What Your Sexy Animal Halloween Costume Says About You

Sexy Raccoon: You are most likely to be killed in a hunting or traffic accident. You are not able to run or jump great distances because of your short legs. At a party, you can probably be found in the bathroom, washing saltines in the sink. Most likely, you have rabies, or at the very least, worms.

Sexy Skunk: Otherwise known as a "Polecat" (you have to get your communications degree somehow), you love to scavenge for garbage, or dig for fat juicy grubs. You are pretty much blind. There are two glands located by your anus which spray out a thick musk of sulphur to protect you from predators. Oftentimes, people smell you and assume there is weed nearby.

Sexy Red Fox: You love to use urine to mark your territory, which is everywhere since you are an invasive and unwelcome species. You are seemingly capable of complicated communication, but it is all barking. People are constantly trying to kill you and cut off your hair for souvenirs, or at least thinking about it. Sometimes, even though you aren't hungry, you kill as much prey as you can, just for fun. Other predators find you extremely annoying, especially in packs. You get mange, a lot. At the party, you will most likely be outside the bathroom, stopping other foxes from using it.


Sexy Bumblebee: Lots of people like to use you for cross pollination, and you are easily confused by radio and cell phone signals. You will most likely die from bacterial infection or ingestion of industrial grade pesticides. People use you as a sign of oncoming environmental apocalypse. When you finally die, the party's over. You throw up in your mouth a lot.


Sexy Clownfish: You love to live in hostile environments, and are a hermaphrodite. At the party, you will most likely be found in the bedroom, trying to coat various surfaces with your sticky eggs. You are a very common pet, thanks to your very popular "children's" movie, in which you are a cripple.


Sexy Turtle: You are an ancient reptile, descended from the Late Triassic period. You were most likely sold off at a young age to an aging raver kid, and are capable of biting off a man's entire thumb from the joint. Lots of people think you would make a very good soup. You are able to retract your head entirely into your bone-like shell. At the party, you will be crawling around on the floor, searching for warmth and trying not to get stepped on.

Edit: Per one of the site's request: here's a link where you can buy the Sexy Sea turtle, which besides the raccoon, is easily the best one.

The Story of Christmas Ale

I originally posted this last year, but since today IS the first pour of Christmas Ale for the season, and because I AM super busy with other stuff and have been a terrible blogger, this seems about right.

Once upon a time, on a unshoveled stretch of dirty snow called W. 54th, between the Animal Feed Store and the bodega, there lived a very little girl and her smaller less articulate sister. They lived with their mom and dad, who were both very sincere young people in their 30s with hipster glasses and nonprofit aspirations. But underneath her J.Crew sweaters, the mom was very much a third generation polish girl, and so Christmas was a big deal to her. There were traditions, and pierogis, and making cranberry chains to put on the tree. There were huge boxes of Christmas ornaments, new ones that the little girl and her sister had made in school, old ones from grandmother’s house with pretty painted angels and white bearded men.

The little girl and her sister got up very early on December 25th 1991, and ran downstairs. The only lights on were the ones on the tree, and the little girl deliberately took off her glasses, so she could look at the colors blended together in blurry stained glass window spots. But what was this crap! There were no presents under the tree! They searched high and low around the living room, but nothing! No boxes, no wrapping, no weird awkward shaped forms to rattle and bounce. They ran crying to their mom and dad, standing in the dark doorway of their bedroom sobbing. Mom and Dad got up, looked all around, called the police even. But the presents were gone. Zipped Zoomed Znatched.

All across Cleveland that morning, it was the same tragic mystery. All the presents were gone, stolen! evaporated! and no one knew how. Little Jimmy Casterelli in Cleveland Heights didn’t get his Legos sets, and therefore never became an engineer. Patricia Kowalski from Fairview Park never found out that in that very large box her boyfriend had put under the tree was a very small ring, and she ended up dumping him after New Years for not being serious enough. In the snowbound suburb of Berea, the Christmas lights sparkled on the ranch houses, but inside it was nothing but tears, disappointment, and fathers escaping to the garage to drink. The news stations deployed their sparkling vans and sculpey faced reporters to the farthest ends of Cuyahoga County, and the police sent all their available men around to interview “Witnesses”, but other than drunks and schizophrenics, no one had seen anything.

