About Dogs and Cats and their Buddies.

Previously posted on my Facebook Page. 

YOUR dog might be stealing things because they are looking for something to do or for some interaction with you. Dogs need both physical and mental stimulation to prevent boredom and giving them suitable outlets for their energy will prevent them inventing their own means of entertainment! Arrow though only steals Ching and Fizz’s little toys because she tends to get jealous that the kitties get more attention sometimes. But Arrow is a good doog. 🐕👀🐕

CATS and dogs definitely watch TV shows? While some cats go nuts for on-screen antics, others are content to watch the activity with an air of calm. In fact, Ching and Fizz are now addicted to bird videos on YouTube. We may have to bring them to a therapist. Meanwhile, there are a number of features about television shows that dogs find attractive. Of course, “best in show” dog events. Though Arrow is more interested in volleyball on ESPN but finds “Naked and Afraid,” weird. 🐈📺🐕

WEATHER PATTERN occurs when the weather stays the same for days or weeks at a time. Some common weather patterns include hot and dry weather, wet and rainy weather, and cold weather. If weather patterns go on for too long, they can lead to emergencies like heat waves, flooding, and blizzards. If you wanna know more, google it or ask your cat. 🌬💨☀️

SNIFFING bags and boxes is often tied to a cat surveying their territory. Cats will usually scent mark their territory. This signals to other cats in the area and provides information such as whose territory it is, how many cats have been there, and whether or not it's a territory that your cat wants to try and claim. So if your cat likes the smell of your bag, she will claim it as her apartment. 🐈📦🐈

GOOGLE search says dogs see cats as prey, and cats see dogs as a threat. They don't choose this; it's just hardwired into their brains. And when they live together in a house, they compete with each other for food, territory and human attention. FAKE NEWS! Not a fact, so untrue! Dogs and cats coexist peacefully because they don’t do politics. They are not hoomans. 🐕🥰🐈

MOST recent estimates indicate that more than 1,800 pandas now live in southwestern China, and their numbers are increasing. That trend prompted the country to announce, in 2021, that pandas are no longer endangered. Pandamic! Notice as well that Panda Express by Master Chef Ming-Tsai Cherng are increasing. Ha! 🐼🥢🥡

YOUR dog seems hungry, always? Maybe she has health issues? Diabetes or worms? Side-effect of meds? Stressed over what the cat shares her from Facebook? Not getting enough of the right type of food, including the expensive “The Farmer’s Dog” chow? Hey, that’s just the way it is although Arrow isn’t “hungry” always because when she feels like eating, her wet food and dry food are just around her. Eat! In fact, Arrow eats based on the diet program that Fizz devised for her. 🐕🍽🐕

BOSS is the one who manages and supervises your work and the one whom you refer to during normal daily work, like when Ching and Fizz closely monitors me as I clean their litter box and boss space in the bedroom and bathroom. CHIEF denotes a rank which dogs use to refer to the cat. So you know what a Bosschief is. 😺😾😸

CHILDREN who are into reading have dropped from 79 percent in 2017–18 to 72 percent in 2021–22, says a survey. In 2021, some 97 percent of 3- to 18-year-olds had home internet access, according to another study. Specifically, 93 percent had access through a computer, and 4 percent relied on home internet access via cellphone. The other 3 percent had no internet access at home. Those 3 percent know Orwell, Shakespeare, and Dickinson. That’s the info that Fizz shared with me. 📚👶📚

SOMETIMES, collars with buckles can be irritating for your dog, or sometimes, collars that feel too tight or have to reach over their head can be irritating. Sitting with your dog, using treats, and encouragement to help them bond with the experience of having the collar can help them adjust. Or let the cat convince your dog. Although Ching doesn’t see the sense in collars on her since she (and Fizz) are indoor cats anyways, still–she persuaded Arrow to wear a collar with diverse colors. 🐕🦮🐕‍🦺

Compilation of short MORNING THOUGHTS on Facebook.

