Four Large Dogs in a Postage Stamp Yard

The four large dogs next door never get walked. Their families share a 12x12 foot square of yard in which hundreds of gallons of urine and thousands of pounds of feces have piled up over eight years, causing a severe stench. I feel like I live next to a pig farm. I always end up calling the City about it, and they call the landlord, and she calls the tenants, and eventually the poop gets picked up. This has been going on for years. The yard is a toxic waste dump.

It was as if I were floating about in their rooms

 “From the time I turned 18, if I was sitting with people I had met only once or twice, I would see in my mind the inside of their houses. I’d see the carpets, the walls, the paintings on the walls, the tiny trinkets on bedside cabinets, the colors of the pots and pans, the stash of private letters, everything. It was as if I were floating about in their rooms.” Sinéad O’Connor

Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” is the sound of her floating in Prince’s room. 

In June 2021 Sinéad O’Connor published a memoir called Rememberings. It’s rough. She was born in Glenageary, Ireland, in 1966. The third of four children. Her parents split up when she was 9; she split time between her father, who was initially granted custody of the children, and her mother, who in Sinéad’s account was physically and mentally abusive. Sinéad mentions a few times that when she’d come home from school for the summer she’d pretend she’d lost her field hockey stick, because she didn’t want her mother to beat her with it. She says her mother would beat her with a carpet-sweeper pole instead and make Sinéad say, “I am nothing,” over and over. 

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Sea Goat: half-goat half-fish

Roman aureus coin with Capricorn as a sea goat minted in 19 BC by Emperor Augustus[1]
Grouping	Legendary creature
Sub grouping	Hybrid
Folklore	Greek mythology, Jewish folklore, Sumerian religion
Region	Mesopotamia, Greece, Israel
Habitat	The ocean

The sea goat is a legendary aquatic animal described as a creature that is half-goat and half-fish.^[2]

The constellation Capricornus was commonly imagined as a type of sea goat. The constellation has its origin in Bronze Age Mesopotamia. According to the Babylonian star catalogues the analogous constellation to Capricornus of the Greeks and Romans was ^MUL SUḪUR.MAŠ, 'the goat fish', which symbolized the god Enki.^[3][4]

Greek interpretation

The Greek interpretation of the sea goat comes from the introduction of the Babylonian zodiac. In an attempt to codify the constellation Capricornus within the Greek pantheon, two myths were used as an explanation. One being that the constellation is Amalthea, the goat that raised Zeus. As thanks for caring for him as a child, Zeus places her amongst the stars.^[5]

The other being that the sea goat is the wilderness god Pan.^[6] The myth goes that Pan jumped into the river to escape the monster Typhon. He tries to turn himself into a fish while jumping into the river, but he moves too quickly and only his lower half becomes that of a fish. Zeus then engages in combat with the monster. Zeus defeats him, but not without Typhon pulling the muscles out of Zeus' legs. With the help of Hermes, Pan replaces the damaged muscles. As a reward for healing him, Zeus placed Pan in the sky as Capricorn.^[7] The god Aegipan is also depicted in Greek art as a sea goat.

Jewish tradition

In Jewish oral history, sea goats are mentioned. The story goes that one day all the creatures of the sea must offer themselves to the monster Leviathan. In another, a sailor encountered a sea goat while far at sea. On its horns was carved the sentence, translated as "I am a little sea-animal, yet I traversed three hundred parasangs to offer myself as food to the leviathan."^[8]

^{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_goat}

Goats were stuck in traffic. Dozens of strangers helped milk them.

‘Have you ever milked a goat before?’ asked farmer Jose Garcia, who was stranded in a snowstorm in Utah with 50 goats that were overdue to be milked

By Cathy Free

March 13, 2024 at 8:10 a.m. EDT

Volunteers milk one of Jose Garcia’s goats in the parking lot of Tractor Supply Co. in Stansbury Park, Utah, on March 2. (Lisa Fernandez)

Jose Garcia was hauling a load of goats to his California dairy farm when he hit a huge snowstorm as he drove through Utah. Traffic was at a standstill.

