orange and raccoon

sunday 24 july 2011


Once again, I hauled myself to the river early this morning. Earlier than I usually make it out nowadays: five o'clock. For four and a half years it was routine for me to go out at five with my dogs, but that's all four years gone now, and five o'clock is often unappealing now that I have no dog to walk with. Mental hell.

Making it even less appealing today was the extreme humidity. In the last seventeen days, we have had only one day off from the monstrous wet air, and I simply can't take it. The longer such humidity lasts, the more irritable and physically sick I become. The less willing I become to move at all, because literally the instant I move, I'm covered in sweat.

It was only the memory of my dogs... my great, great dogs... that got me out the door at five a.m. in this vicious weather. Hating to face the stifling air and already exhausted from working on a song for three hours yesterday, and another two hours on a drawing. But because I happened to be awake, and because it was my old dog-walking time, and because I need to remember my dogs, I went.

I had no intention of staying out there very long. Just a quick tour along a part of my old dog route, then back inside this ponystall with a fan blowing on me. Those were my intentions. But you never know what nature's intentions are, and those can change from one moment to the next.

I was out there an hour, and it was all because of raccoons. I haven't seen a raccoon since 2002 (nine years!), and this is nearly shocking when you consider that between 1985 and 2002 I saw raccoons in this town all the time. In my yards, on porches, murdered in the streets by drivers. All the time. So to go nine years without seeing even one raccoon is maximally weird. And I didn't just see one raccoon on the riverbank at about 5:20 when this day began... I saw five. More raccoons than I've ever seen in my life all at once. The one and only time I've ever seen a mother with a litter. I spent about forty minutes watching those animals, talking to them, until they went back to their den to go to sleep. I saw them walk all in a line behind their mother, saw them all five up a tree while I stood there studying them and talking to them, saw the eastern sky behind them and their maple tree turn orange: five masked faces watching me from tree crotches against a background of unabashed orange.

I saw the children climb all over the place, heard the mother make a noise like cat purring in her throat, watched her nurse a baby right there in the tree. Afer they'd come down from the tree and crossed the street (mental hell: will they get across safely?), I saw them sitting in a row on top of a sort of fence, just sitting there relaxing. And I, on the opposite side of the road, am anxious: No, no, I say. Don't sit there all in a row like that in full view of the humans. You don't know what they'll do to you. Go now, go back to your den. It's daylight. It's time for bed. Don't let the humans see you. As if she'd heard and understood my words, the mother climbed down with the kids following after, and they went back into their den. Now I know where it is. My lips are sealed.

Brief research I just did yields disparate results: some folks say baby raccoons are called kits (like foxes), others say cubs (like bears). Since pandas and raccoons and bears are all related, I make the unilateral decision to call their children cubs. The only foxy thing about them is the triangular, pointed face. When you watch them move, they move for all the world like little bears. Bears with tails; tails with black rings around them.

Whatever other things a walk at the river may be for me, it is always mental hell. Because I walk there alone now, without my dogs. Because my last two dogs were stolen, hidden, and killed by vicious, spiteful, ugly human beings. It is always, without exception, a walk in mental hell.

But my love for animals and my fascination with them is so great that even in my hell, my rage and grief, I am charmed, dazzled and transfixed by the creatures around me. Even as I rage at the theft of my two dogs with every step, I stand in front of the maple tree full of raccoons and study them, love them, talk soothingly to them. I'm dazzled and can't tear myself away, though breathing the noxious air is making me suffer. I hold my breath while they cross the road, fearing an ignorant and nasty human behind the wheel of a car. I thank them, repeatedly, for being there. Thank the mother for bearing the anxiety my presence is causing her, apologize to her that I can't yet bring myself to walk away.

They're safe in the den now, sleeping. I want them to be safe forever, to live to be very old raccoons and die peacefully in their sleep. I want them to have plenty to eat, and some fun, and good water, and any other blessings I could wish upon raccoons. All in vain. Because they live in the center of a town, not in some remote woods. Because humans in general hate raccoons and love to hurt them if they get the chance: I've seen it all my life. Because they drive their bleeding cars and don't care. So many of them barely give a dog or a cat a chance, let alone some wild animal.

I send my wishes for them into the new-morning air, into the orange, into the nearly colorless haze when the orange fades away. I try to fill every molecule of the air, plants and trees with my raccoon wishes, with my dog rage, with my love for all that's beautiful and my loathing for the vast seas of ugliness that gush from humankind.

In readers, my distaste for homo sapiens will be resented, is always resented. I tell the truth in my blogs, my books. And one of my truths is my dislike of the human race. If you can't read my writing and understand how I've come to this repugnance and bitterness, then I can't help you expand your capacity for understanding.

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read... Stolen stars... Spite and malice... Soulcast...

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smoky

30 may 2011

The fourth guinea pig of my years. Half-way to Princess Shiloh-Chailin, the one I have now. Short-haired, all black, no rosettes (supposedly decorative cowlicks). Born late in 1984, and from January to June of 85, he belonged to my parents. They'd got a pair of pigs for themselves composed of male Smoky for Dad and an orange and white female called Peach Blossom for my mother. When my daughter was out for a summer visit with my parents, she returned with Smoky. Not having been present, I don't know whether Dad simply offered the pig (my father was never much into caged animals, though he was kind to them), or if the daughter wheedled to get Smoky. Whichever it was, he became ours. He was the beginning of the second continuous animal family of my life, the one in western Mass. The FIRST continuous animal family had extended from my birth until the age of 31, when the last cat of my eastern Mass life died. Then my daughter and I moved west when I was 32, and Smoky was the first member of the second continuous family that would go on until 12 March of 2008.

