rats with antlers

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I hate jackasses who coo over deer. I hate deer. I used to be an innkeeper years ago, while trying to reclaim my writer's voice and sense of homemaking from the decades in the trenches with legalese. We had a twelve-foot deer fence around the property, and the most gorgeous garden you are likely to see outside the ones tended for cash-paying visitors. All manner of heirloom roses. A fuchsia bush bigger than an SUV. Rhododendrons. Dahlias. Ferns. A bunch of amazingly beautiful stuff. Just outside those fences was acre upon acre of hops that had long ago been planted where redwood forest had been cleared a hundred and fifty years ago to make way for the necessities of providing beer to thirsty loggers.

Notwithstanding the acres of heavy nutrients, and notwithstanding the twelve-foot fences, a pregnant doe began jumping the fence every night to nail the roses and the rhododendrons. I would run out screaming and flapping and she would placidly look up at me with an expression on her face as if to say, "What? Can't you see I'm eating?" and continue munching away. I was, of course, beside myself, and breathing fire. I called the absentee owner and demanded he grab his shotgun and make the drive to waste this doe. Which he promptly did.

When he arrived and brought the gun out, I completely lost all my hate and anger, my molten desire for death to the destroyer. The buddhas were kind to me and he couldn't find the deer to shoot her, and my prompt adoption of a dog got rid of the problem with no further delay.

Now Iran seems to be calling me on my revolutionary urges, showing up with their shotgun, and I am desperate for them to let even their oppressors protect them from our shotgun while they find a dog to do the job instead.

Don't get me wrong. I, too, believe the job needs doing. It's a question of means.

After finally getting to sleep last night, I had a whopper of a Zen dream. I was back with 86, who beside sliding into completely irresponsible loady-tude behind his abject alcoholism and bipolar fanaticisms, is/was the hardest working man I ever met, and the most astoundingly talented artist I've ever even seen. The travesty of his self-destruction cannot be expressed... on these and plenty more fronts. He was a man apart, and also a completely useless little boy. So it was uncomfortable being back with him. I found all my art and his art gone, and all kinds of really crappy, ugly and cheap paintings arranged with transcendentally good composition on every wall. He had taken my antique barbershop mirrors and arranged them so that they couldn't reflect anything at all to the human eye.

I was smothering in the thickness of needing not to displease him but to try to reawaken his true sense, since he was making life very oppressive. I might as well have been stitched into a burqa. I was being offered a job to pick up eggs and magazines from one store to deliver to another at 3:30am every night. We needed the money and since I was almost always up that late anyway, heck, that ought to be doable, but was uneasy about even bringing this up with him.

And then somehow even the oppression with 86 was dimming and the question of the motives of the eggs and magazines trafficking store owners was beginning to worry me, making me wonder if I really should take this step.

I hate to break it to you but my husband has come to mean everything wrong with clinging to the love that makes one vow to save all sentient beings. You cannot force them to stop ignoring. You cannot force them to stop focussing on their own multifarious objects of greed to deal with the matter at hand. They are the garden-decimating does, jumping outlandishly high hurdles for more and better and faster from the already astoundingly abundant world, and they are the owner's shotgun, and they are the transcendental talent and heart drinking and debauching itself to death, when nothing, not one solitary actual thing caused it. Mere ignoring causes it all.

And, worse, caring so much that one begins to grab back onto the habit energies of arguing, pleading, insisting, and fighting, becoming so rigid in opposition that one's inflexibility defeats one's strength, lands one back in states as wretched and unworkable as theirs, THE way to piss away decades of work to be strong enough to do them any good.