Too Much

Too much reading and too much sleeping and too much of this damn dog. Yesterday, my mother went in for her second surgery, which went really well. Now we know the truth: if you have to have surgery, insist that it happen during regular business hours, or early in the morning. Not at night. That late night surgery stuff is for the birds - the birds who want to be shoved out of the hospital way too fast with no instructions and handed over to the custody of their totally nervous daughters while they're still all fucked up on giant cocktails of drugs. If I was a lawyer, I'd sue - the whole experience yesterday was so different than three weeks ago, and so much more the way it's supposed to be, with solicitous nurses and a long time in two different recovery rooms. In fact, it was the first lengthy and completely coherent conversation I've had with my mother in 3 weeks. I feel better. Which is good, since I have to spend tomorrow moving her back into her house, and that's making me nervous as hell.

The upside of the whole hospital waiting room thing is reading. Yesterday, I read The Time Travellers' Wife by Audrey Niffennegger, which was brilliant and I loved it. Sad and beautiful and mentioned punk rock and real drugs in a perfectly normal everyday tone of voice, which always makes me feel oddly validated as a person, like my life experiences have not been that bizarre and outre, or from another dimension or something. Granted, these mentions were in the context of a book which also includes time travel as a given, but, you know, we fringe characters take what we can get. Three weeks ago at the hospital, fwiw, I read Nadya by Pat Murphy, also brilliant - a story of a werewolf in the American West. All this is good. Then I had to come home last night and today and read Tom Robbins' Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates which I loathed. I think I have outgrown Tom Robbins. Either that, or his new books suck, which is quite possible, or, which is very possible and scary, his books always sucked. I'm afraid now to go back and reread them in case I find out that they are all drivel and always were. He gives me the utter creeps now, and when I was in my teens and twenties I thought he was as a god. But at any rate, I've pretty much been reading steadily for two days, which isn't really all that good for me.

I slept too much too, last night, although it was in chunks due to the antics of that dog, who has decided to destroy the couch, and also seems to be developing what looks a whole lot like obsessive/compulsive disorder. Once he starts destroying something, he just won't stop. Last night was the second night in a row of him pacing and digging into the floor and trying to shred the couch and yesterday and again today I've come to a serious and depressing conclusion (yeah, again) he has to go. This is too much. I can't just keep this fucking animal around to provide me with amusing anecdotes which actually illustrate the underlying desperation of my life: to wit, I can not afford to keep buying new furniture and new blankets and so on and so on. And I need my sleep. And I don't want to get kicked out of my house because my dog has taken to chewing holes in the floor. Nothing I do gets through to this animal and he just needs more help than I, or anyone, can give him. I feel like the kindest thing to do would be just to shoot him and bury him and I wish I was tough enough to do that, but I'm not, so I sent off a desperate email to the animal compassion network, and if they can't or won't help me, I'm afraid it's off to the Humane Society he goes, where he'll be miserable and freaked out for the week before they gas him. I feel like the most evil person in the entire world, but really: he's a dog, not a human, I've tried for 6 months, and he's literally destroying my house. It's horrible and insane and true: I'm doing what I always swore I'd never do and valuing material things over living ones, but Jesus, this is the second couch in 6 months, he just chewed a hole in my rug, he pisses on my bed on a regular basis, and I no longer have any comforters or throw pillows because he's eaten them all. It's all funny on the blog, but you know what? It's really stopped being funny at home.