Paul A. Toth's Blog: Violent Contradiction

Ah the latter days of summer and the beginning of Fall.  Beautiful time of the year and Sophie and I love to hang out in the backyard.  Recently I have seen a tiny mouse running along the fence.  We have had mice in the backyard for years.  I think they live in a drainpipe we have or in one of the ornamental grasses.  I have also seen a bunny in the backyard.  Now our backyard is completely fenced in but once I saw the bunny I went looking for how he was getting in our yard.  First of all he is tiny so I was looking for a small hole in the fence and I found one.  Sophie is so funny when she sees the bunny.  She goes nuts and I have to say she cracks me up.  What a cute little dog she is!  Bunny does not stray far from the little whole in the fence, for good reason I think.  Sunday morning Sophie was looking for the bunny out of our sliding glass door and I thought how funny it would be to write a comic strip called Backyard Bunny.  Hmmm, the thoughts of a bunny and a mouse about the family living in the house sharing the same backyard as them.  It is a thought anyway.  Speaking of which I am not sure how I feel about the little varmints in our backyard.  Actually we live in the suburbs and we actually have a lot of wildlife.  I have seen red foxes in the neighborhood jumping fences, coyotes in our neighborhood park, raccoons in our backyard and owls at night along with all the bunnies in people's yards.  I am very careful about leaving Sophie out at night.  What kinds of varmints do you have living in your backyard and do you do anything to get rid of them?

Last time I went to the grocery store I did not get treats for Sophie.  Usually her and I share a little cheese together but Dad likes to buy her treats from the the grocery store.  He went to the store last night and brought home a bag of dog treats. sophie treats   I am weary of store bought snacks.  With all the pet food scares about ingredients from China I am very careful about reading labels and researching the company.  The latest scare was about the chicken and turkey jerky treats that are made in China and making dogs sick.  Today I made a call to Purina about the Beneful Baked Delights.  They told me the treats were made in the USA but they do import ingredients from China.  She assured me the treats were 100% safe to eat.  Moral of the story is buyer beware.  As a devoted dog owner I would be devastated if I gave Sophie a treat that made her sick.  What kinds of treats do you give your dog?

     It is the last 6 weeks of summer.  The time of year in Colorado when we get monsoons, a fancy name for thunderstorms.  Actually the rain comes at a good time cooling off the days and greening up our lawns.  Sophie and I like to walk when it is a little cooler out.  Good exercise for her and me.  Walking is an easy activity to get prepared for.  I just need my tennis shoes and my iphone and Sophie needs her harness and leash and we are ready to go.  We like to walk in the neighborhood with plenty of shade from the trees to hop into if we get a little hot.  I also like to walk around and admire the landscaping of my neighbors.  Sophie is forever on the lookout for rabbits.  Doing research on miniature dachshunds I discovered that they were bred to hunt rabbits.  I feel like Elmer Fud sometimes, you know when he said, "Be vewy quiet, I am hunting wabbits!"  Sophie loves to go on walks and I see the joy in her body language.  Next time we will go to the park and take you along with us!

     Sophie is naturally as cute as a dachshund can be but she actually does have a "beauty" routine.  She gets bathed about once a month, her teeth brushed once a week and her hair cut about every three months.  Our vet has said using a dog shampoo is best because it will not dry out her skin.  The one we use we get from Pet Smart.  It has baking soda that helps her smell fresh and other good ingredients. I also brush her coat occasionally.  I use a hound glove which is a rubber glove with little nubbies.  She seems to like it.  We also have a little brush but she prefers the hound glove.
     The toothpaste Sophie uses is chicken flavored and I use a plastic fingertip toothbrush.  She looks really sad when I get her toothbrush out, but I feel better cleaning her teeth to reduce the times she needs a sedation cleaning from the vet.  So far she has not needed to get her teeth cleaned by the vet and she is three.  I don't know about you but I am a little nervous when they sedate her to clean her teeth and if brushing her teeth helps reduce the times she needs a vet cleaning then it is worth it.
     Sophie is the apple of my eye and I love her to pieces.  Her favorite part of her "beauty" routine is getting a haircut with the clippers as you saw in my last blog post.  She puts up with the rest because I insist!  Here are links for the products mentioned.  shampoo  toothpaste tooth brush houndglove
What products do you use to keep your pooch looking their best?

