Friday, May 27, 2011

Want to Cry. Want to Run Away.

The stress of the outlet short out last night, along with hordes more unfixed cats showing up everywhere has me wanting to get out of dodge forever.

Rates are going up on everything, from garbage to electricity, but my income isn't going up and my car is aging. How in the world will I continue to help animals in this area?

People want. People take. People cause problems. People don't give back.

I want to run away.

Today an unfixed boxer from another street was running around. He's after the unfixed lab/pit mix across the street, who keeps getting out. Before that, it was an unfixed male pug running around after her.

They have the money to fix that female lab/pit bull, but haven't done it. Now she's likely pregnant. Like another neighbors' boxer. They breed her deliberately. Like there are not enough unwanted boxer's already out there, like two unfixed male boxer's being advertised right now on craigslist. Likely one of them is the male who was out free roaming today.

The neighbor who had taken in the white cat turned her back out, fearful she might have kittens hidden away out there who need her. Whether she does or doesn't, who knows. The poor cat was so darn skinny her backbone is prominent. If she has a home somewhere around here, those people need arrested.

There's another white cat, a male, now in the neighborhood, unfixed of course. There's another unfixed brown tabby. There are those 11 two blocks from here, 8 of them kittens from just one litter.

I need to get back to trapping down at that warehouse, but it is so far, and gas so expensive. I'm broke. Completely broke.

I need to catch those last two at the nursing home, also.

Same problem. I am broke.

I have no money for bait right now, or to be driving back and forth, even the 12 miles to Corvallis.

I guess it is three males who need caught over there on 13th, including that big Siamese. And the tabby male roaming in and out on 15th. There's the tabby on white roaming over on 14th and Walnut and Maple, too. I need to take the time to snag these problem males. It doesn't help to talk to people about FIV. Doesn't make them get off their butts and join in this fight, even when it's their cat in danger and endangering other cats. I don't know why.

Guess I've had it. Guess I'm tired of fighting this fight alone.

Guess I'm tired of giving myself and my time away. Guess I wish somebody would give back, maybe help me fix my car, the mirror, the wiper problem, anyhow. The struggle continues.

Joy is getting some needed help with that very sick kitten from a rescue group who also are going to take in a couple of the young males who are tame. She asked if she should do it, accept their help, and I said "Hell yes". The group comes with a veterinarian recommendation.

I watched a movie a couple months back called "Into the Void". It is a re-enactment of a true story. Two ice climbers climb a remote peak. Before that, they hook up with a non climber, who they invite to join them. However, he does not accompany them on the peak attempt. It is a difficult peak, more difficult than they imagined. On the descent, one climber breaks his leg. He understands his friend will likely leave him there, or they both will die. But his friend begins the impossible task of slowly lowering him down the mountain. But on one such leg, the man with the broken leg is lowered off a cliff. His friend has no idea he has been lowered into a void and holds fast his position at the other end of the rope, hoping to feel his friend's tug on the rope, to signal he is fastened to the ice, and he can then climb down to lower him farther. The tug never comes. After a great length of time, the uninjured climber is pulled down the mountain and can no longer maintain his hold. He makes a decision to cut the rope. He knows his friend will die. But should they both die?

The injured climber falls, crashing through an ice layer into a crevice. The other climber continues down, through a glacier field laced in crevices, then across a boulder field, where the snow is gone, and finally to their base camp. He tells the man who had joined them that his friend is dead.

But the inured is not dead and makes his way through the crevice he fell into, pulling himself along with his arms and hands. He makes it out finally and down the glacier, weaving in between the crevasses, following his friends footsteps until snow obscures them. This is slow and terribly painful. He makes small goals for himself and gives himself a set amount of time,to go say twenty feet. He is dehydrated and in terrible pain.

Days go by. The two men at the base camp determine they must leave. They burn the other mans' clothes in a symbolic goodbye and prepare to depart.

