Sin of the week, 7/6/08 - or 311

Last night about 7 o'clock, I heard a sound outside I had never heard before. I looked out the window and saw that in the playground below, someone had left a cocker spaniel - just put it into the fenced area, closed the door and left. The dog was crying so pitifully that it was drowning out the sound of season 3 episode 5 of the Sopranos, which I am sad to say I have recently started watching and even sadder to say that I can't stop watching because I am hopelessly addicted.

But we can talk about that later.



Someone abandoned a dog in the playground below my window. I considered going downstairs and bringing it water. Or some cat food, since I keep that around. But I didn't. Instead I called 311, New York City's idea of what to do if "there is no emergency - except that I am seriously annoyed and I complain about it."

You know what the "operator" said when I asked for the number to the ASPCA? She said the ASPCA is only open Monday through Friday from 9-5. Then she started giggling and said, "Why don't you just adopt the dog? He's a spaniel, right? Those are nice."

Tee hee hee.

I called my aunt this morning, who was in the Mexican restaurant across the street from the hospital. She has been spending about twelve hours a day at the hospital with my dad because my step mother had left Charlotte and gone back home of Friday and wouldn't be back until Monday. My dad, meantime, has stopped eating, has only been sleeping three hours a night, and only gets out of bed when the therapist makes him get out of bed. When I asked her whether it was time for me to come and say goodbye, she said "probably some time this week, but I won't know for sure until I talk to the doctor tomorrow. Of course, Erica will be back tomorrow and he usually perks up when she is around. I just can't tell yet. But I'll call you tomorrow."

I am not sure what the point of this post is except... I do.

I have been aware that my general life performance, sometimes measured in MELP, has been poor for some time. It's not like I haven't tried.

But I have definitely failed. My dad's illness and issues related to it have had the effect of total life paralysis. I have accomplished nothing in the last two years because everything I do or think of doing has a rider attached to it, the header of which is: "If dad dies this will go down like 'this' - but if he doesn't, it will go down in 'this' other way." This rider causes a total lack of focus - one that has the effect of wiping my hard drive of anything except the rider.

So I order all six seasons of the Sopranos and for hours on end, I watch people shoot each other because that is good and distracting and if I do enough of it, then sun goes down and then it rises again and I have accomplished nothing for yet another day - except that it's one more day knocked off the rest of my life that I am not really living while I wait for the whole fucking world to end.

Does anyone have a solution to this? It is not a rhetorical question, either. I need an answer. I've lost two years of my life doing nothing but reading the rider and doing... nothing.

(You're right - I could have adopted that cocker spaniel but I am not sure that's the right kind of something. Thanks for noticing that yet again, I did nothing).