Bayer Dog

"He's a big dog!"
"He's such a good dog!"
"Bayer, you're such a good dog."
I'm fighting back tears as I write this. This is the second morning without Bayer in the world.
He died quickly which is a blessing. Bayer never showed his pain. He had us pretty much convinced that his old age was not painful. He wasn't all that old, just shy of twelve years, but we knew his time was near. Today is Thursday? It was Tuesday evening just after his supper. He went outside to pee and following that he took a few steps and fell right over on his side and died. I wasn't outside with him but my wife was.
Monday was the last time I played soccer with him. Bayer loved soccer. His game was goalie though. He was in his element when he was blocking my kicks. Back when he was younger we used actual soccer balls. When he tired of the game he'd chew the sections off the skin of the ball and if he could he'd puncture the ball with his teeth. In the end he was using a small basketball that would no longer hold air but would always spring back to shape, even after being run over by a car it was still round and perfect for him - softer though.
Bayer loved to go places. He went to the ocean, even challenged the surf down at Fort Popham on more than one occasion. He went with us one year to Florida and came along on a June trip to Tennessee where he got to survive humid temps approaching a hundred degrees. He came with us one long weekend to Burlington, Vermont. Leaving him home just wasn't an option. It was like cruelty to animals the times we had to leave him home by himself for a few hours so that was always the last resort. He made sure we felt shame when we returned.
Bayer's last few years were a challenge. He loved to eat and ate too much for his own good. His mother was a chocolate lab. His father was a total mystery. His mother and his sister were his only dog kin. I always figured his father must have been a large dog. The story was that Bayer's mother came along on an ice fishing trip and wandered off for a little while and as a result had a litter of just two pups, both black dogs. His physique reminded me of a moose or a bison, large and strong front shoulders, narrow and slightly lower hind end. The last time he was on the scales he came in at 116 pounds if I recall correctly. The vet scolded me with her eyes when she saw that.
In his last year he didn't get around well. It was human trauma getting him into a car. He couldn't climb the stairs anymore and we mostly live on the second floor. This past winter he had company during the day and night, which was a blessing. Thank you Emma and Jake for that. Bayer loved you, Emma.
The thing is with Bayer, he loved everybody and everybody he ever met who loved dogs loved him. He could never get enough human attention. He was quite literally a creature in need of human affection. He was behavior-challenged around other dogs. It didn't take much for him to trigger an event when another dog was around. He didn't understand pack behavior. Bayer was a loner. He was claw-shy around cats too but he loved our cats.
Abbie Cat says good-bye to The Bayer Dog as do we all.
Thank you Lord for giving us such a beautiful and needy dog.
Thank you Bayer for letting us be your friends.

Morality Is

Most people view morality as the way they believe, at any given point in time, to be the way everyone else in the world should live. Morality is judgment and judgment is sin.

Waiting Season

There's a season of the year here in Maine that many people have never heard of. It comes late in winter when the rest of the world is celebrating early spring, or for years like this it hangs around till most of the nation is in full spring bloom.

It's mud season... again

When it's mud season there's normally still quite an accumulation of the past winter's snow that has aways to go still before it's gone. Under and all around that old snow is wet soft ground, the kind that if you step in it or drive in it, well it just turns to mud.

So we don't step in it and if we can help it we don't drive in it. Instead, we wait. We wait for the snow to all melt. We wait for the spring water table to drop back down to normal. We wait for spring rains to harden up our dirt roads and our driveways. We don't wait for the frost heaves to go back down or get repaired but if we have any sympathy at all for our cars we drive slower until they do.

We wait for the frost to go out of the ground and for our gardens to dry up enough to get back in them so we can till something other than mud.

And we wait for ice-out. We wait till we can look out over the ponds and lakes and see beautiful blue water again. We're still waiting for that. Heck we're still waiting for the whole thing to warm up, dry out, and become spring!

I drove up to the airport today and went for a long walk. Most of the snow is gone now around all the crushed slate at the airport taxiway construction site. They should be coming back after mud season. There is an enormous amount of crushed black shale (slate) in piles where they ran rock crushers all last fall.

Then I walked the dirt roads from the airport down to the outlet of Wilson Pond taking the side road into the old hydro generator station. I was surprised to see as much water as there was in Wilson Stream. It couldn't have been more than a week ago the last time I went to Wilson Pond and the water level was way down. After the power house side trail I went to the public boat launch, still closed for the winter, and found that the water level now in Wilson Pond is almost back to its normal summer level.

From there I walked the shore road across to Walden's Landing and couldn't help but notice how all the spring brooks are carrying off all the runoff from the melting snow.

So I say to myself, self, you know what that means, don't you? It means all signs of winter will be gone before we know it! Then a few weeks later, mud season will be done and we can all stop waiting.

 

Believe

To believe is to make a judgement that something is true.
Judgement is a sin.
Simplify.

