Over The Top

On this past election day, I had to put my wonderful dog down. It was a very difficult time, to say the least. The first few days that followed were even tougher to get through and lately, I suppose I've reached a certain level of accepting the inevitable, but it's still tough. I've written a ton of thoughts and ideas down, but I've yet to sort through them and see if I have something worth working on with any of it.

I think I'm somewhere in the middle as far as pet owners - devoted, perhaps on the outer fringes of codependency, but not so fanatic as someone I know who actually anguished over getting home late and waiting to feed fish until morning for fear of waking them up. I'm speaking the truth here. The same person who said they had to take back roads to a destination because the kittens don't like it when the car goes over 35 MPH. I'm speaking the truth here. That is over the top, and perhaps smack dab in the middle of codependency. I find it hard to believe fish would be traumatized by being fed at a later hour, or that kittens would have an internal speed limit. I'd imagine such scenarios playing out in the following manner:

Fish: swim, swim, swim, swim away, swim, notice food, eat food, see food fall to bottom, follow food, eat food, swim, swim, swim away, swim....etc, etc, large human face looming, swim, etc, etc, that's my day, every day.

That's what fish do.

As opposed to:

Fish: swim/sleep/sleepyswim/swim/sleepy/swimmysleep....HEY!!...What the??....it NEVER gets light this time of night...!!...what the.....oh shit! FOOD!...aw crap, I'm not even hungry...swim, dart about, swim....Jesus that light is bright....can you give me a swimmy minute to wake my scaled ass up already? Aw man, all this food is hitting the bottom, it's gonna touch fish poop and it won't be any good.....couldn't this have waited until morning???
Thanks a lot asshole, thanks for making the day for all the bottom dwellers!

Or the kittens:

Kittens: meow, meow, purr,meow,meow

Translation: oooh, we're riding in the car! Where are we going? I have to use the litter box...are we there yet?

All of this would, of course, be at speeds of 35 mph and lower...but once we come to the highway:

Kittens: meow, meow, whine, meowy-whine, non-stop whine...

Translation: Oh God...is that an onramp? oh no, please...don't....are you going into overdrive? oh God, we're gonna die, we're all gonna die, I'll never see my little ball with the bell inside it again....oh please, slow down - I need a litter box, I want to scratch something - PLEASE

That is over the top, at least it sure seems that way to me. Not to worry though, I'm sure that to many people my own manner of being a pet owner is over the top as well. More on that later!