24 jan 04

I remember two dreams from last night. The first one was about my IP address changing every few seconds. The second one was about having to go to some kind of Sunday school for adults, at my dad's request (i think james's brother eddie may've been there). In the dream, I was vaguely disturbed and disquieted, but I couldn't quite put my finger on why. It was as if I was just going along with things, not really giving it much thought, but all the while selling my soul to yahweh. The dream was an expression of my feelings about my 16 years in the church, and my 13 years of dismissing it as 'just something that people do,' until my great anti-christian personal revolution of November 2003, born of working for these particular fundamentalist christians at the shaker forest festival. My blog entry consisting of 9 things that are wrong with christianity played a part in my dream. I think the next step is to distribute a flier based on the entry to local churches, maybe passing them out on Sunday morning.

When my grandfather, who clearly doesn't have many years left, recently asked me, 'do you accept jesus christ as your lord and savior?,' I answered, 'yes,' partially out of a desire not to offend, but I think also partially out of a christian herd-instinct left over from my dark days as a lutheran. But not anymore; if he asks me again, I'm going to do the dance of the goat of mendes. I want nothing more to do with the god of the desert or his messiah, and will undermine him at every opportunity. I am the anti-missionary.

Instead, I promote secular humanism, if you're into that sort of thing, or discordianism, if you hate people as I do. If you don't feel like worshiping either gods or humans, then the only creative force left is chaos. dada, zen and nihilism are to me together a much more reasonable interpretation of reality than a spirit in the sky. Or, just don't even worry about it. Certainly a pleasant life isn't dependent on the belief in god, a higher power, morality, or anything beyond what we immediately perceive. Just eat, shit, fuck and breathe, and everything will turn out fine.

23 jan 04

I don't want anyone or anything else; I just want my katy. I don't want words of comfort (even though people haven't been offering very many), or another dog, or anything. I want my little dog back. I keep having fantasies that they didn't *really* kill her, that she recovered at the vet's office, and she'll come back to our front door.

This is not getting any easier with time. I truly, truly don't give a shit about people. They're being tortured, you say? Starving in africa? Dying of AIDS? Threatening 'world peace'? WHO CARES?? There are 7 billion of them, and they're miserable, viral creatures who deserve extinction. No human will ever come close to relating to me the way katy did, or filling the void katy left. Dogs are just different, these little creatures of pure goodness. Why would you *ever* elect to spend time with a person rather than an animal? So you can play your idiot intellectual games and foster your illusion of algorithmic control of reality? People are selfish, ugly, conniving filths who deserve their inevitable destruction by the hand of their own murderous warfare. Every day I pray for doomsday; when it comes, I'll laugh and kill a few myself just to help out. So, fucking leave me alone. I don't want anything to do with you, human.

Remember: I bite and gouge eyes. I am unburdened by moral imperative, and kill humans for pleasure. Haha, I'd like to see them try to put me in jail; just a more efficient concentration of prey.

kill yourself -- save the planet.

I feel better now, after cleaning house all day and getting letters of support for katy, which I posted on her site. My mom also wrote a really, really wonderful piece on katy; she's a much better writer than I am -- her stuff just *flows* (even though she tends to use the long-dash too much -- just like I do). I also added a few links to the 'links' page, including a site that lists toll-free numbers to call for pet-loss grief counseling. So I'm feeling better; the NSA can stand down its alert now. I was getting tired of those little targeting lasers flashing all over the house all the time.

Ana was upset after reading today's vitriolic blog entry, and says she's not going to read it anymore. This is probably for the best; as I explained to ana, this blog is for me. It provides a place I can express myself. The fact that it's public sort of helps this function along, in that the knowledge that a few others are reading makes me feel less that I'm ranting and raving in utter darkness. But certainly, its primary function is to help me sort out my own muddled thoughts and emotions through writing; post head-injury therapy.

And also just because writing is fun.

And also because I'm a terrific egomaniac.

That said, it's important to remember that individual entries shouldn't be looked at as representing the whole of my personal philosophy. I contradict myself innumerable times in this blog, and the entries are less a definitive statement of my beliefs and weltanschauung than they are me trying to sort through things as they come up.

If you want to read it, go ahead, but remember that my artistic license here is unilateral.

22 jan 04

I've almost survived my first day without katy. I wish I could be with her. I made a webpage devoted to her memory.

It's fun to fantasize about killing myself so that I can be with katy. I don't see why not, really. I just don't get close to human beings the way I do to animals; I felt closer to katy than I can remember ever feeling to anyone. I can't help but think this is a function of my brain injury; not in my inability to remember, but in my inability to relate to others of my species. My life is so empty now -- I just sat there on the couch this evening, unduly fascinated with the television, laughing at the idiot jokes on 'friends' and getting absorbed in 'Star Trek' technobabble. I felt like I needed the television, that it was helping to fill the empty hole. Then, I ordered a pizza to fill the hole some more.

My aunt ann is the same way -- she can't deal with human relationships, but loves her animals. But she doesn't have the vindictive, violent streak of rage that torments me, and transforms my misanthropy into sociopathy.