More Normal

I wonder if "more normal" is anything like "more perfect"? In other words I wonder if it's even possible to be more normal than normal. Or is "more normal" something less than normal but not so much less as to be abnormal? Closer to normal. Or is it just not possible to be more normal?
Whatever.
But listening to right-wing news and commentary today and listening to left-wing media outlets all weekend leaves me thinking that everything seems just about back to normal now, like as if Trump had actually been entitled to be President and won the election and is now the President.
Rush Limbaugh has even gone back to his usual spin saying just what you'd expect him to say about Syria and Putin, no mention of Israel, defense of United Airlines in the current scandal.
Even Alex Jones has found a way to get back to normal. I thought for a moment there that Infowars would explode, self-destruct, from Trump's obvious betrayal for the Deep State but they found just the right spin to satisfy everybody.
Nobody knows the truth.
Normal.

Let Down

I feel the same way I felt when G.W. Bush declared he was going to war in Iraq because, for one thing, Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against his own people, or at least that was the claim of America's intelligence community.
But no point in reinventing the wheel by writing about how this makes me feel when it's already been expressed so eloquently. Here's Paul Joseph Watson (or at least here he is as long as YouTube lets him be on their turf)...
The Truth About Trump's Air Strike on Syria
Trump - and America with him - if he continues down this NeoCon path, is going to be in deep deep dung. Remember when we realized that Obama was essentially Bush's third term? What's it up to now, term 5?
It's a charade. It's all a big nasty deadly charade. It's covert.
It's covert.
It's covert.
Did you get that? It's not the way it appears. It's covert. Trump included.
But who am I to say, eh?
I'm just glad someone else is out there saying it.
***
Something nobody is mentioning yet anyway is the amazing coincidence that just hours (not days) after Trump attacked Syria's military, Trump's Supreme Court choice was confirmed by the Senate following months of stonewalling.
Just coincidence, right? I mean this isn't how our government actually works, is it?
***
Actually I think the first time I remember having this same sinking feeling about a Republican President was when Nixon kept escalating Democrat Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam War after assuring the American public repeatedly that he was seeking peace.
I wonder if there have ever been - since the Sixties at least - any American wars that didn't involve the growing and distribution of drugs by the CIA. Google the Opium Wars if you don't believe us English-speaking Whites are capable of such underhanded monkey business.
Things are not what they appear to be. Think "covert".
Read Terry Reed's Compromised.
***
Update Saturday April 8
There's nothing like war to unite the mainstream media in this country. Since Trump's election victory last November all the mainstream media outlets except one have been unabashedly anti-Trump, pro Obama, pro Clinton, the one exception being Fox News which has been the Trump administration's prime time apologist. All of a sudden all the media outlets are blowing the same horn in harmony. Even Fox has gone gung-ho for Obama's war against Syria.
Bear in mind for a moment that Syria is at war against the same ideology that brought about the 9/11 attacks. The names have changed and the geography is different but the objective is the same, drive out foreign imperial power in the Middle East and establish Muslim Sharia Law.
Syria is on our side against Islamic totalitarian control of the Middle East.
Russia is on our side against Islamic totalitarian control of the Middle East.
Yet the mainstream media has for quite some time now trumpeted the view that Syria and Russia both are America's enemies in the Middle East.
Pay attention to this observation:
As far as I know, nobody has made the claim that either the Syrian government or Russia favor Sharia Law or Islamic terrorism.
...and this:
Many alternative news theorists have proposed that the United States covertly supports - directly, covertly, and through its allies - the Islamic extremists who oppose the influence of the world's imperial powers in the Middle East. It has been the function of mainstream media in the West to mask this fact.
Again, since this is not an easy concept to embrace, independent observers report that the United States secretly, covertly, supports those who attacked us on 9/11.
It is no secret that back in the 1980's under Ronald Reagan's authority the United States trained, armed, and paid for the radical Islamic forces that drove Russia out of Afghanistan.
Ever since then, though, it has been a tightly-kept secret that the United States is continuing that same effort.
Get this... It is - get that, it is! - a secret that the United States and its allies support Islamic extremists in the Middle East. We and our allies seem to train, arm, and fund any group which stands in opposition to the Syrian government, but we do it in secret behind the backs of the American public and lie about it whenever anyone mentions the truth. The function of Western mainstream media is to convince us that this reality just isn't true, to convince us that the US government's lies are the real truth.
We were aware of how this works way back when it was going on relative to the Vietnam War.
We were aware of how this works back during the second Iraq War after America's 2003 invasion. We eventually realized the lies. Fox News seemed to be the one exception back then. They didn't seem to wish to acknowledge the possibility that President Bush and his team lied to us using the mainstream media as a propaganda tool.
But we are not aware that the same thing is happening now under Trump.
Fox's Hannity seems to be on the bandwagon here in harmony with the mainstream media.
That comes as no surprise. Ever since Obama defeated John McCain, Fox News has advocated for the Neo-Con agenda.
The one exception in all of the US government, the one lone voice of reason and truth, seems to be Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, Democrat, war veteran, politician, truth-teller. Listen to the points she makes in her interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
I'd like to find a more reasonable understanding of all this. But where would I even begin to look for it?