Free at last, free at last.......

If there’s one useful thing I can impart to all of you in Readerland, it is this: the road to hell is paved with good deeds. Some of you may recall that last week I picked up my latest foster dog, Frosty, the blind albino Doberman who I was told “can be barky but not too bad.” Since I’m pretty much the only volunteer who has no dogs, I was asked to take him to see how he was on his own, since there was concern that he was aggressive in general. Okay. This was my trip out to Carol Stream last week where on my way home, my windshield got cracked by a rock from an idiot truck – so one can kind of see how THIS was going to go.

So Frosty settles in that evening, and other than the fact that he can’t quite hold it all night and I’m cleaning up crap in the middle of the night, things are relatively okay. Even when he starts barking and won’t stop until I let him out of the kitchen, which I do because it’s 3 fucking AM. Fine.

The fun starts the next day, when, after talking to the woman who adopted a former foster dog of mine, Gary (aka The Dog With the Unfortunate Name), we agree that she should basically return him because she’s had him a month, and in that time frame he’s become completely neurotic, pacing around, destroying things, because he’s left alone for an 11-hour day. Now, there are some dogs that can handle a long day like that – Gary is not one of them. This is the dog that would drape himself over my lap while I was working so that he’d be as close to me as possible. My sweetums.

So now with two dogs, I discover The Real Problem With Frosty. Which is that he’s insane. Okay, not technically, but he’s about 9 months old and acts like a puppy, which he is, and wants to play ALL THE TIME. Given that I live in a small Chicago apt., it’s not exactly conducive to two huge dogs turning and tumbling and wrestling and so on, so I wind up supervising them all day. Because the Other Problem With Frosty is that he can’t be separated. Put him behind a babygate in a separate room if there are other dogs in the house and he sounds like he’s going to rip someone’s throat out and will attempt to leap over the gate. Now, not actually aggressive, but he won’t stay behind the gate.

So this is our new scenario: me, my cramped apartment, trying to get a report finished under a deadline, two huge dogs being as rambunctious as they can possibly get, and oh yeah, Frosty the “Not Too Barky”? In fact barks when he hears people in front of the house, when he hears other dogs barking, when he hears my idiot tenants get home at 2/3/4 AM, when he hears the universe turning as part of the time-space continuum. He barks so much, and so loudly, that I worry the police will show up at my door because someone is complaining. When he’s not barking, he’s whining, or jumping on my head, because god forbid the people who had him for his first 9 months should have thought about teaching him some manners.
At this point, I tell the rescue folks that this is not going to work, because a) I can’t get any sleep, b) I can’t get any work done since I have to referee these 2 all day, and c) they are going to hurt each other while in the process of completely destroying my house. Sadly, my selfishness in being unable or willing to deal with the above has made me a bit of a pariah with the organization - the fact that I’m not independently wealthy and need to be able to actually get work done at home wasn’t considered to be very important, it seems. So today I took Frosty back to the kennel, where the organization keeps dogs until they can get into foster homes. And there was a decided chill when I dropped him off, as I am now a bad, evil volunteer for not being willing to let my life further degenerate into a complete and total shambles.

To my original point – even though I’ve fostered some difficult dogs, from sweet Jennings who had severe separation anxiety such that I couldn’t leave the house, to lost/stolen Amber/Embry who also couldn’t be crated or separated and went nuts at the kennel, so I went to pick her up in Carol Stream on a snowy winter evening late at night even though I already had one foster dog and the two of them made for quite a handful since Amber/Embry couldn’t really walk, it’s not enough, apparently. I feel guilty for dropping off little Frosty, who in between the barking and whining, really was very adorable and cuddly and sweet. Really. When I wasn’t ready to kill him, I really liked the little guy. As for guilt, well, I’m not the idiot breeder who breeds for eye color and winds up with white Dobes with beautiful blue eyes who happen to be blind; I’m not the idiot couple who bought Frosty from said breeder and then dumped him at 9 months old at a shelter because oh, they were having a baby, and oops, this rambunctious pup that we didn’t teach any manners to at all is now quite a handful. And while no one else in the group stepped up and was willing to take in Frosty either, somehow the weight of him being stuck back at the kennel is on my shoulders. Because the worst part is that while I feel bad about Frosty, I can also admit that the silence at home right now.......is heavenly. Either that makes me a not very good person, or my heart just turned to stone when I lost my little Hudson, and there’s no room in it for anyone or anything else anymore.

And so, dear reader(s), this is my life. I have this tendency to try to solve the world’s problems, while my own life continues to be a train wreck.

Trust me, it doesn’t pay.