It was the saddest day in Cleveland history.

So the next week, when a local brewery announced they would be a releasing a new craft beer, a holiday seasoned ale, something with a little punch, it was barely noticed. Soon though, the little brewery was regularly packed, with people humming about this strange new beer. They sat at the long wooden counter, enrapt in their work thoughts and unhappiness. But after taking a sip, a change would start to steal over their faces, brows magically unfurrowed, mouths relaxed, shoulders sagged down. The bar was surprisingly quiet the first hour, as everyone focused on the gold brown liquid, and you could almost hear the contemplation, it was thick in the air. But after 1 or 2, the drinker started to become louder just a little, more excited. And by the end of the night, even the most sober faced of adults would be laughing with glee. It was instantly addicting, exactly what anyone could want in a beer, not taste or smell, but effectiveness. It made you feel full of holiday cheer, even though your kids were crying and your wife spent all her time thinking about the credit card debt. They called it Christmas Ale.

The little girl’s parents went there too, having heard about it from friends. They sat in a booth, tired and worried about money and work tomorrow and the babysitter who was a slovenly fat teenage blonde from down the street. The Dad ordered a burger, and the Mom ordered a wrap, they both ordered two Christmas Ales. When they came to the table, the Mom took a drink first. “It tastes like legos. I think. New legos.”

Dad took a drink. “No honey, you’re wrong, it tastes like that time Little Girl put watercolors in my coffee to make it pretty. And it smells like that set of coloring pencils we got her for….”

“It tastes like happiness, is what it is.” Mom said dreamily, drinking and thinking of that set of plastic horses she had got when when she was 11, how shiny and new the painted colors were.

Of course, you can’t steal a city’s Christmas presents every year, and though they had stolen enough joy to last a few batches if they were careful, it soon ran out. Which is why they have a warehouse now, underneath St. Ignatius, where forgotten and stolen children toil year around making shining amazing presents to give each other, each little worker getting excited just thinking of how much work he’s put into the gifts, which are then gathered up and taken away as they sleep. No child there ever gets a present. After all, Christmas Ale is very popular.

2012 Edit: Historians often cite Oct.30th 2011 as the first major viral urban outbreak of Christmas Cannibalism. The virus was thought to have been administered to large holiday weekend crowds starting in a near west side neighborhood. The deadly mutation was triggered by a dangerous combination of Christmas Ale, organic lip gloss, and strenuous drunken biking. Though there are some experts that contend the stage had already been set for Cleveland as the "reanimated dead" epicenter a month before, when a new species of beverage, Yeungling, was introduced to a virgin population whose immune systems were dangerously weakened by the foreign substance. Thus making the victims that much more susceptible to the Christmas Ale infection

Red

I should probably talk a little about these lectures I've seen recently. I kind of don't want to, but I keep putting it off, so it's time to start articulating some of it, because otherwise more of it will slip away. That makes this sound like it's going to be more grandiose than it is, promise.

Last week, I saw Vito Acconci speak at University of Youngstown. I had only like a less than rudimentary knowledge of him. And the whole lecture was fantastic - his history and his past stuff and his modern stuff. But the Q&A should always be the best part, and this one was pretty good. One of my friends asked a question about how this guy felt about the shift to rendering everything on computers, if he thought it took away from the creation of it. I was hoping his answer was on the tape, but it wasn't. I remember it being a very sad answer. There was something about the way he looked while answering, as if all of a sudden he had gotten really old. The timbre of his voice was strong but maybe defeated. I say maybe because the way he talked about the history of technology and the tech guys at his own firm wasn't anything but mildly positive, word wise. It just looked very much like he wanted to say a lot more, but was so used to biting his tongue it took almost no effort now, was an automatic response, like putting yourself to sleep. This didn't match with the rest of the man you had seen throughout the night, so by default it seemed like the truest moment. Who knows if it was? He might have just been tired.