The injured man is now in the boulder field which is very hard to navigate with a broken leg. He is starving. He confesses to enjoy the feeling of urinating on himself, and that everything has broken down. He knows he is going to die. A song he doesn't even like bangs through his head constantly and he can't escape it.

During his terrible ordeal, the thing he wants most is not so much to live as he wants to not die alone. He longs to be held in someone's arms and comforted.

He hops one step and falls, on his broken leg, throughout the boulder field traverse. He finally is in and out of delirium. It's been four long days since the rope was cut, but comes to with a sharp acrid smell, which is the smell of his own base camps latrine area. He realizes this and calls out for his climbing partner.

It is the other man who awakens in the night to the sound. He does not think it could possibly be a living being calling out like that. He thinks it must be the dead man's ghost. But when the injured man's climbing friend hears it, he knows who it is and races out to find him. And when he does, he holds him in his arms and comforts him.

That is what I came away from that movie remembering, what that injured climber longed for most and when he got it, how it felt to him.

I think that might be what most people want when they are experiencing terrible difficulties, terminal illnesses, losses, injury, pain, fear--to be held and comforted.

I remember watching the series "The Pacific" and how one soldier lost his humanity during the brutal battles, the deaths and maiming of friends, the constant deluge of rain and muck and illness the soldiers endured. He came to hate the Japanese and look forward to killing them. A blast hit a hut one day. He and his friend were looking through it afterwards. There were bodies, but one old woman was alive. She pointed to her intestines, hanging out of her body, then took the end of his rifle and put it in her mouth, motioning for him to shoot her.

Instead, he picks her up and cradles her against his chest as she expires. This connection, this act of humanity, of dual suffering, two broken beings touching souls briefly, his failure to kill, restored him in some ways.

I watched another movie "Children of Huang Shi". It is inspirational. It too is based on the true story of a young journalist caught in China as Japan begins attacks on China. He is nearly beheaded when the Japanese invaders discover he took photos of a massacre, but he is saved by a group of insurgents, led by a Harvard educated Chinese man, who, after the young man is shot and wounded, sends him off to Huang Shi to recover fully.

There he finds he has been sent to an orphanage, of starving and diseased boys, left to fend for themselves mostly, except for an occasional visit by a young woman doctor, with issues of her own, including an addiction to morphine.

The most poignant scene in that movie is the doctor jumping off a Chinese convoy truck to give a shot of morphine to a dying Chinese soldier. A superior jumps off after her, slapping at her for wasting morphine on a soldier already dead. He drags the soldiers body up off the ground and then drops him and yells "He's already dead. You wasted morphine." The doctor gets back on the truck and it takes off. She looks back. The "already dead" soldier raises up slightly to look into her eyes.

With the Japanese advancing, the young man, now a teacher of the orphans, who are now clean and free of lice, has only one true ally, besides the doctor. That is a Chinese woman who sells drugs including opiates and also sells herself for sex. The Chinese army sees the boys in the orphanage as soldiers, bodies to be wasted on war. They also intend to take over the orphanage to use as a headquarters. Their teacher wants to save the boys. He concocts a plan to take them 500 miles through the mountains to the edge of the Gobi desert, where no one will bother them, where they will be safe from the war, to start over.

He gives a fond farewell to the red lady, bowing and kissing her hand. She is astounded at such treatment and to be called a lady. She turns, and goes back into her brothel where an officer waits for "servicing". Her head is held high.

When the teacher discovers the doctor is an addict, the warrior, who saved him in Nanjing and who is trekking part way with the group, tells him she is a great woman, who has absorbed deep pain. He goes to her then, and when she expects his condemnation, as she has run out of morphine and is in withdrawals, instead, he tells her she is the most beautiful and brave woman he has ever met. She is restored by these words.

He dies in the end. He dies of tetanus. The children and the doctor bury him with great love. He is remembered to this day for his acts of courage.

These are all inspiring movies. They touch at the heart of what every person needs but rarely gives or gets.

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