My media life started at age 14 for a provincial city newspaper. Through the years, I pretty much navigated journalism in all its forms, grease, and politics till I “rested” in 2009 after two years stint with an Asian American newspaper in Los Angeles. I never felt “involved” with my news copy; always detached. I was trained that way. A spade is a spade. Fact is fact. Crime is crime, politics is politics. No Left, no Right. My personal take of the world goes to my poetry. ✍️💻✍️

Chillen. The art of chillen is learned and acquired via life experience. No amount of spiritual advice, shrink hours, helluva pills, wine, sex, and rock `n roll etcetera could calm a tortured soul, shattered heart 55x, or a massively bothered mind. All these are just marketing pitches and denial mojos. We don’t know when we’d finally get moments of peace and quiet. It just happens. Mostly, when we inhale exhale and say “Been there done shit…” And then we cool out. 🦋🐧🐦

Cleaning up after the doggie is pretty much like cleaning up after little kids, my life many years ago. Arrow wakes me up, interrupts my writing/reading, and coaxes me to play tug/pull or go out for bathroom break (or she just tricks me, she simply wants to smell the air). Afterwards, Arrow keeps quiet and leaves me alone. “Interruptions” like these though are sublime. I feel needed, same way a child needed me. You feel a sense of importance, value, and presence. 🐕😍🐕

I still am into old-stuff like vinyls, cassettes, and CDs—because they keep memories secured. There are so much to enjoy in the past than those that are in front of us these days. If there is a time machine, I’d like to return to the years before 21st century. I don’t dig this technological overload against the easier and more accessible life long time ago. ☎️📼☎️

There’s gotta be something to amuse ourselves while we are at home, with majority of time fronting the computer screen or streaming TV. Reading the same political murkthrow irks, for sure. But not the dog and cat videos, which are very entertaining. Me, I entertain myself by making selfies. In fact, I have thousands of photos here on Facebook. Me, afraid that FB will “steal” them? Why would I care. At least, I am certain, not just me watches my own face, LOL! 👽😎👺

It is cold season again. I easily get cold. In fact, all seasons I wear socks. My feet are never without socks! So on winters, thermal underwear and jackets and gloves and scarves and winter slippers are obligatory. But if you ask me why I prefer the East’s chilly snow over the West’s sunny beaches? I don’t know. I guess, I am just human. LOL! 🌬⛄️🌬

Sunday chores. Take trash out for Monday collection. As a boy in a brood of nine, I had my own daily and weekly house chore. I’ve gotten used to that life task. Haven’t outgrown them. There are also daily habits that stay. I fix my bed before I leave the bedroom, never left a dirty plate on the sink, triple-check closed doors at night, OCD-arrange my clothes in closet and drawers etc etcetera. ☀️🌫☀️

A Supertramp song goes: “At night, when all the world's asleep / The questions run so deep / For such a simple man.” Indeed, life and living can be tough. Profound. Complex. Dense. Many times, the news in my life isn’t all about climate change, white supremacy, health insurance, Kyle Rittenhouse, and 20-year wars. News: My new favorite chips is Utz and Cyd The Koolcat’s new fave chow is Hartz Tuna Delectable Squeeze Ups. 🙂🦋😎

Autumn leaves. Time passes. Seasons. Seems like few years ago when Elle Cyd The Koolcat used to accompany me outside, blowing and raking leaves, and gardening. For more than 10 years. Just hangin’. She has grown older. She prefers staying in these days, chillin’ on the sun room, and ruminating in her spot in the house. In these internet days, Cyd assumes the sublimity of existence that we sometimes disregard. Life is being there, here, and everywhere. No need to talk. 🍂🐈🍁

Stuff and things from the past. Memories. Remembrances. Recollections. When we remember, we also remember the bad along with the good. So we reflect how it was, how we dealt with those, and how we survived. When I look at old mementoes in the house, I am brought back to those years. And it gives me calm and peace. Basis of comparisons. And I can always say, it was a lot better then than these days. But I see blessings than misery. ☎️☎️🦋

Rituals and Holidays and Christmas

Previously posted on my Facebook page.

CHRISTMAS, celebrating the birth of the Christian God. Thanksgiving day, giving thanks for the blessing of harvest? Do we point the cursor at religious feasts? Spanish explorer in San Elizario, Texas in 1598 or in Saint Augustine, Florida in 1565, or the Virginia Colony or the Berkeley Hundred in Charles City County, Virginia in 1619? The New England Calvinist Thanksgiving? Or do we gather and mourn this day to restoke the fires of anger in our chest, memory of that tragic day in 1637 in Mystic, Connecticut, the blood of the 700 Pequot humanity?

 

       Or what is Saint Patrick's Day, or what the Irish call, “Lá Fhéile Pádraig”? The death date of the most commonly-recognized patron saint of Ireland, Saint Patrick—who brought forth Christianity in the land? Or do we also pause and light a candle to those who perished from the creeks to the pulpit in the name of religion? Or what about Christmas Day? An exalting convergence central to the Christian liturgical year? Mistletoes and Santa Claus? Or should I turn back the pages of time that it was the Christian cross that subjugated my people and pummeled their beautiful, wealthy earth to submission?