I will never will be able to enjoy a relationship as pure, uncomplicated and honest as mine and katy's; especially not with other shifty-eyed, lard-swilling stench-apes (otherwise known as humans).

It's official: I hate people, and I love dogs.

Step two: a plan for extermination. Do I need to remind you yet again to vote bush in November?

I'm ready to lash out at everyone, to kill without mercy or discrimination, to taste blood and feel flesh tear between my teeth. I guess this is what they mean by the 'demons coming,' eh?

Death to america.

Yes, I admit I'm crazy, but that doesn't make me any less dangerous.

This is what a blog is for -- a place to express myself. The more I write about this, the less likely I am to act on it. And it's made a vastly more powerful cathartic tool by the fact that I know a few people are reading it. This all reminds me of movies like 'office space' or 'the big leboski,' that are seen as anti-society and are rallied around by armchair revolutionaries. But this is their very danger: by watching 'office space,' suspending your disbelief and immersing yourself in the movie, you are supplanting the desire to actually live what you are watching. Why rage against the machine when you can watch movies and listen to songs about it? Watch 'the big lebowski,' say to yourself 'yeah...I'm like the dude...i say 'fuck everything'' and then go right back to your fulfilling job as one of the cogs in the hierarchy machine. So keep watching those movies -- it's just what 'they' want you to do. If you're cheering in a movie theater when they smash the fax machine in 'office space,' there are guaranteed to be 2 hours in which you're in no danger of actually smashing any fax machines.

I want my katy back.

21 jan 04

There is one specific psychological phenomenon that causes people to hate doctors, which happens to be logically invalid. If you're going to hate western medical establishment, I'm concerned that you should be doing it properly, and not putting yourself in a position where you can be easily dismissed.

If a family takes a sick man to the doctor every time he's sick, and this goes on for years and years, then the family will start to associate the man's 'being sick' with 'going to the doctor.' it will start to seem as though the doctor caused the illness, just because they are correlated in time. I think this is probably why a lot of people like to chuckle wryly about how going to the doctor makes you sicker. This phenomenon only manifests if the illness is long and protracted, and involves many trips to the doctor accompanied by an ever-worsening condition. While a scenario like this does illustrate that medical science in fact can't do much for you, it does not illustrate that doctors make you sicker. Of course they can, as in the case of chemotherapy, but the possibility also exists that the perception of medical treatment making a patient sicker is due to the unavoidable correlation of illness and visiting the doctor.

Katy is gone; my mom and I had her put to sleep early this afternoon. Her condition got very rapidly worse in the last 24 hours. She was vomiting every few minutes, shitting blood, and wandered around aimlessly and with a crippled, painful gate, not even being comfortable enough to lie down. Every so often, she'd shiver for no reason (i think she might have been in pain), and I think her internal organs were simply shutting down; AIHA can be a nasty way to go. So, I'm glad we did it -- she was clearly an unhappy puppy.

But I miss my little hound; her toys are still scattered around the living room.

The vet just called. It turns out katy had cancer. We put her to sleep before we could get the results back from the lab. But this doesn't really change anything; she was deathly ill and wouldn't have gotten any better, regardless of whether her diagnosis was AIHA or lymphosarcoma. Even if she'd lived long enough for her to start chemotherapy (it's doubtful that she would have), it wouldn't have done any good, since her cancer was incredibly fast and aggressive as well as at an advanced stage, as the vet explained it. The lab told him that katy had almost no healthy bone marrow cells left -- they had all been replaced by cancer cells. So killing them off with chemotherapy wouldn't give healthy cells a chance to regrow, since there weren't any around. I was worried for a little while that we put her to sleep when she could have in fact been treated for cancer, but from what I understand it wasn't a treatable cancer; treatment wouldn't have prolonged her life or eased her suffering. The vet also mentioned that one of the drugs we were giving her when we thought she had AIHA was in fact a chemotherapy. I can't help but wonder if the vet is telling me a lie or omitting facts to help assuage my guilt over putting katy to sleep, and maybe chemotherapy would have helped if we hadn't put katy down before the results of her bone marrow biopsy arrived. I wonder if the medicine we were giving her for AIHA was what was making her feel so awful, and if it'd have been discontinued if she'd be able to live a while longer, maybe even long enough to start chemotherapy and enter a remission.

We made a decision based on how katy was feeling, and an intuitive sense that she wasn't going to get any better. I hope this was the right thing to do. Would she have gotten better? I was not willing to sacrifice her happiness for waiting for a day that likely would never come. Was this just a bad episode? No, she'd gotten steadily worse for the past two weeks. Even if this was a particularly bad episode that would have subsided to some small degree, there would have been many more episodes like it, increasing in number and severity. How soon would the cancer have killed her? She probably would have died within days, and her life during those days would be torturous. How effective would chemotherapy have been, and how sick would it have made her? Not at all, since her cancer was so advanced, and it would have made her a lot sicker.

I still thinking putting her down was the right thing to do, but I can't help but ask and wonder about these questions.

20 jan 04

The problem with medicine is that it struggles to defeat death, rather than to help life along. How can one hope to defeat death? It's a losing battle.