He was smart, he was good, and he was fun. And while he remained an only child, he was king of all he surveyed. In the spring of 1986 I got him a buddy, as I hate to see any animal living without another one of its own kind. And what did they have in the pet shop in Hadley but a nearly full-grown male, short-haired with no rosettes, and all WHITE. I loved the idea of the all black and the all white, so home the new guy came with us. I called him Snowball.

I repeat that male guinea pigs can't share a cage once they both reach sexual maturity. We had a few months when they could be snuggle-buddies, the all black and the all white, but when Snowball became a man, we had to separate them. I put their two cages side-by-side so they could still always see each other, lie down side-by-side with the glass between them. And there were supervised playtimes of freedom on the floors.

On 31 May 1988, Smoky died. It wasn't wet-tail, but I don't know what DID take him. He was three and a half years old, and at that point in time I had never had a guinea pig live longer than that. The three before Smoky had all died at almost exactly the same age.

He began a second animal family that I thought would persist for the rest of my days. On the day Smoky died in my hands, I couldn't foresee the mafia-chick or the psychotic landlady or the spiteful, lazy caseworkers of the Department of Mental hell who would one day demolish that family that Smoky had begun, and demolish me with them.


read... Spite and Malice... Stolen Stars
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julia

tuesday 10 may 2011


Julia, or Juliana, or Yuliana. Her name mutated throughout each day, depending on what I felt like calling her. She ended up being buried in my plot in the community garden. Not my usual practice, but since there were urgent bullyings going on from the landlord -- that was the alchoholic landlord that time -- I wanted Julia safely buried someplace nice before a disaster might occur. I dug up a young iris I had and buried Julia beneath it. That plot was taken away from me two years later by the wisdom of certain turners falls twitidiots who decided that since I'd been sick for three months and hadn't been able to garden, I didn't deserve to have the plot anymore, after six years. Anyway, since a zebra finch, as I've said before, only weighs about an ounce, I'm sure two years were enough time for her compounds to peacefully return to the soil and the air.

Julia was the too-late wife I'd bought for finch Zachary in 2001. By rights she ought to have lived a lot longer than two years (most of my finches did), but birds are prone to various parasites and a host of viral and bacterial infections. Back in the early 90's I found in a used bookstore a copy of Robert Stroud's Diseases of Birds (at least I think that's the title). Stroud was the famous (to certain generations) Bird Man of Alcatraz. A murderer serving a life sentence in the prison at Alcatraz. I'd heard of this man since childhood, and had always been interested in the idea of someone like a murderer wanting to study bird biology while he was in the slammer. By the time I found his long out-of-print book, I was a birdkeeper myself, and decided to buy and read it.

So many possible diseases, and so little time. I'm sure that by the 90's many of the diseases pet birds can contract have been eradicated, and I felt I could dismiss as outdated certain ailments discussed in the book. But there are enough left to give me a fright, and it did.

So which of these ailments took Julia? I don't know. But I carry the remorse for a mistake I made in her treatment that may have precipitated her death, or halted a slow recovery, or both. One important task in treating sick birds is to keep them very warm, and I'd been doing that. Julia was in a little hospital cage with a heating pad under it and a light blanket covering it, vitamins and antibiotic in the water, etc. But on the day in May on which she died, the outdoor temperature had taken a spike upwards, the apartment had got uncomfortably warm, and I was afraid there would be TOO much heat for her, just when she seemed to be making steady, if slow, headway. So before bed I turned off the heating pad, fearing to give her heatstroke, and in the morning she was dead. I know from talking to other finchkeepers, and from some reading, that it's a real crap shoot with these little birds. Some of them live five or six or seven years with not much effort on the human's part, and others die suddenly and young. The hospital techniques save some, and don't save others.

Julia was my last finch. Haven't had another one since her death. If I ever get myself moved out of this ponystall the guinea pig and I now inhabit, I want to have a pair of finches again. I love the chattering they do, and their tiny but energetic bodies. Bodies may be small, but their spirits are large and sweet and fun.


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read... Lifelines... All my stars
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(photo: enhanced detail from greeting card)

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peter II

monday 9 may 2011


This particular Peter was one I got for my daughter when she was three. He came from a farm near a friend of ours, and there were lots of young bunnies, so we wandered among the cages until kid decided which one. The bunny was still pretty small, so child got to think of it as a baby, which, of course, children like. He was short-haired, colored in grey patches and white patches.

Myself was 29 at the time, and had previously had three different rabbits, but had had them when I was quite young. I didn't KNOW much about rabbits. We went to a farmy sort of store that my dad knew about to buy a cage for the rabbit, who was going to live in the screened-in patio attached to our breezeway. The man who owned the store told us we had to watch the teeth, that rabbits' teeth keep growing and if they get too long they need to be cut. I'd never heard of this looming menace before. My first two rabbits had been killed in their hutch by weasels, both at once. And my third rabbit had lived to be seven, in a hutch beside the garage. Now I had something new to get anxiety over.

Little Peter was often brought into my daughter's room to hop around and interact with us, and for a while things went fine. Even the farm store guy had thought there would be no real trouble, since Peter had a wooden cage that he could chew on any time his teeth needed it.