He felt panicked as hours ticked by with snow and high winds swirling around the truck, and no sign of movement on the freeway that evening, March 2.

The goats needed to be milked every 12 hours or their udders would become painfully swollen and possibly infected. “I was right on the 12-hour mark,” said Garcia, 40.

He and his uncle, Bartolo Garcia, had planned to find a freeway rest stop where they could milk the 50 goats Jose Garcia had purchased in Minnesota to add to his herd of 500 in Merced County, Calif. They’d been taking turns at the wheel during the nearly 2,000-mile drive.

“I kept praying the traffic would get going, because I knew how uncomfortable the goats were,” he said, adding that he was also hauling 25 young goats that were already weaned.

“They’re high producing animals, and they really can’t go much beyond 12 hours without milking,” Garcia said. “I was getting ready to lace up my boots and milk them in the trailer, when things finally started moving.”

They had been stuck in the storm for more than five hours, and Garcia said it probably would have taken several more hours to find an interstate rest stop. He was relieved when he learned there was a livestock supply store in Stansbury Park, Utah, about an hour’s drive away.

Lisa Fernandez was preparing to close shop for the day at the Tractor Supply Co. store when Garcia rushed in, visibly worried.

“Have you ever milked a goat before?” he asked her, explaining the situation.

A runner saw a dog stuck near a 1,000-foot cliff. He carried her down.

The answer was no.

“He said, ‘If you’d like to try, I can show you how,’” recalled Fernandez, assistant manager of the farm supply store.

She agreed to help him, but he still seemed desperate. He had another request.

“He asked if I knew of anyone else who might want to pitch in because all 50 goats needed milking,” she said. “He said he could use any help I could find.”

Fernandez and another manager quickly called some of their employees and asked if they would help. One employee posted a notice on the Lake Point Crew private Facebook page, asking for all available hands.

“My boss is trying to find people to help these farmers for about an hour to hour and a half to get these goats through the night,” Tosha Carter posted. “Would anyone be interested in helping?”

Within 30 minutes, about 40 people showed up to help on a chilly night, even though the vast majority had never milked a goat before, Fernandez said.

“I sure hadn’t milked one, but I was happy to try,” she said.

Fernandez said she fetched some buckets from inside the store and grabbed a bunch of supersized soft drink cups to hold the milk. Several people arrived with jars and bottles so they could take fresh goat milk home with them, she said.

A dog ran a mile to her doggy day care for help after a car crash

Garcia showed her and the other volunteers how to milk the goats in the parking lot and get a steady stream going.

“He said, ‘Grab at the top with your index finger and thumb, work your way down and don’t yank,” Fernandez said. “It took me about 20 minutes to milk the first one, then I started to get the hang of it.”

Abigail Ryba, a salesclerk at the store, said the task was easier once she got a good rhythm going.

“The goats seemed a lot happier when we started milking them,” she said, noting that some of the goats were milked inside the trailer, while others were milked in the parking lot.

Woman fosters obese dog; throngs of fans watch canine lose weight

“I’ve been around goats at a horse rescue where I volunteer, but I’d ever milked one before,” Ryba said. “I love working with animals, and all of these goats were super sweet.”

“The people who weren’t milking goats were comforting them, letting them know it was all going to be okay,” she added.

Garcia said he was stunned that so many people dropped what they were doing on a cold Saturday night to milk goats for a stranger. KSL Television reported the community’s spontaneous act of kindness.

“The parking lot was full of people wanting to help,” Garcia said. “Even the sheriff rolled up to see what was going on. He wondered why he hadn’t been invited to the milking party.”

By 11:15 p.m., all 50 goats had been milked, and he and his uncle were able to get back on the road to California, he said.