Medicine just keeps going, keeps fighting, like an insane machine, until it can't fight anymore, all the while deliberately ignorant of the devastation left in the wake of the battle. This is less true in veterinary medicine than in human medicine, but it's still a problem. Thank god katy's not a person -- she might be subjected to western health care, and be in real trouble. As it is, she has a chance of experiencing a good death, which for some reason human medical enterprises aren't able to accept as one of their goals. Instead, medicine rages against death, and in the process ensures that patients/victims die in misery. Since death is part of the body and part of life, trying to 'prevent death' or even prolong life amounts to an assault on the body and spirit of the patient.

Medicine grew up out of our first 'enlightenment,' the one where we inferred from the success of our species that we are fundamentally different from the rest of creation and that we need to lord over it. This childish, presumptuous, arrogant illusion of control manifests in no clearer place than in western medicine and its related hierarchy, rituals and moralistic doctrine.

Katy is dying, and I'm under stress.

19 jan 04

I've been depressed lately, for three reasons: katy is sick, I don't have a job, and I hate living here. I talked to ana tonight, and she tried to make me feel better. It sucks that I don't get to spend time with her, that she's stuck in West Virginia. I've been going for bike rides in the cold lately. It's really nice, but today's was spoiled a bit by the fact that some of the ice and snow on the trail had actually melted, making the trail all gooey. I like to think of riding through the mud versus riding over roots/rocks as the anima and animus of trail-riding. I see this not only as a dualism, but specifically as a female-male dichotomy; the sticky, ensnaring mud versus the hard, protuberant rocks and roots. It's funny how there's a clear hierarchy (common to a particular culture) in dualims. Here's a list of dualistic constructs, with the head honcho in the hierarchy listed first:

1. animus, anima
2. man, woman
3. god, the devil
4. science, humanities
5. life, death
6. heaven, hell
7. good, evil
8. riding over roots, riding through the mud
9. employed, unemployed
10. 1, 0
11. left-brained, right-brained
12. logic, intuition
13. self, other
14. individualism, collectivism

That's all of them. Haha. I was thinking of all of these things I wanted to blog about on my bike ride, but now I can't remember them. I know one of them was something about generalizing platonism vs non-platonism to just about everything. I'm obsessed with dualism; it's a problem.

Katy is getting another blood transfusion tomorrow, and a bone marrow biopsy. It's not fair that such a tiny, sweet little dog has to go through all of that. I'm not 100% sure it's necessary, either; no matter what the outcome of the tests are, the practical result won't be too different -- she'll come home, and either take medicine that isn't working, or not take medicine because now it 'officially' doesn't work.

The marrow biopsy (ouch) is to make sure that she's actually producing red cells to begin with. If she's not, then it's pointless to give her immune-suppressant drugs, because the issue isn't her white cell improperly functioning, but her bone marrow. At that point, there'd literally be nothing we could do. But she's quite happy and spunky, even though she's in dreadful health on paper. I wish I could be with her all day tomorrow; she'll come home some time in the evening, after spending all day at the vet. I'm always afraid that every time we leave her at the vet, it's going to be the last time I see her.

Feelings about dogs are uncomplicated, unlike feelings about people, which all tend to be love-hate to some degree. Dogs are nice. People suck.

But getting back to katy's medical procedures, I get the feeling sometimes that medicine is a very hierarchical-socialist endeavor, that procedures are done to further the knowledge of the medical community and benefit society through medical innovation, rather than to improve the quality of life for the patient. I guess this is no secret. But I think it actually goes one step further: even if someone is being 'treated' for an ailment, and not just being relieved of symptoms, then that treatment doesn't benefit the patient as much as it benefits the advancement of medicine. I feel like individual treatment optimization is sacrificed for innovation and progress. Of course, this also applies to veterinary medicine.

I really don't like or trust doctors. It seems to me that they operate on societally sanctioned authority and little else, and are closed-minded, ritualistic subscribers to a haughty and primitive barbarism that fights the human body and tries to battle it into submission, rather than listening to it and working with its own natural healing process. With the possible exceptions of sterilization, antibiotics and vaccination, there haven't been any really notable medical advances in human history; we're still chopping away at tumors with knives, removing living organs and saluting religious orders to mutilate the genitals of babies. It's obvious that the next big advance is about to come out of the cracking of the genetic code, but I'm sure that too will be mismanaged by our collective moralistic idiocy.

Veterinarians are only a little bit better than doctors, simply because they aren't coraled around by misguided morality and religious baggage -- if a dog is suffering, and there's no hope of it getting better, you put it down. It seems logical. But of course, humans (which we supposedly value more than dogs) are allowed to live out their lives for 20 years on respirators, covered in bed-sores and insane with chronic pain and boredom, because only yahweh can take a life.

Genetic therapy has some potential because it basically lets the body heal itself. You inject a virus containing a few specific genes into someone, and their body is thereby given instructions at the cellular level on how to remove a brain tumor itself, rather than having it bloodily sheared away by doctors in their secular-priest robes.

Society is never going to advance. Never. We're angry, violent, stupid, lazy, obeisant creatures that are going to rationalize and murder our way to our own ruin.

18 jan 04

Another week, another archive.