The Suburbs: Is it Safe for Dogs, Even?

Two catastrophes happened within three days of each other.

Our cute pooch had to leave our apartment to live differently and otherwise, forever. It was a yapping-in-an-apartment issue that was causing insanity to both those in the apartment and those nearby. So, Connie, now back to Molli, has moved to New Jersey to live with my sister and her family. It is working out. Go Molli, go!

Not long after, there was the pre-Halloween snowstorm that was so freakish and devastating, that my sister’s little burgh of Cresskill, New Jersey is still without power, five days later. All sorts of things crushed. Messy messy world.

Will the dog survive under such conditions? Apparently, yes. It’s just dry kibble and water that propels her. So my sister’s family must trudge through dark nights and refrigerator-free days, training a dog to do its business outside, under the stress of television-free evenings.

It makes you wonder how long people will continue to live out in the woods with or without their dogs. It’s all tornadoes and crazy snow storms and freakish winds in the northeast. When I was a kid, we had about four blizzards the whole time, a couple of floody summers. Things truly have violently changed. What must my Republican appurtenances in the suburbs and country think about all this?

Or, do they not have time to think about all this since they must pass their days busily with their chain saws, making logs out of the trunks that have crushed their roofs, blown out the windows of their S.U.V.s?

As harsh as this sounds, you do wonder how many Escalades have to be pounded before someone admits to Global Warming/Severe Climate Change.

Homeostasis can be gentle. Or, it can be meted out. Right now, it is meted. It’s all physics and math, this mess. Why is this so hard to understand?

I wish the population of the great northern woods much strength in the oncoming years. But hell, what am I smugging about? The next super virus that hits the big cities, opportunistically rampant due to the population bulge, I will be running across that G.W. Bridge to New Jersey to go sit in the dark with my sister’s family and my former pooch, Molli, who, hopefully, will be house trained by then.