Later in the week I went to Jay's for dinner and we talked about the effect of computers on art. Jay stands by the idea that visual art on the computer hasn't got the soul of creating with other materials. He's a painter though, and that is definitely true for his form. As to mine, I know some people swear by typewriters but frankly I don't like them. They are slow and loud. Writing on a computer is just faster, and the faster I can type, the faster I can get my thoughts out, so better. Andrew and I had briefly discussed handwriting a while ago, there was some article about how kids not learning handwriting in school was detrimental to their development, because the very act of repetitively make the same actions with your hands while having to think about it on another simultaneous level was essential in creating certain neural pathways. But like an ill fated reptile, our hands were losing those particular strengths. I'm so used to typing everything that my handwriting has gotten weak and just a bit more illegible. I was lucky though, it was pretty legible from the beginning. Other people I know are not as fortunate. I don't know about the superiority of one set of neuron patterns to the other though. I'm not convinced that's true.

Computer renderings versus physical painting or drawing. It can be technically as good, but it's always just missing something. That memory of tactile sensation. Photography is a weird thing like that too. I'm starting to see the difference with film, and I've been trying pretty hard to avoid that, but you know, there it is. Ugh. Subtlety.

Tonight I saw Chuck Klosterman at Akron. When we got there a little late, he was reading from a portion of his new book. I didn't like Downtown Owl all that much, even though I like his nonfiction writing a lot, and it took a while for him to win me over, because as he was talking about writing the new one I kept comparing them. But once again, the Q&A was really good, and he answered questions for an hour. I had two favorite answers. The first was the guy who asked about how he felt about all media being changed to digital, if he thought it was taking something away from the experience for future generations. Klosterman answered that he thought our relationship with physical objects were overrated, and talked about how he and wife had recently gotten rid of all their CDs. That's a big thing. I haven't even done that yet frankly, I still have a bunch of them upstairs, and bunch in the car. But he talked about how hard it had been, how he thought he would miss them terribly, and then hadn't missed them at all. Because the value of the art was not in it's tangible form, and if it was, then it wasn't very valuable in the first place.

I asked him, since in the new book his character is searching for someone to tell him he's not guilty or bad for habitually and secretly observing people, then what was it he felt guiltiest about in his career? At first he told the story of mistakenly believing a high school kid about information for a story when he was young. Then he talked about Killing Yourself to Live. He had written about three exes in the book who he sent copies of it to. The first two had negative reactions, and the third had made him realize that by rewriting down memories, he had irrevocably changed her memory of how things had happened. That her mind had sucked down his version, imagination being as violatile as it is, and now she couldn't quite remember the way she had originally felt about it. And he felt terrible about that. Which is a really powerful recognition. When you are intentionally putting out your ideas about what has happened in your life, in a form that you want other people to consume, even if you try hard to accurate there are going to be words you pick and choose to use. It is just like how if you watch a movie before you read the book, that visual image is stuck with you while you read it, no matter what. That was a whole nother answer to something else, but also worthwhile. It does rob you of an extremely important relationship with the written characters. If you've watched Watership Down the movie first, and then read the book, you have no idea what you're missing and will never get, which makes me sad to think about.

Later at the bar I hadn't been to in a long time, it was nothing but old 90s songs playing, Tori Amos, Green Day, Collective Soul, No Doubt or just Gwen Stefani, I can't remember any more.

Let Me Tell You How Fucking Awesome My Night Was

Brown Bird - Fingers to the Bone by supplyanddemand

Halfway through the day I decided I need to drink tonight, I'd had a bad couple of days if you couldn't tell from my last couple of faux zen bullshit posts. So I convinced Jason on gchat, easily, to have food with me at ABC. Tara then texted me, so she came up too. We talked about ageism, and Todd laughed at us. We decided to go to Happy Dog, and Jason said he needed to wrap his girlfriend's birthday present since he was headed to Judie's afterwards, so somehow in between him getting up out of his chair and him leaving, an executive decision was made that Judie's present, which was an 8x10 print, had to be wrapped in a foil swan like they do at fancy restaurants. Jason was instructed to bring the foil to the Happy Dog.

We get to the Happy Dog, and it was classical music night, so like I walked in to a violinist, which let's be honest, is the best way to enter a hipster hot dog bar ever. We immediately devoted the next hour to making the Swan. Brandon came up, and he even knew HOW to make a foil swan, so that was sort of USEFUL. It turned out amazing, here it is.





WE MADE THAT.

Then this group of guys was playing this amazing gypsy jam music, with clarinets and oboes, and Jason left to take the swan to Judie, but we had this cardboard roll left from the wrapping paper we stuffed the entrails with, so Oliver the Centipede was born.



And Jonah the amazingly nice bartender who didn't scold me for using all his bar straws emailed me a picture of Oliver titled "cool thing". Tara and I had a minute talking about boys, oh so much talk about boys always boys boys are so amazing sometimes and cute and jeez, and then this other amazingly awesome band came on, that was this deep down folk blues chill down your spine making sound, and we moved closer to the staqe and I yelled in the Happy Dog, which let me tell you NEVER HAPPENS. It was this duo Brown Bird, which if you hit that little button above, you are listening to now. When they were over, we bought CDs immediately, me once again thanks to Jonah, god Jonah whoever is sleeping with you tonight should be extra nice to you, and when they came over to the bar they told us the story of their crappy introduction to Cleveland through a crappy booking at Wilberts, and then Brian Straw bringing them there to this bar randomly, and MorganEve was SO nice and beautiful and the guy David had the best beard ever, I wanted to marry him right then and there, the way he stomped that drum. Then when the music was over someone put on a shitload of ABBA, and I sat there dancing finishing my drink, fishing around for the cherry at the bottom, and I was so happy, I thought to myself this is what life is, going out just to forget awful stuff, and then ending up on a trip that is full of bar straws and foil and super smart people and really good music, and driving home listening to a bluegrass band from Rhode Island you never knew existed before that night. And I'm so thankful my parents raised children who could appreciate magic in bars, actual real tangible conjured by cellos and boys with beautiful eyes magic.

Oh, and happy birthday Judie! We sent a shitload of love your way tonight.
Now I'm going to listen to Roy Orbison until I fall asleep, and try not to think about the boy I like.

Edit: I wrote this while pretty drunk. You can tell because I used the word amazing 5 times. And honestly, there wasn't a single cherubim present that whole night.

Just pretend this is 1999 and also this is a white plastic bag

If it weren't for light, I would be so bored. Today I sat on my parents' back porch, drinking apple cider with whiskey, and trying to read a book. I found it hard to concentrate on the novel, even though I had read it before and liked it. The words were dry and still. I could not stop thinking about making out with someone in the sunlight. I was suddenly very scared that perhaps I had ruined my attention span with facebook and twitter and gchat. This is still a real possibility, but I refuse to think about it further. The implications of everything aren't necessary. So I put my phone and my book down and tried to just watch. I made it 20 minutes of being still and silent. That is not very long. I am out of practice with focusing. But also I saw that nothing else in the universe is still or silent either. It is always moving. So I think instead of practicing being still, I will try and practice moving all the time. Being still is too much like being dead. Though I guess I won't be very good at being dead either, since that's a lot longer than twenty minutes.



