s microchipped, you know. Surely someone will find him!” And then what? Silence? “Shut the fuck up about the damn dog!”? Or, maybe, “Never mind – I’ll get you a puppy.”

Anyway, Blackie was invited to join the prison program, which was a relief because the Hubbit and I already had an extra dog in addition to our five full-time family membrs. So he had a couple of days of peace, getting to know his convict. And then Mama Bear called to tell me he’d died during his neuter surgery.

“He died?” I was shocked.

“Yes – just started seizing. Some sort of reaction to the anesthetic.”

“Oh damn. That happens, but it’s rare.” It happened to a dog the Hubbit owned, in fact, 25 or 30 years ago.

She was upset. “Don’t they do some kind of blood test before surgery to make sure that won’t happen?” I had to tell her no, not when it’s a rescue. Blood work is expensive.

Anyway, maybe that’s why his people dumped him. Maybe they knew he was sick and they didn’t want to deal with it. It makes no difference. It doesn’t matter whether they were cowardly, mean or cruel. He deserved better, and we couldn’t give it to him.

The dog we took in yesterday doesn’t have a collar or a microchip. I’ve checked all the lost dog sites on Facebook, as well as Craigslist, and no one is looking for him. I put up an ad and I’ve had several responses, from heartbroken people desperate to find their missing family members. It hurts to have to tell them no – “No, I’m so sorry, this one is male.” “I’m sorry, he’s a purebred German Shepherd, not a mix, and he’s mostly black, not brown. I’ll send you a photograph.” I don’t put much information in the ads I place – just his breed and that he’s in poor condition. I figure his owner should be able to describe him. But the downside of that is that good people’s hopes rise, and I have to let them down.

The Hubbit told me this boy had been hanging around our private access road for the past couple days. He and Paranoiber had been trying to catch him, and he hadn’t mentioned it to me because I’ve been AWOL inside my head, for reasons that I may get into in another post. But yesterday when he opened our gate the dog ran through it and up the driveway, so the Hubbit called me on my cell phone. “Can you come? You’re better at this than I am.”

I am good at catching dogs. I’m good at expressing relaxed unconcern with my body and voice, and I’ll wait an hour or more for them to come to me, and when they do I don’t grab them right away. So yesterday I put on an extra sweater, slung a leash around my neck, took a can of dog food and ambled down the driveway. He was near the gate, worried, scared, pondering his chances of jumping out. I started chatting in a friendly singsong when I was still some distance away. I opened the can of food, hoping he might recognize the sound, or pick up the smell. He ran in a tight circle, looked for a place to hide. I scooped a gob of food out of the can with two fingers and tossed it to him. He eyed it, hungry. I yawned, half turned away, discussed the weather (crappy) and the season (an exceptionally golden autumn). He snuck over and picked up the food, then backed away.

I sat down on a patch of grass, tossed another bit of food. This landed too far from him, and he merely eyed me warily. I tossed a little more. At last (my aim pretty much sucks) I managed to land a bit right in front of him. He ate it, then worked his way toward me from one scrap of stinky chicken mix to the next. At last he came to a stop right in front of me. His eyes are deep, warm, the color of acorns, and they were full of questions.

“It’s nicer without grit on it,” I told him, and proffered a gobbet of food. He nipped at my fingers as he ate, but lightly, not meaning to, then licked my hand thoroughly. I fed him about half the can, looped the leash over his head, and we ambled up the driveway together.

He’s spent most of the time since then asleep. There’s a huge crate in our dining room, so he started out in that. Only Argos was an asshole about having yet another dog in the house – but Argos has never seen the point of dogs, and he particularly despises German Shepherds. I think he considers them overgrown wannabe Malinois. The rest of the pack was casually friendly, and pretty soon left him to rest. By this morning everyone had met him, and even Argos offered to play, and right now he is lying in front of my desk, farting with eye-watering dedication and persistence. I’m guessing, from the condition of his coat and the thrust of bones beneath his skin, that he’s not used to the quality of food he’s been getting since he arrived. Oh well, I’m sure his gut will settle down eventually.

Tired and battered, but still so sweet.