“It would have taken me hours to do this alone,” Garcia said. “They got me out of a huge jam, and I now consider them all friends. I told them to come visit my goat farm in California any time.”

Fernandez, for one, might be tempted to take him up on the offer.

“I grew up about 90 minutes from where Jose lives, and I’m looking forward to staying in touch,” she said. “Because of him, I can now check milking a goat off my bucket list.”

I have to pound away at a rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole

Writers who are blessed with inborn talent can write easily, no matter what they do—or don’t do. Like water from a natural spring, the sentences just well up, and with little or no effort these writers can complete a work. Unfortunately, I don’t fall into that category.

I have to pound away at a rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of my creativity. Every time I begin a new novel, I have to dredge out another hole.

But, as I’ve sustained this kind of life over many years, I’ve become quite efficient, both technically and physically, at opening those holes in the rock and locating new water veins.

As soon as I notice one source drying up, I move on to another. If people who rely on a natural spring of talent suddenly find they’ve exhausted their source, they’re in trouble. 

In other words, let’s face it: life is basically unfair. But, even in a situation that’s unfair, I think it’s possible to seek out a kind of fairness. 

–from Murakami’s 2008 essay “The Running Novelist,” tr. Philip Gabriel

Write on the side of the egg.

[This] is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the wall: Rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like this: “Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.” 

 Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be? 

–from Murakami’s 2009 Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech

Something you Pull out of Yourself

As I wrote A Wild Sheep Chase, I came to feel strongly that a story, a monogatari, is not something you create. It is something that you pull out of yourself. The story is already there, inside you. You can’t make it, you can only bring it out. This is true for me, at least: it is the story’s spontaneity. For me, a story is a vehicle that takes the reader somewhere. Whatever information you may try to convey, whatever you may try to open the reader’s emotions to, the first thing you have to do is get that reader into the vehicle. And the vehicle–the story–the monogatari–must have the power to make people believe. These above all are the conditions that a story must fulfill.

–from a 1992 lecture at Berkeley, as transcribed in Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, Jay Rubin

Reflect on What You See

Reflect on what you see. Remember, though, that to reflect is not to rush to determine the rights and wrongs or merits and demerits of what and whom you are observing. Try to consciously refrain from value judgments—don’t rush to conclusions. What’s important is not arriving at clear conclusions but retaining the specifics of a certain situation . . . I strive to retain as complete an image as possible of the scene I have observed, the person I have met, the experience I have undergone, regarding it as a singular “sample,” a kind of test case as it were. I can go back and look at it again later, when my feelings have settled down and there is less urgency, this time inspecting it from a variety of angles. Finally, if and when it seems called for, I can draw my own conclusions.

–from Murakami’s 2015 essay “So What Shall I Write About?,” tr. Ted Goossen

Experiment

It is the inherent right of all writers to experiment with the possibilities of language in every way they can imagine—without that adventurous spirit, nothing new can ever be born. 

– Haruki Murakami from “The Birth of My Kitchen Table Fiction,” tr. Ted Goossen, 2015

It's Like Boxing

The most important thing is confidence. You have to believe you have the ability to tell the story, to strike the vein of water, to make the pieces of the puzzle fit together. Without that confidence, you can’t go anywhere. It’s like boxing. Once you climb into the ring, you can’t back out. You have to fight until the match is over.

 –from a 1992 lecture at Berkeley, as transcribed in Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, Jay Rubin

bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it.

I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on The System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist’s job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories—stories of life and death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.

–from Murakami’s 2009 Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech

You’ve got to stash away a lot of junk to use, Magic can’t work if your garage is empty.

Remember that scene in Steven Spielberg’s film E.T. where E.T. assembles a transmitting device from the junk he pulls out of his garage? There’s an umbrella, a floor lamp, pots and pans, a record player─it’s been a long time since I saw the movie, so I can’t recall everything, but he manages to throw all those household items together in such a way that the contraption works well enough to communicate with his home planet thousands of light years away. I got a big kick out of that scene when I saw it in a movie theater, but it strikes me now that putting together a good novel is much the same thing. The key component is not the quality of the materials─what’s needed is magic. If that magic is present, the most basic daily matters and the plainest language can be turned into a device of surprising sophistication. 

