I Pee on You, Because I love you.

I am a cranky fucker.

I mean it. You're reading this, my beloveds, and you're thinking, no, that's so not true, she's a delight. And, sorry, but you're wrong. I am a holy terror. Irritation is my new default position.

I'm so highly strung these days, I will yell at a peanut butter sandwich. Peanut butter can go straight to hell.

My boots don't zip up easily and I'm likely to just freak out. I might toss them out the door into the snow and pee on them.

Every time I look at my answering machine I visualize smashing it to pieces with a giant sledge hammer. It wont let me delete messages until I've played them back. What kind of bullshit it this? I've already listened to the fuckity-fucks when they called in and I allowed the piece-of-shit machine to get it. Why do I have to play back the messages?

My disposal stops working if I put a soggy Cheerio in it. What the shit, fuck, cunting, asshole, mother-fucking douche-bag hell is up with that?!

I declared the other day that everyone in this house is old enough to do their own goddamn laundry. These people treat the laundry basket like it's the magic hole into which they can throw just about anything and VOILA! it appears folded in their drawer. Well, fuck all of you.

Vild, in wild agreement with my laundry rebellion, took all his shitty clothes from his closet floor and heaped them in front of the washing machine. This, to better 'do' his own laundry. I ended up washing an unopened package of socks, a belt, a bathing suit and a baseball cap in addition to a year's worth of too-small sweaters and torn boxers. This is NOT what I meant. Fuck him. I might pee on him too.

My poor kids. Those little assholes. I've bought them seven hats apiece this season and there are no hats in this house. Not a hat. Not a single fucking hat. And they don't like having cold heads when they wait for the bus. Makes them cry. I know what might warm them up - if I pee on their heads.

And ok, with the toilet already. Are they just waving their shlongs in the direction of the bowl? Its like they think, I know the toilet is in that corner of the room, so I'll just wave it over there while I brush my teeth and hope some of it splatters in there. She'll never know. Are they dropping their wet craps into the vessel from a hot air balloon? Are their turds stunt ponies jumping into a bucket from the high dive? Because forensic splatter tells the tale.

My van is just another room in the house for foul overspill. Don't leave a dry Starbucks cup in the drink holder of Vild's car, unless you want a courtesy attitude adjustment. But feel free to scrape the chicken feces off your boots on the van rug. Go right ahead. It's not like I use it for my fine upholstery business. Definitely throw your Go-Gurt tube anywhere you want. I'll explain to Mrs. Yiffniff about why her wing-back chair smells like an old vagina.

Definitely ask me what's for dinner. Because, you know what's for dinner? Whatever the fuck you're cooking for me. That's what. Because I've been told my grocery shopping is "too high on the pyramid" another way of saying too expensive. So now I go to the grocery store in a sprint, on my way to meeting the bus, and I am paralyzed. Tacos? Are taco shells too high on the pyramid? I may leap from this pyramid to my own exasperated death. You can all eat cereal for the rest of your life.

I am a very, very angry person. I weep. I rail. I swear. I am a shotgun of human emotion, spraying everyone I love with the buckshot of my rage. Then I fall asleep. Because peeing on everything is exhausting.

And before you all say it - I've had my hormones counted. All present and accounted for, thank you very much. I take my Zoloft, eat stool softeners, drink water, give to charity. I drink medicinally. No help. I get enough rest. I have meaningful work. I still want to break everything within reach.

I've had a hankering for puppy satay. Kitten mittens, made from actual kittens.

I'll punch a nun, I'll do it. If I see a kid's balloon fly from his wrist I'll just point and laugh, I will. I'm not holding the door for any more old people. They can fuck themselves too, with their wrinkles and frailty. I'm not laughing at any more knock-knock jokes, either. Just shut up.

That grill, rusting under the snow? You suck. I hate you.
Those rental properties? I've got a gas can and a match. Don't make me come over there.

Tonight I'm going to buy a rotisserie chicken and eat it in front of the chicken coop.