       Or is Thanksgiving simply an Earth Fare turkey baked with Food Lion stuffings, Saint Patrick's Day is a keg of Guinness, Christmas is an ornamented tree circled by colorful gifts recycled from Goodwill, flea market, and Dollar Tree purchases? Maybe. For whatever it is, and whatever historical, political, or commercial backstory or front-story that we choose to interject with these holidays, these are simply moments of pause and ease. Moments of family, friends, community. 

       So let us cease to crowd our template of dogmatic hatred with more hatred. Holidays will never be “just another day,” because “just another day” is a tedious grind in the workplace, lumbering traffic of harassed souls in the street, necks and wrists bloodied by credit card gallows, and unmitigated smoke of war in the prairie of our discontent. There must be a day or days when we just have to easy up on the psychoanalytical bombast or sociopolitical bravado of knowing too much and too deeply, lest our spirit starts to slip slide away to a swamp of numbed, synthetic existence. 🎁✝️🎅

REST the redundant bickerings with mom or dad, set up the chess set for bro and cousin, start the grill with compadre and comadre while Bee Gees music plays along, hand over a slice of appleberry cake to the new neighbor, share a PBR or Guinness with whoever happens to be without a family around that time and talk about Kobe or LeBron or Pacquiao or Kim Kardashian, nothing heavy. 

       Somewhere in an island-galaxy so far away, I was born in and around a wounded humanity that bury their dead in thousands after almost 6 months of calamities, and they weep and weep days and nights—enough for tears to nourish the earth again for springtime harvest and summertime revelry. On Christmas season, they pause and take it easy for more than 30 days—and just live, just live like what life is all about. Let life and love happen while these gifts are still beating from within and without. There are no Thanksgiving or Saint Patrick's Day where I came from. But there are people, diverse people from 7,107 islands who speak 19 languages and worship a dozen or more different gods—who gather when a holiday ensues and just, well, they just gather. It's all about a holiday of hearts that talk and speak with a singular language. Maybe that language speaks about love, sumptuous turkey, or queso de bola, or best brew ever. Whatever it is, it's all good. 🎁✝️🎅

GIFT-GIVING. Do we have to overthink or intellectualize handing over a gift to a friend, loved one or even a random acquaintance? To give love is to receive love 7 times. Even long-ago tribal homeys and visiting travelers exchanged sweet little things to proclaim their new friendship. Commercialization of holidays? Consumerism of humanity? Do we really believe that there'll be nothing but a “handcrafted, politically-correct and environmentally-sweet” bauble and necessity sold in our neighborhood store one day someday? Do we sincerely believe that we will never consume beyond sea salt and backyard leeks? “Commerce” and consumption are all personal. As in giving... 

       Hence “giving” or buying should not be sweepingly categorized as objects of another's sociopolitical (or even ultra-religious) point of view. We are all wading and working around the commercial queue before us. We are all consuming on the basis of what we individually need as long as we can afford them or we don't steal them. If you are unable to, it is not others' fault—please don't make them feel guilty. On Christmas Day (or any holiday), we give and we share. That wrapped blessing is not $100 or $10, that is a heart in a physical body of a scarf or a baby doll. The receiver may already have 101 copies of “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack LP but his 102nd copy came from you, so that is VERY special. 

       As in the Little Prince to the Rose, “You are my rose—the rose in a hundred other roses...” The Bee Gees LP from the hundred other Bee Gees LPs—the one that we keep in a glass globe of our heart. So please don't see the negative shadow of a human tradition of love and giving. The few dollars that we spend for three Higland Gaelics, or the gasoline that we let our cars guzzle in to drive to the next bend to score a condom, the little materials that help us create our personalized keepsake to a friend—are not owned by some Enlightened Gnome that vibe with our girth, somehow the One Percent Demigods have some stocks somewhere. So sacrifice a few puffs of the magic herb, and buy 7 sets of baby diapers and wrap `em with colorful Christmas crepes at Dollar Tree. Stop commodifying everything! Simple gestures of giving aren't an AC Morgan Chase pitch, it is a human nature of coolness and awesomeness. So be cool and awesome, buy me a gift! 

       MERRY CHRISTMAS! 🎁✝️🎅