His appetite dropped, his spirit dropped, and then I remembered the tooth thing. Dad and I looked at the teeth, and they did seem long, so he cut them. But Peter died anyway, on mother's day 1983, when he was less than a year old. Daughter didn't seem much bothered by the death, but I, naturally, was brought very low. When we went back to the farm store, the man said the teeth were probably cut too late, and that in the meantime Peter, in his compromised state, had contracted some rabbit bacterium or something. Even then, in 1983, you did not take rabbits to the vet in the area where I lived. There were no vets who treated them. Vets who treated guinea pigs were still fairly new. When you had a bird or a rabbit who was ailing, the places you went to for advice were farmers and breeders. And considering the experience I've had with vets vis a vis rabbits SINCE then, the farmers and breeders didn't do badly at all.

Twenty-eight years it's been, and I can still see Peter lying on a red and pink towel at the base of the willow, just shortly before he died. I wanted him to die outside, breathing the outside air and hearing the breeze and the birds around him. I was there too, sitting on the ground beside him, petting him and talking to him until there was no more Peter. And I still, twenty-eight years later, get the lump in the throat and the little sting in the chest because I didn't remember the tooth thing sooner. That whip comes out, the whip of remorse that I blew it. I'm not complaining. I believe that people should feel remorse. This is, like many of my other convictions, absolutely passe and despised in the hollow human ambience we dwell in in 2011.


~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~
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read... Stolen stars... All my stars
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antoinette

tuesday 12 april 2011


No, she wasn't named after the French queen who said "if the poor have no bread, let them eat cake," and was ultimately guillotined by the proletariat. Why would I name one of my animals after someone like that? No, her name came about as the result of a traumatic event in her life.

In September of 1992, when Antoinette was a little over a year old (and I'm ashamed to say I hadn't yet named her), I let her and all the other little zebra finches out of their cages for their play. The larger birds got their turns on different days. This was a long-established routine in our family, and had always gone reasonably well. Among the larger birds who watched while the little ones had their play were some lovebirds, who, as I've said elsewhere, are notorious biters of feet and legs. But there had never been any serious injuries, and I had come into a complacency that believed there never WOULD be.

I had checked on the finches a couple of times and found nothing amiss. But when I went in to round them up and get them back into their cages, I found blood. Blood on a windowill, on the window, and a number of other things. It was a LOT of blood, when you consider that a zebra finch only weighs about an ounce and can lose a life-threatening amount of blood very quickly. And birds can go into shock very easily as well.

Having found all the blood, I still had to find the bird that was producing it. Several finches were hunted, caught in my hand, and examined before I found the right one. A little off-white girl without a name. And there it was. A leg, I'm pretty sure it was the right, bitten very high up near the hip. Bitten NEARLY clean through, but not quite, and dangling by a very thin thread of what? Skin? Tendon? I wasn't sure. The thread was so infinitessimally thin that I hoped the thing would just break off on its own.

This was a Saturday afternoon. My mother was staying the weekend with my daughter and me, but it was no ordinary visit. We had big plans. Big for US, at least. On Sunday we were heading off very early in the morning for a bus trip to the Bronx Zoo. This trip had been planned for months, and my mother had paid for most of it because I was a poor single mom out of work, and we were all three looking forward to it. A big day out for mother, daughter and granddaughter.

It's agonizing for me when I have to choose between an animal and the humans, and I almost always decide in favor of the animal, but this time was different. I was willing to ruin my OWN trip to the zoo (but not exactly happy about it) by calling the vet, having my mother take me and bird over there, and using my zoo spending money to pay the extra for an emergency vet appointment for this bird. But as I thought about these things all that afternoon and evening, I found I wasn't willing to risk ruining the trip for my mother and daughter. If the vet had said the bird needed to be watched very closely for a couple of days, and needed this or that medication every four hours, I would have stayed home from the zoo, and I doubt that the others would have gone without me. I was the mediator between them. And even if they had gone, they wouldn't have had a very good time without that mediation.

So I took care of my bird myself, keeping her very warm, putting antibiotic in her water and making her drink little bits of it through a dropper, until early on Sunday morning when we had to leave. I left her with huge reluctance, fearing to find a dead bird when I returned. I put on a good front for mother and daughter all day, and of course I did enjoy the zoo. But in my mind every few minutes all day long and into the night: is she all right? is she still alive?

Late Sunday night we got back. She was still alive. She was warm and eating and managing to move from perch to dishes with this dangling leg, but it wasn't easy. Next day she went to the vet, but there wasn't an opening until the afternoon, so every hour of waiting seemed like three.

That leg just has to come off. There's no fixing it. This from the vet. I start asking quetions. When can you do it, what do you use for anesthetic, bla bla. Vet says we'll just do it right now. It's just a snip and a stitch on the little stump. No anesthetic for a brid this small. We'll wrap her in a towel and that will keep her dark and calm until it's finshed. There are very few nerve endings in a bird's leg.

I paced the parking lot smoking cigarettes, certain that that tiny little bird had already had way too much stress, and that being held and wrapped and snipped by strangers would just finish her off. Heart attack of the massive type. This is a very easy thing to happen to a bird, death from stress.

She, my plucky little soldier, did not die. She seemed, in fact, extremely happy that that dangling thing had been taken away. There was no post-op infection or faiing, the stitch was removed when it was time (and I think I did it myself), and all ended happily. As I watched her through the remaining five and a half years of her life, I did so with enormous pride in her survival, her courage through massive blood loss and stress and strangers and snipping and stitiching. Not to mention the compensations a bird with one leg needs to make in order to balance and jump.