 First and foremost, though, is what’s packed away in your garage. Magic can’t work if your garage is empty. You’ve got to stash away a lot of junk to use if and when E.T. comes calling! 

 –from Murakami’s 2015 essay “So What Shall I Write About?,” tr. Ted Goossen

Dreaming is the Day Job of Novelists

Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.

–from Murakami’s 2011 acceptance speech for the Catalunya International Prize

I Mesmerize Myself

When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long—six months to a year—requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

–Haruki Murakami, in a 2004 interview with John Wray for The Paris Review

Thelonious Monk quoted by Murakami

One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: “It can’t be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!” I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.

–from Murakami’s 2007 essay "Jazz Messenger"

Murakami

Murakami-san, hello. The wind is strong today, isn’t it? Fukuoka’s sky is blue, though. There is something I’ve wanted to ask you since I was in high school. Here’s the long-awaited question: Is the pen really mightier than the sword?

—Hungry Sachiko, female, 27 years old, regular employee

I’m taken aback by how straightforward this question is. Is the pen mightier than the sword? I want to say of course it is, but nowadays it’s hard to say. Aside from terrorist attacks, you get backlash from the internet as well. You have to be mindful when you’re writing something.

I keep in mind to “not have the pen get too mighty” when I write. I choose my words so the least amount of people get hurt, but that’s also hard to achieve. No matter what is written, there is a chance of someone getting hurt or offending someone. Keeping all that in mind, I try as much as I can to write something that will not hurt anyone. This is a moral every writer should follow.

But at the same time, when you need to fight a battle, you also need to reserve energy to be able to fight. Something like what you use to tighten your stomach. But that’s only when you really need to. If you recklessly make the pen mightier than the sword, you’re putting yourself in danger. That’s my personal opinion. Some may think otherwise.

                  https://www.vulture.com/2015/02/best-of-haruki-murakami-advice-column.html

I'll know her name

I was very upset that our local pool was closing. I would now need a car to get to the regional pools. When I started hunting for options I was shocked at the price of used cars. 

I decided to take a long walk to sort out my thoughts. I noticed a Honda sedan parked next to my friend Peter's house in Blackstone. It had no plates. At supper I asked my husband, Do you think I should call Peter and ask him about the car? Sure, he said. 

Peter explained that the Honda was a gift from his sister-in-law and they're keeping it in the family but how fortuitous that I called because he needs to get rid of his old blue Pontiac sedan. I was going to donate it to WGBH radio but I'd much rather give it to you! 

So this week we asked our mechanic Sam if he could go over the car. He approved, considering that all I plan to do is drive to the area swimming pools. He'd have to fix a few things to make her legal to pass inspection.  She drives well. Be sure to take her out on the highway once in a while to clean out the engine. 

One of the pools is a highway trip 8 miles away, so that's good. Now I have to be patient while Peter cleans out the car and sends away for the title. I'm hoping Sam can get started on fixing up the car. Meanwhile we have a lot of finicky paperwork ahead of us. 

I can't wait to clean her up and drive her to the pool. Meanwhile I am thinking of names. Blue Boatie, Bluedini, Bessie, Bertha, Franklin Flyer, Kismet.

I'll know her name when she whispers it to me while I'm driving.

Local Drama

At this point, local police had a rifle trained on him, they say, but he was still trying to put the Mercedes in gear until North Smithfield police Sgt. John Babineau jumped onto the roof of the Mercedes to smash a window and officers were able to wrestle Fellows from the car to get handcuffs on him – after a struggle.

Russ Olivo

Let us remember...that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both. Christian Wiman

Art is so often better at theology than theology is.

 ― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer