Pets, past and future ~

These are some pets I'd most like to have... and actually have had.

FURRY FRIDAY ON SATURDAY


Akitas are one of the oldest pure-breeds of dog in the world. The American Akita was taken back from Japan by American troops after World War II. It is bigger and furrier than its Japanese counterpart. Whenever I see one down the local park, I want to kidnap it. One came up and stared me right in the eyes. I was down on the grass, so we were eye to eye. She just stared into me. Very intense. Akitas are loyal and dignified and very Japanese. Similar in character to Alsatians or Rottweilers. They are used in Japan as police dogs. I have never heard one bark.


An idea of their size!


The puppies are well known for being savage and wild. This is pretty obvious when you take a look at one:


My favourite little dogs are Norwich terriers. If I got a small dog I wouldn't care too much about breed. The type I'm on about tends to show up in Rescue Home catalogues named "Scruffy". If you've seen "Scruffy", you know the dog I want. Every animal shelter has a Scruffy.


Chinchillas look like rabbits from Mars. They need a big cage, a huge wheel and a "marble", that is, a stone slab you can stick in the freezer for them to lie on in summer. Chinchillas come from the high Andes and do not enjoy temperatures much above 75F, 25C.


The best pets I ever had were roborovski hamsters. These come from Mongolia. They're a totally different breed to ordinary hamsters (2in/5cm fully grown, pingpong ball-sized when curled up). They are the smallest and fastest hammies in the world.


Unlike ordinary hamsters, which fight when kept together, robos are highly social. They sleep in a heap:


They do everything together. But they're easily startled, don't tame at all easily and don't like being handled. They ping off on the floor at the first opportunity, have taken me 2-4 days to recapture. Imagine a wild house mouse on speed and you're still not close! Aren't they cute ...

WISHING Y'ALL A CHARMING WEEKEND. IF IT CAN'T BE CHARMING, THEN MAY IT BE TOLERABLE.

Easter Vulgarity

I HOPE YOU'RE ALL having a great Eggster/Passover/long weekend... whatever it means to you. Here are some cute bunnies for the pagan amongst ya:



And a lopsy-eared chinchilla, for those, like me, who prefer a martian bunny to the earth variety...



A technicolour Easter Chinchilla...



I had a miserable easter with no eggs and no drugs. I was trying to give up but ended up in such pits of misery I only wanted to die and do the world a favour and get it over with as quick as possible. How I hate being alive without drugs. Can't live with them; can't live without 'em. What the hell am I going to do?

I don't WANT to cut my throat, or jump in front of a train, but I haven't the guts to detox. So I'm stuck in this agony of misery ~ toothache of the soul.. and have no idea what steps to take to clamber out of this dreadful morass....

Nobody can help me. Only I can help myself. Yet I can't. I'm too lazy.

So I'm ****ed, aren't I??

Akita 秋田犬 alerts! Akita 秋田 means Autumn 秋 Field 田 or Fallfield 秋田, if you want to be American and succinct about it. I saw a huge dark male one trotting down the street the other day. I wanted to say kon-ban-wa! (good evening) to it, but was too self-conscious. Also it looked 50% really cute and 50% like it wanted to bite me (which is why that breed appeals to me in the first place, a mixture of ultra-furry and scary, haha!...



Then I was watching Ray Mears in South East Asia yesterday and saw a white Akita dog 秋田犬 on a floating Vietnamese boat village in Vietnam. I'm surprised a dog designed to brave the Greenlandic winters of northern Japan could survive in a tropical climate, and it did look a bit scraggly, but I suppose the undercoat moults out in tropical climes... Anyway, Northern Vietnam has quite severe winters, so I spose the poor swine would need his coat for that...



I'm still undecided about what to do about pets. The problem is, roborovski hammies are so very tiny and pingy and are a bugger to get back once they escape (which they do with exceeding ease) and I have a great gap under my door that would NOT be good vis-a-vis getting the tiny swines back...