Overall I'm a depressive, cynical, serious individual. There is not a long list of things in this life that cause me to feel joyful, but seeing animals overcome obstacles is right at the top of that list. I feel that joy every single time I watch that animal overcoming that obstacle, and so it was with this little bird. The same is not true of humans. You don't like reading that, I'm sure, and think me an unappealing shit, I'm sure, but it's the way I was made. Animals have always been fascinating and loveable and desirable to me, whereas humans are difficult,nasty and unreliable.

The year before the biting of the little bird leg, this same vet had amputated the leg of a guinea pig I had who was called Tony. At the end of the bird amputation, we were setting up a file for the little finch, and the vet asked her name. She doesn't have one. Let's call her Antonia, after your other amputee. So the file was set up for Antonia the finch. Over the next week or so, I decided I liked Antoinette better, and that's what I always called her. Antoinetti, to be precise.

And that's how she got her name. Because a lovebird bit her leg nearly off, and this bite resulted in amputation, and a guinea pig who'd ALSO had an amputation was called Tony. A circuitous and odd route to something as routine as a name.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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read... Stolen stars... Mugsy's book
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(fairy at www.toscano.com)

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coco

tuesday 12 april, 2011... turners fails


Coco was a little brown mouse that I bought in 1995 at the request of my daughter's boyfriend, who was staying with us at the time. While there were many pets in our home, he didn't have one of his own, and he asked for the mouse. So I bought the mouse and the wheel, etc, as a gift to him.

Eight or nine months after getting Coco, this seventeen-year-old boyfriend decided to return to his parents. Fine, don't have a big problem with that. What I have a problem with is that he left his mouse behind. Not because I didn't want her; on the contrary, I loved her and was happy to have her. But all this love and adoration that boyfriend spoke of over all those months seem to have been what? An act? A temporary infatuation? Or was he afraid his parents wouldn't ALLOW him the mouse, and he'd only have to bring it back to me? He never has explained to me why he walked out on this animal he played with nearly every day, and so I'm left to speculation. I'll say on his behalf that his parents were very twisted people who made him very unhappy, and I can certainly picture his mother screaming "You're not having a dirty mouse in MY home!"

So she was mine after his defection, until she died on 12 April 1996, a sunny Saturday afternoon. I can't speak for others, but for me, INSIDE me, all animals, people and objects take on the flavor of the circumstances that existed when they entered my life. And if those circumstances cease to exist, as they usually do, then the person or object or animal that remains still carries that flavor, that time and place. The parting between my daughter and the boyfriend was fraught with tension, and so he made no return visits to us or to Coco. Every day that I cared for her after he was gone, she was a little brown handful of life and beauty, but also of his going, and of his never coming again, and of his turning his back on her, whatever the reason. When SHE died, another piece of HIM, and of our time together, died along with her.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(stars from a greeting card)

read... All my stars... Stolen stars
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(all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved)
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ginger

sunday 20 february 2011

Yet another zebra finch, and yet again I don't have a photo currently to hand. Ginger was the light-grey variety of zebra, and she's the only one I ever had with a white dot on her forehead. She was also one of the zebras I actually purchased, as opposed to all of those that were produced for me by my two breeding pairs. I went out shopping for another female and came home with Ginger. Because of that little white dot.

Zebras tend to be jaunty little birds that chatter quickly and move the same way. Ginger was a little different. Not defective in any way, not TOO slow or TOO mellow, but there was a very slight slowness and mellowness to her that made her an individual.

And there was something else unique there too. For most of her life, Ginger always had in her eyes this little expression of amusement. As if she found everything that went on with her and her cagemates, and everything that went on in the rooms and the apartments around her, just slightly funny. And HER amusement always became mine too, because whenever I saw that expression in her eyes, it made me smile. Those of you who know I have Asperger's and have read elsewhere that I don't smile much might find this strange news. But all the laws of my internal physics are DIFFERENT with animals than they are with people. And while it's not terribly frequent that a human will elicit a spontaneous smile from me, animals can do it a hundred times a day.

I never got any chicks from Ginger. It's always puzzled me that from close to thirty finches that I had at the apex of my finch-keeping, only two breeding pairs established themselves, and both of them contained the same male.

Ginger died in January of 1998 when she was close to seven. Another star in this Aspergian sky, with a little white "star" on her forehead.

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read... All my stars... Braonwandering...

~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~

(russian penguins at www.signals.com)

all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

bandit

Page

sunday 20 february 2011

Not a name I would have chosen for any animal, but I say again that I had a small child, and children like to name animals. I got to choose his MIDDLE names, which were Blandiens Bendybones Bum. Yeah, yeah. You like the KID'S choice better.

We got this little bandit out of the laundromat in the first week of September 1986, a basically white cat with large patches of dark-brown tiger. Child and I were there doing our usual Saturday stint with laundry, and there were these two rather infamous townies in there with a kitten sleeping in the woman's lap. The kitten was wearing a flea collar, and I naturally assumed that that kitten belonged to that woman. But when she left, she and her companion got up and left the kitten in the chair. He didn't stay asleep long once he'd lost that warm body.

So, of course, the next humans he came to flatter were my kid and me. Blandiens, that name you don't like, is the Latin for "flattering." Bandit was an inveterate flatterer. When he wanted something, he would rub up against you oh-so-adoringly, and make these sweet little high-pitched sounds in his throat. As far as I ever saw, it worked every time. The woman who owned the laundry said she was sure the kitten belonged to no one because he'd been hanging around for several days. I argued that he was wearing a flea collar, a sure sign that he did, in fact, belong to someone. But she defeated my reasoning by saying that whoever it was obviously didn't want the kitten anymore, and that people in downtown Turners were forever getting cats and then tossing them out forever when they were tired of them. Really? say I. I'd only been in Turners a year, and spent little time there, as my weekdays were spent 9-5 on the campus of UMass. There was a lot I didn't yet know about the town. A year or two after this day, I had learned to advertise on radio and in the paper before I kept any lost animal I found. I didn't want to take an animal someone loved and missed. But on this particular laundry Saturday, I took this woman's word that someone had rejected this kitten, and we took him home. He was smuggled up the back stairs in a brown paper grocery bag so no fellow-tenants would see him. I hadn't yet asked the landlord if I could have a cat, and I didn't want some asinine butt-brain getting to the landlord before I did.