Monday morning reminder:
There is no such thing as a dull sky. There never has been. The sky is always beautiful.
There is no such thing as a dull ocean. There never has been. The ocean is always beautiful.
There is no such thing as a dull mountain. There never has been. The mountain is always beautiful.
There is no such thing as a dull person. There never has been, but... The skies and oceans and mountains are always beautiful regardless. The road is always beautiful. Animals are always beautiful. People must then always be beautiful too. You know. Find it.



I thought at first that was a moon rainbow, but it was just a trick of the sunset, creating moons everywhere, echoing Jupiter, maybe auditioning? C'mon apocalypse, give me carbon dioxide moon rainbows everywhere. Kill me with rainbows.

Stepping over Black Cats

Hotel Victoria



At some point, the focus of justice stopped being land use and became human use. Because our idea of what treating ourselves fairly meant changed. Instead of dowries and duels, now there were personal injury suits and love. And maybe also because, numerically not rationally, there are just so many more poor people now. In a fair world order, numbers don't lie. It's hardwired into our brain, into all brains animal and pumped up with blood, we instinctively feel what is fair and what is not. We let others cover that up with words and money and complicated systems of guilt. But no matter how much soot covered gold we gild it with, the raw reaction remains. It gets sleepy, it gets lazy, and worse it gets hopeless. But it remains. It is there to be played with, diluted, extracted, but never wiped out.


So what should we use to symbolize justice now? Is it the blind woman with the scales, images of money and worth? Or is it an apathetic universe, letting the yarn roll out of his hands and end up where it wants? Instead of two equal weights, two equal bodies both climbing, struggling to get to the top first. It depends on if you think it exists or not, I guess, and if you believe in god. Lots of emotions live in our genetic material, we certainly don't act on most of them (oh but don't you want to?), so is fairness any different? We try hard not to be animals, and how many times does the animal instinct prove true anyway, and in this case the animal instinct being the angelic instinct. Will this one win? More importantly, if this raw reaction didn't exist, if we had no innate concept of fairness, would god exist? No wait, that's the least important thing.

The symbol of justice now is an image of pain, of the way our neurons flash and shake when confronted with personal discomfort.


The seasons are a reflection of natural justice, if justice should mean harmony and predictability. The way the world rotates and tilts, the equanimity of equators and equinoxes. I never understood why hell was the hot one and heaven the cold one. Is it because the notions were born out of desert people, where the mild winter months were a relief, and northern climates were a place of fertility, trees, growth, massive herds of food? If so, how quickly we chose hell as the vacation destinations once we had a little freedom from need.

Chemical Aftertastes

She sat against the arm of the couch, and picked at the cut edge of her jersey dress. She always cut her clothes like that, so that the jagged edges curled up and hems hung limp and unfinished.

"I don't know, I'm just exhausted," she said, her eyes looking across the room and twitching, like she was trying to find something to focus on. "I feel like the whole weight of inevitability is on me, but I can't figure out what it is that's inevitable."

"You know, people feel that way when they're depressed," he said from the other couch.

"I'm not depressed though. I don't feel depressed, and I mean, I've been depressed. I'm excited to see people tomorrow, and I'm excited about the show, and I had a pretty good weekend. But I just feel so tired of trying to think about how we feel about this, about anything. I remember I felt this way when I decided I was an atheist. Like, I was just tired of listening to people talk about God, like it mattered one way or the other, and I just gave up caring. That's how I feel right now about something very specific, I just can't tell what."

"There was a special I watched the other night, and it was about the breeding of dogs, how the Victorians with their easy money spent all this time refining dogs into more and more different kinds of dogs, and how that era was the turning point for how we saw dogs. Like before, they were work dogs, and that was it, dogs worked with us. Then all of a sudden they were status symbols and people no longer cared about them being strong and athletic, but instead wanted weird mutated unique looking pretty dogs. So now dogs and humans are in a kind of crisis, where we need to figure out the role they play in our society, toys or partners. And then they talked about how scientists were training dogs to smell out cancer, like bladder cancer in urine, and the smell of biological stress that your body puts out when it's sick. They talked about this kid who had diabetic seizures, and his parents had trained this german shepherd to come and get them wake them up whatever any time she smelled this kid's blood sugar getting too low. It was amazing." He snubbed out his cigarette and she hugged the couch pillow a little tighter.