I was thinking of doing what Mr Downstairs Man did with his Staffordshire Bull Terrier puppy and getting a doggie anyway and waiting facing whatever trouble arises as and when. I really want my Akita 犬 swine and do not see why the local council piggery should stand in the way of doggie happiness. The swines!

The Mood-Pig

AARKHH!I've failed! It's coming back, I can feel it. Depression, or whatever you want to call it. That feeling that something is wrong all the time, when I cannot (or do not ~ whatever) do anything meaningful with the day. And I should. And my days are only like that, I only have empty days because I have made such a wreck of my life, and that is why I'm so depressed ANYWAY. Know what I mean... Vicious circles are nasty things.


So my life is in the piggery once more. I did write out a rambling old post on a pizza box, but it's too long to type in without constant credit top-ups at this cybercafe that will not take money on account and give multi-hour discounts. (I cannot function in half-hour or one-hour increments. Tried: cannot do it. It wastes time and is a big reason why many of my bloggosphere friendships wither due to lack of contact on my part. I cannot relax into it when the clock is ticking constant threats of disconnexion in my ear. No!

I don't think I'll be out of the piggery by tomorrow but you might get the typed up PIZZA FUNGHI box edifice. So beware! Have a cheery Easter (ie Passover) if that is what you do. When IS Easter, by the way? Good Friday? Easter Sunday? Or Easter Monday? I never did get that one...

Chinchillas and Teeth!

MY POOR Shreddie-muncher on Saturday got cancelled, so here's another cutie. I don't know if I'm going to have any "chins" in the near future. They're a bit big and the cage they need (which must be chew-proof, not just a rabbit-hutch) is enormous and very expensive too. Also they're social animals, so I'd need at least two. Having kept social hammies in groups, the group interaction entertainment is too much to miss. Also I think it's cruel to keep furry animals in solitary confinement. If you're going to make a South American Mars Rabbit who naturally sleeps most of the daytimes and spends evenings hoppetting and pinging about the stern crags of the High Andes reside in a metal dog-carrier-looking cage, the very least you can do is make the cage as spacious as possible, with toys like exercise wheels, which all rodents love (so much so that some species of hammy will neglect their babies in order to trundle away) and buy your pets company. In London, baby chinchillas are about £25 each and the 4ft x 3ft x 3ft cage would be about £100. Which is quite a lot of money. And not very practical when it's technically "no pets" and my robbies used to hide from the landlord by day in an aquarium stashed in a closet! At night they rambled in a furry pingpong balls donkey derby, all three scurrying on the wheel at once. Poor Baby Itchy, who was smallest and lightest couldn't always fit on and frequently ended up hanging on the side for dear life as her tubby Sister Spherical thundered obliviously onwards, on that big wheel in the dark.
Roborovski hamsters are extremely flighty by nature and startle easily, which doesn't really make them good pets for children, who of course will want to pick them up. Of my three, Itchy was the only one I managed to hand-tame, and even she was prone to unexpected panic, when she would bunny-hop on the floor. And sometimes escape this way. And go missing for three or four days at a time. Which had me absolutely fraught.
I couldn't believe it when she died. I actually cried. Then Bashful went. Spherical lived a further three months alone with all the seeds to herself, then she trundled on to that big wheel in the sky...
Small rodents like that have a typical life-span of only two months in the wild and mine lived just over two years. So I think they had a decent innings...
I'm still zigzagging about whether/when/how to get new ones. Robos aren't the easiest of pets to source. Lots of shops told me they wouldn't sell them because they're "too small, too fast and not suitable for children".
But if you think of them as furry tropical fish ~ it something you watch in the tank and don't expect to take out. Their antics were exceedingly amusing. They were my sole furry ray of light in some of the darkest months of my life, when I was in that crackhouse with Matran the Rat Man and prostitute girlfriend Laundretta. Nasty times!
I'm off to the dentist later this morning, hoping for an extraction. If he does yank the bad tooth, this will be my fourth, if an impacted wisdom tooth is counted as well.
My first extraction was pretty much an emergency. A tooth that had always twinged and annoyed me and I knew wasn't right but no dentist ever did anything for it, though they must have seen its rotten profile on x-ray exploded in a fairground crash on "dodgems". The top fell out. When he kindly pulled the base, what was left looked like a china toilet fitting full of rotten apple pulp. It was nasty. Then another dentist noticed the gap left by this and thought it would be cool to even out both sides. So he pulled a perfectly healthy tooth. It is this that has left me of a cynical view of dentists, who up till recently. got paid per filling/etc. (Now they're paid by patient, no matter how much work is required, making someone like me economically unviable). Anyway the NEXT dentist said whoever did that second extraction ought to be shot. Then I had constant wisdom tooth pains. I bit down deliberately on the gum, even though it hurt, thinking I was doing good. Until my next dentist showed me an x-ray of said tooth, still completely under the gum, shunting all the rest sideways... this, apparently, is what "impacted" means.
To treat it, he had to cut open my gum in a Y-shape, use a drill to destroy some of the top of the tooth, leaving space to grip and yank it out. Then he pulled really hard. I actually like extractions far more than fillings. Of course my mouth is frozen to liquid methane type temperatures so it's not as if I feel it. But fillings I detest. Anyway he pulled it out and all was fine. Until I tried to eat... and thought I would never eat again! For months I had a cavern there at the back. Ten years later it's nicely healed. And now this wobbler, that, so the internet tells me, either needs a root canal job, or pulling out and replacing with a falsie (which is my preferred option). Theoretically both treatments are free on the NHS...
I'm not quivering inwardly. I'm not in panic. But I'm not exactly looking forward to any of this and this teeth-talk's putting me off. So I'd better go. I'll let y'all know how I got on.
Have a nice day everyone!