He has bite marks on his legs and a wound on the side of his jaw that I’m going to have to look at later. The fur there is matted and crusty, and this morning when I caressed his ear he whined in pain. His ears are dirty too, and he holds them as though they may be infected. I’ll clean him up, see what’s going on. Take him to a vet if necessary.

I won’t be sorry if nobody claims him. He deserves better than this, and we can give it to him.

What do you do when you see a stray dog? Do you ever take them home?

Walking with the Black Dog

The problem with pain is figuring out what to do about it. Do you take a pill to make it stop? Do you fix what’s causing it? Or do you learn to live with it?

The problem with the Black Dog is the noise it makes when it’s tearing your heart with its teeth. It muffles nuance; the tune pain plays on your heart-bones-breath emerges as random notes, dissonant and jangling.

I could take a pill – put the leash back on the Dog. I still have plenty – at least a month’s supply – and my doctor would willingly give more. Here’s how the argument goes (I know it well, having used it often on others): “If you had diabetes or a heart condition, wouldn’t you take whatever pills were necessary to control it?”

The problem with that argument is, it’s specious. If you have diabetes or a heart condition, the first act of a sane person is to change the way they eat, move, sleep, live. The TV commercial narratives – glowing visions of super-sized burgers and greasy pizzas followed without a pause by ads for aspirin and Tums, Lipitor, Prilosec and metformin, always with the soothing reminder to “talk with your doctor” – those are the ravings of a crazy person.

I may walk in the dark of an imaginary tunnel with an invisible black dog at my heels, but I’m not crazy. I’m on a mission to find what’s real – friend or enemy, loss or gain, joy or pain. I’ve rejected the phantasmagoria that lie in pill bottles. I want to grieve real loss, fear real terrors, fight for what’s really good. And laughter – the kind that makes the fat on your belly jiggle … It’s been a while; I need to remember how that’s done.

So here we are, the Dog and I, still walking together and now deep within the tunnel. How deep I can’t say; how much further we have to go I don’t know. Sometimes a crack in the roof lets in a beam of light, a breath of clean air. Sometimes in the darkness the Dog leaps, knocks me to the ground, sinks its teeth into my flesh – and when that happens it makes no difference whether or not I scream, because in the dark we’re alone. So far, I’ve yielded sometimes and fought back sometimes, and I’ve learned that, either way, sooner or later the Dog is sated. It comes back to heel, its breath steamy on my left thigh, my fingertips resting on its head, and we walk on, watching for light, hoping for joy.

Let’s talk. Do you live with depression, anxiety or some other mental illness? How do you deal with it? And, as you deal, how do you identify and give priority to the things that are most important to you?

If

If he hadn’t been there, she’d still be alive.

If he’d been handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and kicked back to Mexico (again), he wouldn’t have been there.

If San Francisco weren’t a sanctuary city, the cops would have handed him over to ICE like they were supposed to.

If ICE were better at its job, it would have had the right kind of warrant and San Francisco would have handed him over despite being a sanctuary city. Actually, if ICE were better at its job he wouldn’t have been in the country at all. Maybe once, but then he’d have been deported and that would have been that, if things were managed right.

If we had a wall…

No, not just a wall. A force field. A dome-shaped shield covering the whole of the United States, and you could come through it if you were a real American or, okay, even someone with the right kind of relationship with a real American, but if you were, say, a rapist or a drug dealer or a Muslim, you’d get caught once, and then we’d inject this tiny microchip into you. Into the back of your neck, say, at the base of your skull … or maybe all the way deep into your brain, and then fix it there somehow in a way that makes it impossible to remove without leaving a hole in the precise part of your brain that you most definitely don’t want a hole in. Like the sex part, or the part that makes you breathe.

And if you ever tried to cross the force field, the microchip would activate and your head would explode – BOOM! SPLAT! – just like that. Now that would be cool – and it would work, too. If they figured out a way to do it I bet it would work.

Anyway, the thing is, if things were being handled right he wouldn’t have been there, sitting on the park bench, and he wouldn’t have picked up the bundle someone left under the bench, and the gun wouldn’t have gone off, and the bullet wouldn’t have ricocheted, and Kate Steinle wouldn’t have died while out minding her own business and taking a walk with her father.