When I reached him a few days later, he said the cat was okay. So began Bandit's time with us.

I don't know how many weeks went by before I was standing on my back porch and saw at the edge of the woods a cat who was the spitting image of our little Bandit, except that he was full-grown and dirty. I called my daughter and pointed out the cat. She makes a blase face. Ya ma, I know. That's Brandon's cat Bandit. That's why I named the kitten Bandit, because he looks just like that one. There had been a method to her madness, after all.
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read... Sehnen... Neverending solitaire...

~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

the fishes

tuesday 8 february 2011.... turners turds

Yes, you can use the plural fishes when you're talking about more than one SPECIES of fish, and that's what I'm going to do.

I was a fishkeeper from 1987-1998. Freshwater, not salt. Five gallon tanks, ten, twenty, and for a while a thirty-eight gallon gem. The beginning of this era was thrust on me by someone else, who gave my daughter a five-gallon tank and heater and filter and pump, plus a couple of fish, for her birthday. It all started so simply. And escalated. And kept going.

Prior to this fish-birthday, I'd only ever had goldfish in bowls. Had never had tanks and all their equipment and all their headaches. I still maintain, however, that the headaches are worth it, because the fish are both beautiful and fascinating. And like potted plants, the waterworld of an aquarium provides a miniature OUTDOORS indoors.

There are certain horrors, too, to fishkeeping. At least to someone as sensitive and invested in animals as I am, they were horrors. Really I don't even feel like going there now -- maybe another time. Today I just want to stay with the pleasures of fish. This quote from the naturalist Konrad Lorenz (from his book King Solomon's Ring) will give you a hint of what you must face when you keep aquariums: "...there is no other group of animals that, even in nature, is so plagued with infectious diseases as the fish." Now back to the pleasures.


How many kinds did I have over the years? Reticulated catfish, angelicus catfish, albino catfish, algae eaters, guppies guppies guppies, swordtails, mollies, many varieties of tetras, including the lovely little neons; gouramis, bettas, angel fish, and more. Interesting, graceful, different demeanors in different species, and so on. An underwater adventure.

I salute every single one of the hundreds of fish who lived in my tanks, from the tiniest baby guppies to the largest angel fish and gouramis. I'm glad to have known each one of them.
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read... Mugsy's book... Mishibone...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

gloria in excelsis... the heights of your wazoo

wednesday 22 december 2010
turners tyrants

Today Cathy, or Kathy (I really don't give a fig) gave me a Christmas card. I've known Cathy for a lot of years, though only fairly casually. But she HAS known for quite some time that I'm an atheist. I have said it to her myself, on more than one occasion.

Now, handy little Cathy makes her cards herself. This year she did it with rubber stamps. The stamp she used for the FRONT of the card was all right. A manger scene, true, and just slightly insulting to an atheist, but not too bad. No magi or anything, just little kids kneeling at a manger, a few animals. Nothing I would have made any issue of. No, it was the INSIDE of the card that lit the fuse (as it was intended to do). The rubber stamp used inside was something to the effect that I would have the love of christ at this time. I said a very insincere thank you and went on about my computer business. But the more I thought about that message over the next two hours, the more insulted I became, and the more I realized what a deliberate little jab of the knife of ignorance and meanness that message was.

The card was given about 10:00. Two hours later, Cathy was gone, and I had a moment with another woman. I showed her the card and told her how insulting it was, and that Cathy has known for a long time that I'm an atheist. I told her: this is what I mean when I talk about how I've been treated here for 25 years. Outright meanness and attacks, and nasty little passive-aggressive things like this Cathy stunt. And she says to me: Just stand tall and defend yourself. I told her that I HAD been defending myself in 2007, against two profoundly disturbed and ruthless women, and that's how my life got destroyed. I told her I was going to Cathy's house to leave the card in front of her door. I wrote a note on it: No thanks, Cathy. You already know I'm an atheist. This I did just before 12:30.

I'm sure Cathy-defenders, and people who don't believe in passive-aggressive acts, will whimper: but maybe those were the only stamps she had. If so, then she should have hand-written the message. Seasons greetings, or some other neutral, non-religious thing. She's perfectly capable of writing. Save your whimpering. I'm not interested.

This is the kind of garbage I've taken from the uneducated, unevolved, uncaring baboons of turners falls for twenty-five years. they just won't let Nakis be. they have to jab, from the kinds of moves like the one Cathy made today (she could have skipped giving me a card at all, rather than give an insult), all the way up to the life-destroying actions of the mafia-chick and the mental landlady. I wish them misery on christmas and every other day. I wish them suffering. I wish them hurt. I wish them all the things that most of them have always given me in such abundance: ignorance and meanness.

shove your message to the heights of your wazoo, Cathy. gloria in excelsis.

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read... Poison and snowflake trees...