Woman on the Run

Here's something that's a lot less effective when you live in the country: dramatically storming out.

In the city, after you've slammed the door, you step into the dark unknown where the metropolis swallows you whole. It's possible, in these circumstances, to make the person with whom you're at odds sweat a little, for whatever pernicious act they've inflicted on your poor tormented soul.

It doesn't work nearly so well if you have to put on your hat, scarf and boots, walk to the car, scrape the snow and ice off the windshield, warm it a little and back carefully out the driveway. It's less impactful, from a cinematic standpoint, if the person who's pushed you well beyond your limit, sees you get your side mirror tangled in the bushes on the way out.

The other weekend I felt the need to leave the house with statement. This WILL NOT STAND!

I managed to get out and down the driveway with some vigor, but the moment my tires hit pavement I was no longer a woman scorned, but rather a sad sack on a country lane with the defrost fan running high, trying to make out the road ahead through a tiny portal of defogged window glass. Nowhere to go.

If you storm out in the big city you can walk the darkened streets listening to the soundtrack of your personal noir film, titled, "You Did This to Me", starring you as the under-appreciated heroine. In the country you can only fume in a Giant Eagle parking lot listening to an NPR fund drive.

I try not to be overly dramatic too often, but now and again I like to remind my people that they are free to go fuck themselves.

Living out here it's hard for your walk-out to differentiate itself from the five-year-old-boy version. Vild, at that tender age, ran away from home into the family backyard, where thirty minutes later his parents found him "living" in a leaf pile. I definitely did not want my rebel yell to be muffled by lawn clippings. My statement needed to be bigger than the compost heap.

The most drama I could muster was a timely showing of Mission Impossible-the sequel. That, and a large popcorn. I wasn't exactly turning to prostitution to support my habit, but this act of defiance would take me from the house and away from those terrible people I call my family. It would prove, irrefutably, that I am a woman with mystery wrapped around me like a chiffon scarf in a Hitchcock movie. I can pull on my protective snow gear, go to a mediocre movie at a convenient showtime - and I might NOT pick up milk for breakfast on my way home! If only a Ford Freestar could peel out without tossing the booster seat against the door.

At the theater, I continued to blow the cool air of intrigue - buying a single ticket, standing in the stupidly inefficient line, anticipating the consumption of a giant snack.

The three 'visor' employees, whose job it is to ply me with over sized vats and vessels wearing open hats and aprons, do so with astonishing sloth. There is no fervor to match my inner tempest. The menu of nine expensive things takes them seven to ten minutes per customer to serve. Surely another sequel to the film I'm trying to see will be made by the time I get my bucket and trough. Never mind that they are pulling the wind from my melodramatic sails with the dead calm of their incompetence.

Keeping this low-productivity machine grinding along, is that other employee. Suit-man.
He's that guy who comes from the back to fill cups when the line begins to groan audibly with inefficiency. He's the older young guy, who has, as part of his boss-man paraphernalia, an earpiece. His Associates Degree in Hotel Management has earned him this badge and you will not take it away from him. Like the secret service, this middle-manager needs to be in constant radio contact with his subordinates, the Visor employees, even as he stands next to them scooping kernels into pails, within speaking range. He might, without notice, have to guide in the butter chopper, as it lands in the parking lot next to the dollar store. There is time sensitive data he needs to relay to the girl with the sweeper in theater 8 of this, Hell's Octiplex.

Back in the day, when I needed space, I'd smoke half a pack of cigs on a foggy beach in San Francisco. I damned the heedless souls who'd befouled me with my devil-may-care promise of early-onset lung cancer and heart disease. Or once, drunk and foul in Cabo San Lucas, I staggered the streets muttering, then wrote illegible letters on cocktail napkins in a bar owned by Sammy Hagar. Later that day, as I lay with my face on the cool tile of the bathroom floor, my un-boyfriend wouldn't even bring me a coke from the vending machine when I begged him. My performance as a woman unfettered was electrifying.

