New Neighbors

The dog who lives next door barks all evening. He is a German Sheppard and his barks are deep, menacing. The kind of chilling fierceness that would scare away any would be intruder. But as the night wears on, the strong confidence of his barks gives way to a mournful howling. It sounds more like a desperate plea.

The Sheppard’s entire world consists of a second floor terrace which is about ten feet by twenty feet. It is enclosed on three sides by the walls of the house it is attached to. The fourth side, the side facing my bedroom window, is a 12 foot high wire mesh fence. In this confined space he eats, sleeps, relieves himself, and cries. Nobody seems to be living in the house. I’ve been told that the owners have been away on vacation for about a month. Once a day somebody comes to the terrace and hoses it down. The dried urine stains and the poop wash over the edge into the garden below. The Sheppard wags his tail and brings his ball to the caretaker, but the man wants nothing to do with the dog. He finishes washing the tiles, sprays the Sheppard’s bowls with water, then pours some kibbles into one of them. He leaves.

The dog whines and paws at the door the man left by. He whines and barks and howls for a long time. It tears at my heart. I talk to him from my bedroom window. He stands alert, his ears pointed towards me, his tail wags hopefully. But I can no more climb down and get inside his terrace than he can get out. In the end we both grow weary of the limited contact. He circles around the tile floor for a while then heavily collapses into a curled up ball. He will rest for a while. But the crying will start again. It will be another 24 hours before he has any contact and then only with a hired servant who seems to have no love for his job or for this dog.

Perhaps I am over sensitive. Perhaps I am projecting my own loneliness onto the dog. After all, he is in a safe and protected place, his basic needs are being met, albeit in a minimal way. But what about the need for companionship? What about the need to get out and walk around the neighborhood and sniff at the trees and see what is happening in the world? In his mournful cries, I hear a soul calling for help. I feel contempt for the neighbors I have never met.

The Letter

Every time I’ve ever tried to call customer service I get passed through an endless progression of automated menu systems until I finally get to the dead end called “for all other calls, please stay on the line for the next available agent”. Then I get shunted to perma-hold where I am repeatedly informed that instead of pestering them on the phone I could accomplish everything more easily on their web site. So when my health insurance premium was jacked up to over $1000 per month – that’s right, per month; second only to rent as my highest expense – I decided enough was enough. I obediently went to their website to cancel my policy.

Turns out you can’t cancel your policy on the website. I searched through page after page and never found the option to get divorced. So I gritted my teeth and called. I was greeted with the non-news that I should listen carefully as the menus had changed. Like I remembered them from the past? I tried the old trick of immediately pressing zero to bypass the nonsense but they were having none of that. Now you have to speak your answers to the professionally recorded voice that asks you if you want to make a payment or inquire about a claim or find a doctor near you. I responded by reading from a novel that was open in front of me until I hit the jackpot. “I’m sorry. I can not determine how to route your call. Please hold while I transfer you to an agent.” After an interminable wait I finally got a human. As it turns out, you can’t cancel your policy over the phone either. You have to send them a letter. In the mail.

Mail? Who uses that anymore? All my invoices come by email and all my payments are made on the internet. Oh sure I know the U.S. Postal Service still exists. I know this because my whacked out mailman periodically buzzes my intercom, demands that I come downstairs so he can inform me that my name label has faded and is no longer legible. I don’t know why that should matter since the only thing that ever comes to me is addressed to Current Occupant or Our Friends At…

I searched my apartment and found an old box of envelopes and a few assorted stamps. I have no idea how much it costs to send a first class letter these days. Apparently it was 22 cents the last time I bought stamps. I decided that to be safe I better go to the post office and get a new stamp. I used the internet to figure out where the post office is located. I got there at five minutes past five, which was five minutes after the service window was locked up for the night but there was a vending machine in the outer lobby.

It wasn’t any old vending machine. It looked more like a high end copy machine with a touch screen and all kinds of bells and whistles. The welcoming screen asked what it could do for me today. The obvious choice was “mail a letter or package”. I didn’t know there were other reasons to go to the post office. I had to enter the zip code to which the letter was addressed and plow through about ten more screens and place my letter on the scale and finally was informed that it would cost 44 cents and asked if I would like to buy a stamp now. Duh. How many? One. Uh-uh the minimum purchase is three. OK fine. This is getting tedious.

I mailed my letter and took my two unwanted extra stamps home. I threw them in the drawer with the other odd stamps that will never be used. But at least I had officially notified the insurance company that their services would no longer by required. Or so I thought.

Two weeks later as I was leaving my building the whacked out mailman was in the lobby. “Do you want your mail?” he asked with no hint of irony. He thrust a battered and torn envelope into my hand. It was from the insurance company. They were informing me that my premium payment was late and that if I didn’t mail them a check immediately they would cancel my policy. Sometimes I don’t know why I even try.

Let Sleeping Cats Lie

I don’t know why my airline charges an extra $125 each way when my cat travels with me. Since he must remain in his carrier under the seat in front of me for the entire trip, he really is no different than any other piece of carry on luggage. Unlike the screaming kids all around me, he is zonked out and silent from the tranquilizer I trick him into eating prior to departure. At the very least he should be given frequent flier miles. With 4 trips to Mexico, he has already logged over 18 thousand miles. Yes, Osito (Little Bear) is a jet setter.

It seems like he has a very exciting life. Just last year he discovered the joys of amputating the tails of gecko lizards. (Before you get upset you should know that he doesn’t actually tear the tail off. When geckos get caught by the tail they self amputate and while the predator fixates on the gyrating dismembered tail, the lizard scurries away and soon is sporting a new one.)

Yet despite his far reaching adventures, he still spends most of his life asleep. I worry about this. When I spend a lot of time sleeping it means I’m either sick, bored or depressed, or some combination thereof. I worry that perhaps I’m not making his life exciting enough. So I populate his world with various toys meant to spice up his life. I have imitation stuffed mice on strings that I run around the apartment pulling along for him to chase. I get tired of running back and forth between the two rooms of the apartment at about the same time he loses interest in something that is such a poor imitation of the real thing. I guess he knows that the mouse isn’t really running around on its own. Probably the string connecting it to me gives the game away.

Sometimes he will fetch little foam rubber soccer balls that I throw for him. It looks cute when he carries the ball back in his mouth. Unfortunately his favorite time to play fetch is right after I go to bed at night.

You might wonder why I should feel so responsible for my cat’s emotional health. It’s because I am the one who is controlling everything else in his environment. Since I don’t let him outside, his whole world (apart from the Mexican jaunts) is confined to a 700 square foot apartment. When you think about it, that’s a remarkable constraint. Male cats in the wild range over a territory up to ten square kilometers. They hunt a variety of small game or scavenge for almost anything edible if they are in areas of high human population. That’s a lot different than a bowl full of brown kibbles every day at the same time.

But research has found that animals in nature often sleep when there is nothing else pressing. If they aren’t hungry, thirsty, or horny they sleep. Better to be hidden away in the den than thrashing around in the open like a mobile buffet for larger predators. So maybe I shouldn’t worry about how much my cat sleeps. Maybe it just shows how well I have provided for him. (Not the horny part; he’s neutered.)

I think I will end this article on that optimistic note. Now that it is finished and I have nothing else pending, I think I’ll take a nap.