Kill the dog

Greetings,

In Baghdad, Iraq they sent out dog killer squads. They liquidated 58,000 stray dogs in three months. Point and shoot.

This morning before 6:00 a.m. in a small sleep southern Cambodian river town the frustrated alpha simian male next door to a guesthouse finally had enough of his barking mongrel, one of many roaming yapping and screwing in the street.

His wife was sweeping (a national sport) around tables and chairs in an open covered room of computers where students visit in the afternoon to connect. The dog was a nuisance, like her kids and husband. The dog ran around yapping, causing her and her husband anxiety. Rising anger exploded when her Tarzan grabbed a big stick and started beating the dog.

It didn't take a humane society expert to know by the sound of the beating and canine screaming that the dog was doomed. This orchestra of rising screams, fear, panic, anguish, and whimpering rose, climaxed and dropped dead.

Neighbors ignored the reality. His wife swept. Life is short, nasty and brutal. The law of the jungle.

Neighbor dogs, sensing death, howled in their chorus as orange and black butterflies danced at dawn.

Metta.

Listless the listener

Greetings,

Before I became a storyteller I was a listener. I traveled the world listening, collecting creation stories, myths and legends. I listened and collected sharing these stories with others so they would know, understand and feel the energy, the power inherent in the stories. They listened. They absorbed the creation stories into their creation stories, expanding their universe. They became storytellers. They accepted their nomadic storyteller destiny to listen, walk and tell stories. 

One listener in a village was not really a listener. Listless was, in their language, lazy. Pure and simple laziness. Listless passed their lazy disease to others like a story, or in Listless's universe, a nightmare. Listless was a living, breathing artifact of Neanderthal survival instincts. Hunt, eat, sleep, procreate, dream.

Listless loved dogs. Listless was clever, trapped wild dogs and beat them. Listless was the Alpha animal. 

Every night Listless and their pack of dogs hunted. It was around midnight when the dogs began barking. They patrolled around rusty steel gates, junk yards filled with broken machines, abandoned colonial buildings, detention centers and narrow paths near caves where women addicted to controlling their men continuously gave birth to howling children. 

Around midnight wild dogs flushed rats. Big rats. Rats prospered because humans casually discarded fruit rinds, meat gristle, fat, corn, fish paste, vegetables, and children in trash containers fashioned from old tires. Listless sent 20-30 dogs after the rats, all yipping, baying, quarreling, angry, hungry for blood. They cornered a rat, it cried Yip! Squeak! as sharp white teeth pierced its neck. 

All the dogs howled, shrieking long guttural ravishing celebrations of the kill. Deep, shallow, sharp. This chorus echoed inside a black night, as Listless listened to Hellhound on My Trail by Robert Johnson.

Metta.