I ask suit-man to hold the butter while I willfully ignore the message from my kid who wants to know if I'm still going to make dinner and if not, can he have three cookies. I ignore the next one as well, the one inquiring if I might, on my way home, be able to stop and get some colored folders.

It's as if they don't know that I've quit them. That I am an island. That I am no man's servant.

As Tom Cruise climbs the outside glass of a skyscraper I text them in the dark: Yes, I'll bring the folders.

The older I am, the Older I Get

I think everyone, even those who love the sound of their own voice - musicians, politicians, radio hosts - have had the terrifying experience of hearing their recorded voice played back to them unexpectedly. It's other-worldly and mostly awful. The disembodied howl you hear on that cassette from 1980, those phone messages, that video of your trip to cancun - that's all you baby, that's what you sound like to others. Imagine all the years you've subjected the universe, including the people you actually love, to the screeching torment of your vocal range. Yes, that squealing bellows of sound is your human voice and it's what you give off. We're not really meant to hear our own voices in that way. That realm of sounds should be outgoing only.

Seeing your own photo is like that too. There you are, living a moment so beautiful, glowing in conversation and laughter, when everything makes sense, feels right. You are funny, you are in charge of yourself and you are actively enjoying your time on earth. Your connection with souls, sunset, music and food is positively vibrating with silent harmony. Perfection.

The next day you are shown a photo of that merry moment and what you see staring back at you is something else entirely. You are a malformed, hunched succubus of fat and wrinkle, roll and flake. Your hair looks like you molded it from corn husks and balanced it atop your tiny, tiny cranium, itself a shrunken apple on stooped shoulders. The circles under your eyes are slices of plum, floating in the porridge of your skin, sprinkled with chicken lips.

You stare at that writhing, rippled, loose-skinned, chinless, belly blob, with its gelatinous tits sliding into its corpulent armpits and you think, my god, who is that person and why wont they get a better bra?

The Iphone has that reverse photo feature, so the user can hold it up and shoot their own photo rather than the person out front. Sometimes that little icon gets pressed by my giant ham thumb, when I am, say, crouched over, trying to take a photo of a chair, and suddenly there I am, by accident, all of a sudden, at the worst possible angle, in ruthless light, and I will literally gasp at my own image.

This all sounds like false modesty. There is some serious, sad, ugly out there - people in crowds and lines that documentary films could feature. I gratefully acknowledge that I'm not in that neighborhood. Ugliness-wise I'm not even ringing that doorbell and running. What I'm talking about here is the grotesque discord between the person you feel yourself to be and the person your iPhone reflects you to be. Or the cassette, for that matter, portrays you to be.

These things don't matter, of course. Our physical beauty? Feh! We are but fleshy vessels for the love we feel for others. We are vehicles in which to transport our passion, our vision our silly walks and our lungs, like duffel bags to be filled with laughter.

But, from time to time I am allowed to forget, to indulge in vanity - I'm looking fine today, I think. Look at me go, all fresh and foxy. Then the universe sends me a cosmic jpeg, and, cue balloon-fart noise - there I am again.

Age, too, is funny in this way. Our perfect sense of self is expertly bubble wrapped for all eternity, vacuum sealed in a brine of self-recognition. You feel the same at five, as you do at forty-five. But the box your identity comes in gets quite damaged in life's shipping process. What you do, or don't do, over the years leaves its crumpled marks. The scars from poor hammer aim, or hasty interaction with the toaster over, leave your hands looking like oven mitts for the grim reaper. That zit you picked in 1990, isn't looking much better in 2011.

How is it we can become so loose, while also becoming so brittle? Once, while laying on my side in bed I had to ask my little boy, to "Please, move over honey, you're kneeling on my nipple." That same day I realized I couldn't even touch my kneecaps, let alone toes.