~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis. all rights reserved.

juergen

wednesday 8 december 2010, turners tesseracts

Juergen Jergen Oppenheimer was his full name. I was eighteen when I got him. And if you find his full name a tad too much, think on the fact that the one before him was, in full, Jeffrey Jeremy Hilary Boob Jason Julian Chaucer. I was a teenager, for heaven's sake, and a teenager with Asperger's at that. Take a gander at some of the names Opal Whiteley gave her animals: Peter Paul Reubens, Lars Porsena of Clusium, and Thomas Chatterton Jupiter Zeus. And she was just a little KID with Asperger's. By comparison, I wasn't that bad. And by comparison to Jeffrey, Juergen got off easy.

He was a gift, of sorts, from a sibling. One summer day, 1971, I'm there in the livingroom, and sibling squeaks open the heavy front door, tosses something onto the rug, and says "Here's an orange cat for you." Orange was my favorite color for male cats in those days, and the previous one, the aforementioned Jeffrey, had died earlier in the year. Then sibling shut the door again.

Juergen was probably less than six weeks old at that point, very puzzled to have landed in this strange place. He would prove to be calm and quirky, and almost all the time an introvert.

So who's the kid in the photo with the interesting face treatment? I'll call him Joey. He lived nextdoor and was great pals with Juergen, the only one of my cats who was laid back enough to be friends with a four-year-old. As I myself had been, Joey was not what you'd call a mainstream sort of a four-year-old, but he and I were different from the norm in mostly different ways. Joey was often very serious, even moreso than I was at seven, but once in a while he would come out with something that was a howl.

One spring someone buys Joey a plastic fishing pole, with a plastic and magnetized worm on the end, and a separate, magnetized plastic fish. Joey was bored with the plastic, lifeless fish, and seemed to find it much more fun that Juergen came along one day and went after the bait. After that, it was THEIR game. One day my father saw them at it and said "Catfishin' Joey?" And with a completely straight face, staring down at Juergen in the puddle, Joey says "Yup." And the cat, despite his general dislike of water, never hesitated to roil around in the puddles to catch that damned plastic bait.

Another of Juergen's much-loved games was to sit in my lap while I ate and be passed goodies from my plate. His favorite hand-outs were plain donuts. The old-fashioned kind, made in an old-fashioned donut shop.

Joey's about 42 now, with kids of his own. I don't keep in touch with him and couldn't ask permission to use his picture, so I've concealed his face. I'm 57. Juergen, of course, is gone a very, very long time, having died on 8 December 1984 at the age of thirteen.
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(photo by l. billard)

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read... All my stars... Braon...
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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

robin

Page Seventy-four

saturday 20 november 2010
turners unfeels

Do I have to say what kind of animal Robin was? Born in spring 1990 and died in November 1994. Brought to me as a nestling by my loving cat Melinda. I do indeed have a photo, but it will have to wait. Haven't been able to use the scanner for three days.

Nestling means that Robin was all feathered in when Mindy brought her, ready to learn to fly but not there yet. Unable to get her own food. Still pulling the head back, opening wide, and cheeping when she was hungry. Like all young members of the thrush family of birds, she had a white a breast with black spots. As far as I know, robins are the only thrushes that lose these spots with the first molt.

We had gone on a trip down to Disney World in 1990, returned around the tenth of June, and only a few days later, no more than a week, Mindy brought this young bird to the bottom of the stairs. I was already in possession of a female sparrow that Mindy had brought as a nestling the year before. Mindy seemed very eager to help me increase my number and knowledge of birds.

I fed the little bird myself, on wet bread and baby food, and she survived. Most often they don't, but she did. There was one little glitch that I hadn't encountered with birdlings before, and that glitch was lice. An unbelievable number of the tiny little buggers. In the nest, the mother bird takes care of de-lousing, and since I was now the mother bird, I had to think of something. I didn't want to use chemical, store-bought preparations, either on the bird or in the room where I was keeping her. I had read more than once that many bugs don't like garlic (right along with vampires), and so I made garlic water by soaking diced garlic in jars of water for a day or two. Then I washed the bird, her box, her bedding, and wiped down all the furniture in the room with garlic water. It worked, folks. Only had to do it twice, and all the little lice was gone.

Unlike all of my other birds, who lived on seeds of various sorts, Robin consumed mynah bird pellets, which had been doing well for my mother's blue jay for ten years. But the blue jay would eat them dry, whereas the Robin would eat very few of them in the hard, dry state. Not surprising, I guess, since robins seem to live on moist foods most of the time. I had to soak the pellets in water until they were soft, and then all was well. This was the mainstay of her diet, with occasional pieces of wet bread, which she liked, or blueberries, or hamburger.

Robin's is a death I feel at least partly responsible for, and therefore it's hard to write about. Not because I don't want to admit my mistake, but because a dark ball of self-disgust rises up, and extra pain on top of the normal load that I live with every day.

She shines, like all the others, as one of the bright stars on the map of the years I've lived, and I miss her, like all the others, still today.
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read... All my stars... Stolen stars...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated.

spotty

Page Seventy-three

wednesday 10 november 2010 .... turners festers

~~} Bold yellow sun lights the land where you run,
~~} burns so bright all its shadows are black.
~~} You rest in the shade where the danger lies wait:
~~} how long will it let you come back?

He was yet another grandchild of Maman, that mother extraordinaire. I have no picture to show you, but he was a small cat, white with grey patches. Hence the name. And I must have named him in a period of great fatigue, because I usually came up with names slightly more original than Spot. That's as bad as Fido or Rover. But most of my animals had multiple nicknames, and for him these were: Spotty, Mr. Spock, Spocky boy.