Chinchilla ii

I CAN'T really have an 秋田犬 Akita-inu where I am now (nor in most rented accommodation). Plus the cost of jabs and microchipping, bowls and leads or leashes and other incidentals mounts up exceedingly high (though I would really love one) ... so I've set my sights on chinchillas instead. These only cost £25 or so each. Maybe £50. But I don't want a fancy one I want a grey one... The cage is the biggest expense as to house a rabbit-sized creature it has to be massive, with a huge ratty-style wheel for them to ramble on plus dustbath to play in. Chinchillas (so the books say) require a certain type of obscure volcanic sand from the high Andes to brush their fur on... otherwise it will go all sweaty-looking and greasy...



Chinchilla dustbath ~ isn't this entertaining? Look how he gets right in..!



And don't they have South American alpaca/emu/llama-style faces..?

... And don't they look sweet!!

As for the "mental health" comments yesterday:

Thank you y'all!

I tried pretending nothing was wrong for so long and it never worked, so does it mean "embracing" a label?... or just ploughing through therapy to get the hell out as quickly as possible..?

All I know about therapy and counselling is that the more you put into these things, the more you get out. You can (and I'm sure lots of people do) use these sessions merely as an outlet to complain about people, things and circumstances that have occurred during the week. You sound off in the session and do nothing about anything between sessions and the time in the room becomes an emotional outlet. You can also look deep within yourself, like the character described yesterday staring into his own eyes saying "aren't I amazing" (and in counselling ~ complexicated ~ and contradictory and deep and fascinating. (But so is everyone else!!) OR you can use such sessions as a means to throw up insights you can hold on to and use as a means of change. And though it might sound a bit snotty-nosed, that's what I would hope I might do with these "therapeutic" experiences.

I hate counselling, in a way. Because it is an inherently one-sided relationship. They know all these things about you, yet you are talking to a human whitewashed wall. What's "healthy" about that?

The blankness of such a relationship is its freedom, because you should be able to say anything you like without fear of emotional fallout (as might happen if you confided in a family member, who is inextricably tied to the same web of interconnected conflicts as you are)... so it all gets deep and meaningful and whatever. But every time I turn up I look at the watch and see 50 minutes of blank time ... and wish I could somehow fast forward it over!

And every time, somehow the minutes go too quickly!!

Right I gotta go find me a chinchilla. Have a nice day, y'all...