I know everyone has their personal doubts, their individual barcode for shame and self-loathing. I'm not sure it's comforting or just plain sad. It would be nice to have evolved more gracefully, and more completely, into light, fluffy clouds of self-actualization, instead of being perpetually earthbound by the corporeal full-nelson that grabs you, gives you nuggies and stuffs you in the locker of your own disgrace.

Only a few months after I'd had Lily, when I was pretty newly patched from her c-section, when I had a deep, red, raised gash torn across my belly and while my breasts were hot, hard and prone to activate like pre-dawn sprinklers on a Bel-Air lawn. I decided I'd pose for the photographer Spencer Tunick, whose images involve hundreds, and in this case, thousands, of naked bodies, posed in public spaces. I like to do things I think I can't possibly do.

Being naked alone is the worst. Nude with three thousand people is sublime, and here's why: Everyone is beautiful, all are hideous. In that random sampling I saw exactly one youngish woman with a magazine-worthy body that was lovely in both directions. I wasn't there to judge, but I was there to observe. And what I observed was this: Great boobs, terrible ass. Gorgeous face, coarse back hair. Picturesque bottom, zit-peppered face. Soy latte skin, pattern baldness. Giant belly roll, shapely legs. Bra roll, flat stomach. Toned arms, stump legs. Scars, birth defects, tattoos, dye jobs gone Mr Hyde. Crossed eyes, gnarled toes, alarming asymmetry, limps. Mocha, Vanilla, Chocolate, Shitake mushroom, prune. The family album of humanity depicts a comforting sameness in its vast variety - we are desperately flawed and perfectly resplendent. We are malformed and mutant, statues of David, all.

So, when I become too focused on my outsides, I like to give myself a little pep talk. It goes something like this: Shut the fuck up.

And I do, mostly, sometimes.

Dear Colon

Dear Colon,

I'm writing to you to say how sorry I am. There's no excuse for my bad behavior, and every reason to apologize. You've mostly been good to me, and I've been a bad friend.

I think we got off on the wrong foot ten years ago, back when I was newly married, that time when you just freaked out on me for no reason. One minute I'm at the mall doing a little shopping and the next, I'm at home, on the bathroom floor unable to move. You were having some kind of trouble receiving oxygen and by golly, you had a shit fit.

Interesting aside: As I lay on the floor, figuring out the best way to crawl to the phone, I wondered if anyone might get mad at me for calling an ambulance. Like, what if it turned out I just needed a fart and a beer? Was I saving my ambulance call for a time when I might be MORE incapacitated than face down on the floor, bleeding from my ass?

Anyway, colon, this isn't about what you've done, its about me, and what I've done to you. This is, after all, an apology.

People do weird things to their colons. Sometimes they put heroin in tiny balloons and store them in there for the journey. That's nothing. Me, I take about two-and-a-half pounds of roast beef , a half pound of ham, wrap it in sticky buns and casserole, roll it in about a quarter pound of butter, and some cheese, then powder it all with confectioners sugar and coffee grounds and I tamp it down into you like you're a child's Christmas stocking. I imagine you bursting with artichoke dip and yorkshire pudding in the same way those knit stockings are pointed with dollar store toys and Pez dispensers. Again, I'm sorry.

After that whole blood clot thing you did, we've never been right with each other. You've proved yourself to be a bit of a moody prick, I don't mind telling you, and as such, I've treated you like one. Take THAT! I say with a second helping of tenderloin. Nuts? Did you say you wanted nuts? By all means, have a dish of nuts over two days. I think you'll enjoy crushing those up.

You don't fight fair either. You just storm out of the room. No discussion. You decide that I will not have use of any part of my digestive system from now until...you feel like it, or I've repented with a monks diet of twigs and water. What kind of system is that? Who does that benefit? I mean, ultimately, you know I'll just have my doctor shove a camera up there on five feet of tubing and see what you're up to. So really, what's the point of the stalemate?