Like everyone in his family, Spotty was a home boy. Even when free outdoors, these cats never strayed very far from home, unless something really out of the ordinary happened. And the family also tended toward smallnes, which in the case of Spotty's litter was smaller still. None of the six ever got to what you'd call a normal size for an adult cat, and I think this might have been because their parents were half-siblings.

Sixteen years after his death, I still sadden to say that his life was a short one. In the debate between indoor-cat and outdoor-cat, there are good points on both sides. And I have argued the question within myself thousands of times over the years. In most times and places, I opted for outdoor cats. And the indoor people can rant and say that I'm wrong, that I shortened my cats' lives by letting them go outdoors, and in the latter point they are correct. But I had reasons, reasons which I consider just as valid and well-considered as anything they can say, for deciding on outdoors. Not going to elucidate them here, as this is supposed to be Spotty's post, but maybe I'll go into them somewhere on my website, at some future time.

Two years and three months was the amount of time he lived. A short time, but a happy one. He was happy. The dark cloud in his life was the cat next door, a particularly aggressive tom called Skip, who would come to our porch and beat on Spotty, who was only half his size. I tried not to get TOO furious with Skip, because he belonged to people who didn't take very good care of him, and I think this contributed to his generally unhappy nature (he belonged to the same crowd that Rabbit did, and they didn't take much care of HER either). But I did get SOMEWHAT furious when I would hear snarls and shrieks from Skip and Spotty's very unique, loud hum of terror coming from the porch. We all know the expression "scared shitless." This is what happened to poor, timid Spot every time Skip came to the porch to assert dominance. I'd rescue him, of course. And as I've said, this was the only dark cloud in Spotty's otherwise happy life.

read... Shadowpoems... Extemporaneana...

~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~

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(all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved)
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monday 14 december 2009

greenfield

Why do I continue writing these on-line journals, I often wonder. I don't write the kinds of things that people are looking for: entertaining things, things of interest to people 35 and under. So why?

During the long time I've been writing these real-life events on the internet, I've had different reasons for going on. But now I go on for my death, which I'd hoped to be able to bring about myself, but so far... My relatives have no interest in these journals now, while I'm alive: I'm not taken seriously as a human being, as far as I can tell, by anyone related to me. But perhaps when I've died there will be at least some meager morbid curiosity about who this woman really was. As long as I breathe they define me, and I'm not allowed to define and describe myself. Maybe when I no longer breathe there will be a change, but of course I can't be sure.

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read... Lifelines... Lucked out...

~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~

all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.
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anne nakis, or nemo

Saturday 7 Nov 2009, Greenfield

I can't haunt the streets of Turners Falls today, the ghost, the Nemo (no-one), the frantic Demeter searching, and scourging the earth over her lost Persephone. There are no buses today.

I've called myself no-one on this blog, and on another I've called myself sehnen (longing). I'm both of those things. And if my personal archetypes have become Demeter frantic over her stolen daughter and Deirdre of the Sorrows, crying for 12 years over her murdered love and in the end killing herself, it's because of the last 12 hell years. I haven't gone into much of the hell pre-dating the stealing of my family in 2008, but those years actually began in 1997, and culminated in the destruction of my life last year. But all of my on-line journals, whatever I'm talking about in them, give clues to the damage that's been done over the last 12 years.


(resin figurine at www.toscano.com)

Click here to more about Deirdre.

read... Braonwandering... Spite and malice

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imagine

Page Fourteen

Monday 5 May 2008... Turners Fools


I'm a person who has to apply artsy and otherwise imaginative things to all of life: music, colors, images, etc. To ensoul the ordinary, to turn the ordinary into a little magic, to let my imaination have its fun.

For instance, fairies. In my own life that is now gone, I was wild about fairies, but only pretty ones. All my fairies had to be pretty. And I chose to envision all fairies as kind and benevolent, even though this is by no means the case in Celtic myth and folklore.

And I chose to see all pretty fairies as symbols of all the good things life can have. And so on. Ensouling everyday life. Adding a little magic to the mundane. This is a very different thing from delusions, please note, and from the popular psychiatric disorder that is commonly called "magical thinking." This is a conscious choice to PRETEND, because normal pretending is safe, and sane, and fun, and good for the soul. One book in which you could read more on this subject is The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life, by Thomas Moore (a psychologist, by the way).

I did this in my conversations with my animals too. In the years that my cats and I walked along the canal in Turners Fools (where I'm visiting today and typing these words; where my family and my life were demolished), I named various spots along the canal with our own names that no one else knew: the sunset hill, Zoe's lookout, Shiloh's lookout, etc. I did it again with my dogs in the woods at the address we were just thrown out of. The fairy well, the hill to the morning, the little hemlock, the little singing stream, and more. My dogs, Brainse and Mishi, learned these names for things very quickly, and loved for me to say the name of each place when we reached it. Brainse liked to take it one step further. She would stop at each place, often getting there ahead of me, and she would not walk further until I said the name. Sometimes I'd be lost in my thoughts and I'd forget to say the name. Mishi and I would keep on walking a few feet, and then I'd notice that Brainse wasn't with us. I'd turn around, and there she'd be, sitting or standing at a certain spot that was special to us, looking at me as if to say "You didn't say the name, Mom." Then I'd apologize and say the name, and she'd smile and wag her tail and trot forward to meet me. Putting a little magic into everyday things. It's all gone. And the DMH and the CSS sat back on the cheeks of their brains and let it all be taken from me.

Update 12 November 2009: I've been thinking a great deal lately about those dog walks in the woods and all the things we named there, and the sweetness of our time together there. But I cannot yet face returning to that woods.