    Being a long haired dachshund, Sophie needs to be groomed occasionally.  For her first time I took her to Pet Smart where she would get a bath, a haircut and her nails trimmed.  I thought it was a good idea.  Sophie did not.  When I picked her up she was so happy to see me I felt guilty for bringing her.  When I told her Dad, my husband, about her ordeal he said he would groom her next time.  He has groomed her with a set of clippers ever since.
   We don't have a set schedule of Sophie's grooming because she lets us know when she is ready.  This last time she was sitting on our couch in the family room panting.  Just a little background, we have central air conditioning in our house and keep it set at about 75 degrees F.  It is summer time and the outdoor temperature has been in the 90's.  Sophie had not been outside lately.  When I saw her panting I asked her if it was time for a haircut.  She looked at me and blinked.  I took that as a yes and told her Dad it was time to get out the clippers.  She is so relaxed when she gets groomed now.  Notice in the during picture her tongue is sticking out slightly.  She just sits calmly on Dad's lap while he runs the clipper over her.  Much less stressful for her than Pet Smart!  I also posted a before and after picture of Sophie.  If you have a dog with long hair how do you groom them?

    Today is the last day of Spring 2014!  It is a beautiful day here in Colorado with highs only making it to the upper 80's maybe 90 degrees.  Sophie and I love to lounge in the back yard.  She is a particular little dog about me staying in the back yard with her while she "sniffs" and suns herself.  While I am enjoying the sun I am surveying my backyard and have noticed a very healthy crop of weeds by the back fence.  Many years ago we pulled up the sod and planted various flowers, trees, and bushes back there.  We lost a lot of plants until we finally found some perennials that now seem to be thriving.  The plants we had success with were larkspur and an ornamental grass that I do not remember the name of.  There is no mulching around the plants, that is another story I won't go into, just dirt and sand which weeds love.  Every year I pull weeds to no avail.  Pulling them seems to make them grow faster, at least it seems that way to me.  This spring my husband thought it would be a good idea to try a weed killer but I insisted we try something that would not hurt the dogs.  He found an organic  recipe. Vinegar weed killer  After one spraying the leaves started to turn brown, but I found out we need to spray weekly because it does not kill the roots.  Now we are tasked with the problem of how to "finish" our landscaping and Sophie can sniff to her heart's content.  Win Win for us all!!  Have you tried any organic alternatives for lawn care?  Please share!!

how to identify lawn weeds

    Oh my!  Procrastination is not my friend.  Ok, sure there are those times when it pays to procrastinate, you know when you put off washing your car and it rains.  Most of the time for me, anyway, I regret not getting starting or not finishing up a project.  Let's take for example this blog and my dear doggie Sophie.  I was so excited to get her.  She was born on my birthday in 2011 and she was a beautiful puppy. My dear mother named her which to me, is a sentimental story in itself. 
    My husband and I decided it was time for a puppy even though we had two other dachshunds, Rommel and Oscar.  Rommel was a red short haired mini dachshund we found at a pet shop back in December 1999.  Oscar, a beautiful and sweet long haired red mini dachshund, needed a home because his former owner could no longer keep him.  Rommel was 12 years old and grumpy and Oscar was only 3 years old and full of energy.  Did we need another dachshund?  No, but we really wanted one.  I searched online for dachshund breeders and found one close by and saw a picture of a female puppy and fell in love.  We decided to get her, a beautiful dark red piebald long haired mini dachshund, a very unique dachshund with soft chocolate brown eyes.  I couldn't wait to tell my Mom about the little sweetie we found and discuss with her dog names.  We thought of Lucy and Greta but they didn't seem just right.  Later Mom called me back and said she had read a story about a German girl named Sophie and she thought it was a cute name for a dachshund.  Eureka!!  Perfect!!  I was so excited and so was Mom.  She had found the perfect name for my new little fur baby, Sophie.  My new little doggie became Sophie.  Thus I thought it would be so much fun to start a blog and chronicle Sophie's days and tie them in with my thoughts of which I have many.  
   Two years later I lost my Mom to lung cancer and I still had not started this blog, hence a time when my procrastination was a regret.  I spoke to my father a couple of days ago and told him I was going to start my blog and my first post will be up on Wednesday, June 18, 2014, so here it is.  I did not procrastinate, yeah!!  What was different this time was I gave myself a deadline and told someone who made me accountable.  Now I am telling all my readers that I am going to be consistent posting on this blog three times a week.  I am thinking Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday sound like a good start for me.  What can you expect as a reader of this blog?  Well Sophie and I will tell you about our thoughts of the day and share a couple of pictures.  So join me and share your thoughts of the day as we all conquer that stubborn sometimes bad habit of procrastination.  