Her poor father – can you imagine? A sunny afternoon, out for a stroll on the pier, and suddenly bang! and she stumbles forward and starts to fall, scarlet flowering on her back, “Daddy, help me!” – those were her last words. The last thing she said to him. “Daddy, help me!” – only he couldn’t. He couldn’t breathe for her.

That wetback beaner bastard murdered her, plain and simple.

Oh no, don’t start with that bullshit. You think him being there wasn’t premeditated? You think he didn’t think about what he was doing every damn time he slithered over the border? Anyway – look – “during the commission of another serious crime” – he was an illegal, for fucksake. Just by being there on that bench he was committing a crime. Oh – it’s not serious enough for you? Read the definition! “Robbery” – what do you think those fuckers are doing, coming over here, stealing our jobs, getting free healthcare, free education, paid for with our tax dollars –

It was murder.

And they let him off with “illegal possession of a firearm.”

What the fuck do you mean, that doesn’t make sense to you either? He’s a felon, for fucksake. Felons are not allowed to possess firearms.

Exactly. He was holding it. It doesn’t matter that he claims he didn’t know what it was. He got his hands on it. That’s possession, even by your own definition.

Anyway, there’s one good thing that came out of it: people are paying attention to the immigration situation and all the illegals. And the American people have finally chosen a leader who will do something about it. We are done with being robbed and raped in our own country.

Yeah, yeah – I know her parents don’t like that her death has been “politicized”. But she’s a public figure now. She belongs to America now, not just them.

We’re all mourning her, not just them.

We’re all mad about what happened to her – and I don’t get how her father can say he’s not mad. Did you see that interview? It was online – just google it. He says he hasn’t felt one moment of anger and he doesn’t want revenge.

I mean, seriously, that’s just weird. That’s not natural.

But, whatever – at least we are angry for her – we care enough about what happened to her to want vengeance – and we have a president who knows how to use anger to get people moving, so it’s worth it, I guess, if you look at the big picture. Because we the people are finally taking America back, and we’re kicking those fuckers out. They don’t belong here.

Except, of course, now this guy – what’s his name – Jose Garcia Zarate – he gets to stay. You can bet he’s happy about that! Only three years for murdering a beautiful American girl.

You know what really sucks? I read somewhere she was going to get married. I don’t know where – you can find it on Google. And she was pretty, you know? The fact that she was young and pretty, in love, and they say she was a happy person – that just makes it worse. You look at her picture and his picture side by side in all the media, and you tell me – which one would you rather have living in America today? I know, it’s probably “politically incorrect” to say, but fuck that – I’m not a snowflake, and I’m not scared to say there aren’t enough nice-looking, happy people in the world. She deserved to live.

Jose Inez Garcia Zarate, an undocumented immigrant and Mexican national, and Kate Steinle, whom he shot in 2015. (Back story)

And that fucker will get three years maximum for killing her, and he’ll serve half that because it’s in California and they’re soft on crime. Oh, you can bet he’s smiling. He was homeless and now he gets an 18-month vacation in a comfortable American prison, with widescreen television and ice cream on Sundays, all at the taxpayer’s expense. Don’t you think that’s better than going back to Meh-hee-co?

And you know California’s becoming a sanctuary state now, right? By the time he gets out the whole state will be a sanctuary for illegals. He’ll never have to leave.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to us. But if we could just solve the whole problem of illegals and crime…

You know, that idea of mine – the force field and the exploding microchip – that’s not such a crazy idea, right? If they figure it out, I bet it would work. I mean we already have the technology to put microchips in dogs … We could just quit worrying about Muslims and illegals and anyone else who doesn’t belong. Anyone caught hurting a real American, these inner city kids who join gangs, people who backtalk the police – bing bong, they get a chip. Same for illegals. You wouldn’t even need the wall, or the force field – although that would be cool to have … You’d just need something to activate the chip. A radar scanner or something. Screw up once? You get a chip. Screw up twice? Your head explodes.

If I could just figure out a way to pass this idea along to the president… What’s that Office of American Innovation about? If they’re interested in innovative ideas, this one would qualify, right? And for damn sure I’m an American.

With thanks to Tricia … I read your latest post and started to comment, and then my head exploded.

Ok … talk to me. What do you think we should do about all the violent crime caused by illegals?