"So that's what I need huh? A service dog to smell out what's wrong with me. Like, a dog that can smell where the poison is, in what cell of my body its starting, in what little strand of genetic jewels is the black fog coming from? Or get me a glass of wine when it smells the level of zeitgeist getting too heavy. Or message someone to take me somewhere great when I need my quasi intellectual cataracts cut out of my eyes."

He just kept going. "Well, so then I thought about how we call them government watchdog groups, but why watchdogs? Watchdogs are only trained to bark and be scary and a little crazy and way overprotective. Watchdogs are blunt instruments. They should want to be service dog groups."

"See, there's the problem. I want to care about your funny political thoughts, but I care way more about dogs sniffing out cancer. And maybe that's just because science is a fact, and it's usually amazing and distracting and having nothing as immediate as politics to do with my life. But everything is so insane, all the time, it's just people talking and snarking and arguing in circles, and I'm old and all I want to do is make out and have fun and make stuff people like, and not think about things that only make it clear how fucking crazy people are. But you can't escape the crazy. Even if you think you can just hang out with your friends and lovers and have fun, they're crazy too. So at some point I just want to embrace it and only be entertained by it so I don't get crushed to death by it, and I feel like maybe that's what happened with the Romans. Any layer of rich middle class. You've got just enough money to be aware and bored enough to be interested and not exhausted by manual labor all day so you find time to look around, and suddenly you realize our brains just don't work. That they never worked. That they weren't just programmed to be lap dogs, but are supposed to run and bite. "

Rich People Are Crazy

Last night the moon was this swollen burnt orange, like a pumpkin pie left in the oven too long, little spots of char on the thick custard surface, with a chunk scooped out of the top of it, and it hung 7 times it's size on the edge of the city. The closer I got to it, driving on the empty shoreway towards home, the bigger it got, until I thought just as I entered the downtown highway bends that my chest might burst with the weight of it.

I stopped by the 24 hour grocery store to buy cat food. I had been gone all day, and left the cats the very dregs of the last bag 14 hours ago. It just seemed cruel to say I was too tired and fucked up and I just wanted to fall asleep, and therefore they had to wait until late the next morning when I finally dragged myself out of bed. The grocery store at 3am was completely empty. My feet were sore in my boots, and my toes burned at the hard linoleum floors. The cat food was on the complete far end of the store, which is a huge one. I walked through aisles and aisles of junk food and cans and freezers, a million loafs of bread sitting there waiting in the darkness, having come hundreds of miles to sit sterile in their plastic wrappers. I thought to myself that one thing I should do is start going into 24 hour stores at 3am and taking photos. I think I might.

I felt an incredible swell of power as I walked out of the store, towards my car, the only car in the parking lot right in the middle of the vast asphalt space. The wind was 70 degrees and blew up my skirt, the plastic bag with cat food and body wash heaving and swinging against my leg, and it feels really good to be an adult sometimes alive in this time and in this place.

I stopped to get coffee, and introduced myself finally to the woman Kathy who always makes my coffee at dunkin donuts at 3am. I figured after a year of this, it was finally time to try and be a good customer. After all, that woman has seen me in every possible conceivable state of decrepitude - glowing and pretty after dates, crying and mascara streaked after fights, tired and serious after long days, blasting a hundred different kinds of things after shows. Always alone, always at 3am, always on my phone waiting at the window. Sometimes paying with credit cards, sometimes 50s, sometimes a bunch of nickels and dimes. Kathy knows me better than all of you.