I love quotes and here is one:
“Procrastination is also a subtle act of corruption – it corrupts valuable time”
― Dr. Amit Abraham

Without self-imposed limits -- and soon -- today's global-mobile instant shutdown lingo will entirely consume all communication. The critique is nothing new; what's new is the emerging and all-too-visible symptomatology, with grotesque mutations and verbal lesions slashed in boilerplate sarcasm's sharp and jagged sound waves.



Yes, we're becoming the Abbreviated People. No, they are. And we must help them stop themselves before it becomes necessary for us to carry their burden and stop them; burden lies not within the boundaries of their 50-words-per day vocabulary.

Abbreviated People (n). A population incapable of conviction, imposing instant one-word "death" sentences at the moment of any possible communication (i.e., Empathy Abortion).

• "Really? Seriously? Whatever." These are the words of The Abbreviated People.

Nothing official is necessary. No laws, no bureaucracy, no self-imposed sub-literate fascist social contracts like "Watch what you post online" (by which the First Amendment has already been effectively eradicated).

What is needed falls well within the easy means of even the easy people on the verge of abbreviation:

• Limit your mobile communiques.
• Take a break.
• Speak to people without installing a real or imagined screen between yourself and them.
• No matter how powerful the attraction of one-word, zero-testosterone, semi-sarcastic verbal putdowns, resist.
• Learn at least the act of silence.
• Allow another voice to fill the limited and hyper-temporary space you've created between yourself and your devices.
• Ignore your impatience; you can wait for yourself.
• Repeat your mantra: "I, and everyone, welcome my intermissions."




YOU CAN HELP!

SIMPLY PRINT 1,000 COPIES OF THIS BUSINESS CARD.

DISTRIBUTE TO EACH AND EVERY PERSON WHO SAYS

"REALLY?" "SERIOUSLY?" AND "WHATEVER!"

All of my fiction is autobiographical. I admit it. However, I can't tell which characters ones are, so to speak, me. The women come closest. Add ten percent of the men, stir, salt, boil, and you might have someone approximating me. Not a clone. Who needs a clone? Aren't any of us more than enough?



If you answered no, you're one of the reasons I'm paranoid. Not because I'm particularly suspicious all of the time but because everyone might have answered no and how would I know? I can only guess. And that's the problem.



Here's the truth I could do without. I tried to live in the haze, a chemical haze neither high nor there. But artificial serenity causes a rare skin cancer that only appears on the imagination. The imagination is my skin. Or what's left of it. After the haze.



Back to the truth. The following began as a personal message. Despite a few minor alterations, duplicating the original message is the only way to tell this truth. 



This benzo withdrawal has immersed me in the most intense anxiety and physical discomfort I've ever experienced. There is some improvement that waxes and wanes, I've been almost forced to deal with some issues that broke through, you might say, the incredible wall I've built both consciously and not. With a little research, I've come to the unavoidable conclusion that at the very least, I have some definite paranoid tendencies which, while often disguised and usually buried, have often enough emerged into the daylight of my actions and wreaked havoc throughout my life.



This is the answer to my oft-asked question, "What in the hell is wrong with me?" The anxiety, I believe, largely emanates from those tendencies, a hyper-form of social anxiety, but way beyond that. In other words, probably diagnosable, for whatever that's worth. No hallucinations, etc. Not even a constant suspicion but a situational one, always worse in stressful environments like a job or most of all living with rather than visiting a group of people. Examples include dorms, detox centers, etc.



These traits, I think, merge with my "pure obsessive" OCD, and because I have some evidence of the disasters these traits have generated, the worst fears of OCD seem justified. It all fits together, a puzzle that constantly tries to assemble itself but which I have managed to launch into space and out of my perception with pills, alcohol, or anything I could get my hands on. But something beyond anxiety and OCD always loomed, just beyond my purposefully-shrouded perception.



Well, now it's undeniable. This
supports my thesis: Last night, while fully accepting that these traits existed, supporting evidence in the forms of memory came rolling in like storm clouds. But they mysterious dissipated before I tried to describe them, which I planned to do when I resumed talking after a movie. I "caught" some of these memories, but the ones that faded told me how well I had trained my mind to reject an awareness of these traits and the word "paranoid," which is still the correct diagnosis in a much lesser form despite a connotation that gives people the wrong idea.