I have, though, returned to the canal and the river in Turners Falls, where we also walked and named things and had sweet times. The pain of the loss of those times is greater than ever. The pain and rage that still, after 20 months, no "christian" souls will tell me what happend to my animals, is enormous.

~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

part of the book Stolen Stars

psychotic spawn from hades

Page Thirteen

Monday 5 May 2008 Greenfield

I talked about this before, on an older blog that I'm getting rid of. The destruction of me and my animals began on a certain day, with a certain person. Lots of other characters joined in the moral farce before it was over, but it all began with this one sociopath. And how could I know that then, on that one single day, with this one single psycho-bitch, that everything that mattered to me and kept me going in life would be destroyed.

It's Saturday the 15th of July 2006, when she appears on the scene. I'm out in the front yard gardening and this bleached chick in a white convertible drives by and waves at me as if I'm her long-lost best friend. I've never seen her before. A short while later I'm inside my kitchen, and psycho-woman drives up to my kitchen door and wants to know about the empty apartment. And there it all begins.

This is the acoholic, drug-using, drug-selling, delusional vermin who will torment me for over 16 months, in a great variety of ways, including never letting me sleep. She will (or so she later said) make a deal with the landlady to drive me to another nervous breakdown (the landlady doesn't like me and wants me out), and in exchange she lives in the house rent-free. This piece of crap joins together with another one, the landlady, in loathing me. They are both sociopaths, conscienceless with absolutely no sense of right and wrong. They form a team, and it begins.

read more about the mafia chick.

Update 14 August 2009: That's exactly how it began. Nothing I've said about it has been lied or imagined. I'm running out of computer time, but if I weren't I'd delineate for you some of the ingenious and relentless ways this bleached chick came up with to harass me and make me physically ill. Maybe another time. And she is not in jail. Harming me was nothing special to the law, but she did other things that were illegal, but Matthew and his pals have never cared about getting her into jail. It's some of the people she's connected to that they want.

part of the book Spite and Malice.

mental devastation

Page Four

friday 25 april 2008 greenfield

I don't know how to describe things inside me. No words seem to match the emotions. And who would possibly identify with me, even if I had the right words? Who feels the complete bonding with animals that I feel? Anybody? Who feels as fearful and bored and uncomfortable in the presence of humans as I do? Anybody? Who's been screwed in every possible way by humans, as I have? Anybody? Tell me if you know.

Number 15

Explosions.
No one hears them,
nor imagines they exist.

Volcanoes erupt in souls
and go, for the most part,
unremarked.

Complexities
inside us,
seismic events
and black holes,
the kaleidoscope parade
of chips that make a soul
are left to the buffoons
who set up files,
proffer pills,
misdefine you,
and flee.
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poetry page of my website


Update 16 July 2009, Turners Fails: After the DMH and CSS sat back and let my life be destroyed, I still am very bitter about social service agencies, and don't trust them (what reason would I have to ever trust one again?). I'm working with a new one now, but am very wary. And the grief that was in spurts and was distracted by all the anxiety caused by the things Matthew Lacoy told me, is now in its full spate. Where it should have been last year. Living is emptier than it's ever been. --- Greetings to AtomicPunk.
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read... Spite and malice... Fourth february...

~~~~~~~~~ website outline ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

meandering

Page Three

thurs 24 april 2008 greenfield

Meandering through the streets of two towns is mostly how I spend a good part of each day now, having no life that is at all recognizable as my own. As of eight days ago, I live in a rented bedroom. No apartment, nothing of the life of a grown-up. Still the homeless bum that the DMH made me. Still waiting for them to come up with some kind of apartment and give back at least some of my animals from wherever they've hidden them. My heart meanders among grief, rage, depression. My eyes meander over human faces and see how bland and uninteresting they are compared to the expressions on the faces of animals. So it has always been, as far back as I can remember. I have Asperger's Syndrome. Animal faces have always been fascinating to me, and beautiful. Whereas the human face has always been partly frightening, partly boring, partly too duplicitous.

And on computers I meander among my blogs and wonder if anyone in the readership I have can understand -- even a little -- how I feel.



Update 30 June 09, Greenfield: My eyes were also meandering over certain human faces (Matthew's included) that were popping up in MY face way too often, much more often than the laws of chance would allow. Some of them pretending to be insane (including Matthew), but I could look in their eyes and see that there was no insanity there. They were playacting: but why?
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read... Kaikenlainen... Extemporaneana...

~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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(stone spiral at www.gaelsong.com)
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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

mentalhell... and ten months later

website braonthree.wordpress.com

Page One

saturday 19 april 2008 greenfield

Living in mentalhell, falling down the rabbit hole. Life destroyed by the Department of Mental Health, and a couple of others. No more songs, no more birds, no more dogs and cats. Oddballs are forbidden by the Department of Mental Mind-Police.

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That was what I wrote the day I began this blog in April of 2008. Now it's much later (Feb 2010), and much more has happened. In July of 2008 a man told me people wanted to harm me and that I was being protected by federal types from Burlington, Vermont (where I've been told there's a federal branch office). He also told me my own grandfather had been in organized crime. The stress, anxiety and depression that this information caused was added on top of the damage the Department of Mental Health had already done by sitting back and letting my whole way of life be taken from me. Writing about these things -- the people, the events, the emotions -- is the only way I've been able get through each arduous day of the last twenty-three months.

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read... Sehnen... Spite and malice

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2013 by anne nakis, unless stated otherwise. all rights reserved.
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