Sarah and I went to the famous cemetery Monday. It rained lightly on us, which was appropriate, and we walked around in the mud, drove thru the far away sections listening to Leonard Cohen, because we had to, its a cemetery after all. We looked at the giant groves of obelisks, the massive stone urns folded and draped, the mausoleums standing almost humble in rows. Rich people are crazy, cemeteries prove that. All the founding father names of Cleveland, batshit insane. Who thinks to spend thousands of dollars on sculptures just to memorialize themselves? I mean, rich people, they always do. It's the thing you can count on, since the beginning of civilization. I'm frankly just waiting for the day some billionaire builds himself a pyramid in Utah. I'm frankly just a little ashamed it hasn't happened yet. I'm disappointed in modern billionaires.



We saw them just as we had decided to leave. I spotted them out of the corner of my eye off the main road. She thought they were gravestones at first, there were a lot of carved animals stones, they were sitting so impossibly still. I thought they would run as soon as the car came towards them, but they just lay there in the drizzle watching us. The smaller ones in the back looked a little nervous, but the big one, the leader, didn't twitch, or even move his head to follow the motion of us. They were so huge. Huge and solid with muscle and fast, you could see the fastness in them even completely still, it vibrated in the air around them.

What the Fox is Thinking

Battles - Futura

(Photo: Mircea Costina / Caters News/ Yahoo News)

What the fox is thinking:
This morning I woke up and it was cold. Not just chilly end of summer cold, but the taste of ice in the air that means winter is coming. Suddenly I was grateful for my thick undercoat which had anticipated this, and had been growing in thick and hot for a few weeks. Terrible and annoying when it's still hitting 75 in the afternoons, those days I spent hours trying to scratch it off, rubbing against walls, trees, rocks, my tongue hanging loose and swollen like a dog's (no offense). But this morning I smelled the snow and tasted that burning cold in my mouth, and my pups were snuggled close against my belly, and I was thankful for the fact that Nature provides.

Time is so slow and dreamlike in fox time, in autumn, with the pups halfway mostly grown up and at the very least they wouldn't die if I were to disappear tomorrow. Any more likely than any regular fox that is. But the surreal death of the forest around me, of things turning dark and silver, yellow and red, is punctured by dozens of sharp gut wrenching terror. Every predator is out there trying to get plump and well fed before the world washes out, and there are still some hawks willing to try for a thin adolescent pup. So that sucks. It really sucks having your stress and adrenalin levels jacked up with no warning, over and over, randomly. It takes a toll on every system in your body. You don't know if you're tired or speedy, hungry or glutted, you can never be sure that you are actually relaxed even when you lay down in the dark on your bed and tell yourself deliberately and purposefully to fucking relax already. But just when it seems like it might be working, when you feel that maybe all the hairs on your arm aren't sticking up, here comes another barely there footstep or the far off cry and rush of wings, and boom you're up again and ready for attack and counting heads frantically.

Then come the hunting parties. Foppish stupid rich people on horses, with packs of you slavering hounds baying up and down the treelines. And it's bad enough to get killed, but to know you've been killed not for food, not because someone else was hungry, but because someone wants a new pair of gloves? That my wonderful thick oily undercoat, or the thick bushy tails of my children, are slaughtered just for fun, and then to have you, a distant cousin, a family relative, a brother of the sniff and dig and grab and bite, be the one assisting them! And you come sniffing all around my nest, and you're looking for my children or me or anything to kill to make your masters happy. I've tried talking to you lot before. I've tried having a nice drink of water and discussing where you and I fundamentally disagree about the natural order of power, appealing to the role of forest citizens we both have, and the responsibility to make sure things are balanced. That just enough dogs are killing just enough foxes, and just enough bears are killing just enough dogs, which is usually right around where talks break down. You've drunk the koolaid, or in this case I suspect, the whiskey. There is no reasoning with you. I refuse to waste another breath trying to convince you of the betrayal you've heaped upon your whole species, working with the rightful mortal enemy of free creatures everywhere, to brutally destroy your kin. You are a error, you should be put down.
So just walk the fuck away Dog.