More accurately, my version entails anxiety based on extreme guardedness,
an easily-triggered sense that I've been exploited or insulted (which has ruined
my relationship with several agents and publishers, along with romantic
relationships right on down the line), and the feeling others know my every
weakness and how fragile I am when it comes to these reactions.

As a kid
and adult, there have been times when one or a group of people pick up my
paranoid signals and figure I would be an easy target for ridicule. That almost
always happens when I'm extremely stressed. It happened a few times in detox.
It's happened when I transfer schools, join a new team, anything like that.
Throughout my life, I frequently publicly hang my "daily emotions" out to dry
while absolutely vouchsafing any of what I'm telling you -- in other words, it's
always half the story.



Sometimes, I find the War Mask, and I've been told it's frightening. This
is very rare. It happens when someone challenges me "to a fight," not a physical
fight but, as in one instance, "Hey, Paul, come on, rip on the bass guitar for
us." "Nah, I'm sick, leave me alone." "Come on, man." Pissed off, I picked up
the bass and played a five minute groove that astounded not only them but me,
but they all said the look in my eye before I did it was "kind of scary."  I
suppose I took this as a challenge to my manhood. My instincts were triggered. I
rose to the task with a vengeance. But usually, I collapse in the face of these
challenges. More often, I avoid confrontation altogether, ensuring a neutral
non-result.

The other thing I've read about this syndrome that rings
absolutely true is an extreme defensive stance rights being "violated."  But
when constantly told to "watch what you post online," don't you presume someone
is watching? With perspective, I can even say no to that question. It would be
enough to make everyone think someone is watching what they post online. And
that is exactly what happened. But, you see, this requires only enough genius to
realize the power of suggestion. To actually impose a conspiracy of censorship is impossible. To suggest it's your job or shut your mouth is
genius.

Otherwise, when I use the term "paranoid," I mean I'm often the mind that "Almost
everyone is out to screw me, the Constitution is bullshit, every boss has or
will fuck me over, girlfriends can only be trusted after about six years of
faithfulness (despite whatever I do, of course), and, the most common element of
all, when someone is making noise or otherwise irritating me, they know it's
irritating me and proceed with malice." All of these have ruined aspects of my
life so many times I couldn't possibly remember more than a few examples.



I guess I will just have to adjust and take this crazy-feeling admission
as a way to identify and avoid acting on those feelings. Also, paranoia comes
with the benzo withdrawal territory. Still, these memories go all the way back
to the start of my memory, and the realization had the bell-ring of
long-suppressed truth.



The drugs froze me out. You can see why I'd respond so favorably to that
even though it was ruining me. It was relief from guardedness, fear of myself
and everyone else, and probably most of all, fear of discovering and admitting
these traits, which I am positive collapsed on my head every time I ran out of
pills and then all the more so when I was forced to get off them.






So, this is where I'm at. I'm finally writing a
little but only when an idea drags me to the computer. Otherwise, I don't find
the process worth pursuing. But I am picking up a little steam. As you can
imagine, all of this needs to be filtered and digested, somehow, if possible,
and there's no medication, only therapy, of which I could afford about one
minute per month.



For
the time being, think of me as having put together a jigsaw puzzle, one I don't
want on hang the wall, much less convert into all the walls, but also one I also realize I can no longer leave
it in the trash, where it rots. Life means fear. Not only that. But that first.





There's the truth. I will sign the contract to write a memoir now. I need money. And I didn't even begin to offer details. If you only knew. But that will cost a lot of money.



Anyway...



That book, over there, to the left, was written by a paranoid. I'm the paranoid. I'm proud of that book more than anything else I've accomplished. More than anything else I've conceived. I set and met my goals exactly.



True, the book landed around the ten-year anniversary of 9/11 but nowhere near a bookstore full of airplane novel readers.No, they were at home, stomped by the permanent economic correction. I would prefer to call it an error but, unfortunately, it's the inevitable and uncorrectable result of the global slave economy. The perfect economy for those who prosper in it. Is that paranoid? Who cared about 9/11 when the economy collapsed for good? How could a few thousand dead people compare to...pretty much everybody? It was enough to make me lose my head. I didn't. I saved it for later, and it arrived five or so months ago, when I decided I could not sustain the haze. I could no longer obtain the chemicals to create the haze. Game over. But my novel is still better than yours.



Anyway...



Yes, I'm paranoid. I know you told me so. And now I'm telling you. I know. It's not the end of the world, my world or my story. It just changes them.