I want us to be friends, Colon, I really do. There's a lot of you to love and you have some fine qualities. I've seen pictures of you happy, and pictures of you sad, and I like seeing the happy ones with you all pink, looking like an upside down smiley face. The ones of you looking like a twisted piece of old shoe leather make me feel pity and shame.

So anyway, I just wanted to let you know that I am going to try to do better by you. I'm not going to be as reckless with your feelings. I'm going to remember you in my actions. A little warm water at night. Some fiber cereal in the morning - I know what you like. Some probiotics as a special treat. Don't worry, I've got your back. I promise I will not hold you open and choke you like a goose with its liver on the way to becoming a fine pate.

But in return, I'd appreciate a little consideration from you. No more of this stranglehold. No more turning over on yourself and storming off like a spoiled kid. There are going to be times when you are just going to have to take it like a man. I'm not giving up sushi, so you'll just have to take one for the team, far as that goes. And there will be overindulgences from time to time. You know me, you know what I'm capable of, what makes me happy. Don't deny me these pleasures outright.

I'm looking forward to improved relations in the new year.

All the best,

Jess

Torn Asunder

The front room window, circa last week. Now occupied by millionaires.

During my parent's sadistic mid 70's divorce, there was a strange transient period where my dad lived in small apartments around New York. My mom stayed in the too big, un-renovated brownstone with too little money, and us kids. She "took in" a college girl, turning what was once my sister's and my domain into a slender little third floor apartment with a mini-kitchen. The woman walked through our house to come and go. We didn't care. My sister and I just shifted our act downstairs into what was once the master and second bedroom, while my mom moved into the vast downstairs "front room" that had a giant window that looked out onto 95th street. The room had formerly been my Dad's office.

In that room our dad had lectured my sister and me about the use of the calculator. We were not to use it, without express permission and supervision, because it cost a hundred dollars and it added numbers together, you see. But we loved the clicking chunk of those buttons and the (were they digital?) red numbers it displayed.

Later, Mom slept on a single bed in the corner next to built-in bookshelves, sort of tucked in the back corner of this huge, bright, cold room. I now think living small in a large space is one of the most depressing things a person can do. All one can do is hide in plain site. If it had been me, I'd have erected a tent in that room, and slept in that.

Anyway, my Dad was out of the house.

Under the deafening screech of my parent's split, there was this short-lived, quiet and transient reality my dad and I tenderly occupied in short spurts - times when I spent weekend nights at his various divorced-guy apartments. This was an unhappy time, writ large.

But buried in there, between the lurid and humiliating rages he launched against sales-girls in the Bloomingdale's junior department, and shit-fits turned against camp councilors and difficult packaging, I got to watch, with tender awe, as he worked a can opener around a can of tuna and accompanying Tomato soup for our lunch, a Tab for each of us.

I'd never seen him cook a single thing, ever, in my entire childhood. So I think he may have been digging into some college sense-memory, trolling the canned goods isle of Gristedes.

His apartments were always tidy, with a manly minimalist style. He was a bit of a metro-sexual, by today's standards, with his Mason Pearson bristle hairbrush and his shaving cake in a wooden bowl that he swirled across his face with a stubby, soft, round paintbrush.

He had bookshelves bought from Conrans, medal frames with glass shelves, on which he kept some select doodads I always found amusing. Wind-up toys and paperweights, small boxes and maybe an ashtray, or five. He had coffee table books, couches, and nifty cork-wrapped bedside lights, on articulated arms.

For fun we did things around the city, things I now imagine he had to think hard to come up with - ways that I might be amused by his bachelorhood, rather than terrified by it. He had many movie posters, and a couple of times we went to one of those now extinct u-frame it places, and picked out colored, beveled woods, which he paid for by the linear inch. We'd nail them together on the carpeted table tops with the tools they provided, laying the glass in on top of diamond shaped metal bits we'd carefully hammered into the wood. I always got to Windex the glass with newspaper, which felt important and a little dangerous actually, holding the big piece of glass with his help, wiping it clean.

Because he's the film guy, reviewing and making documentaries his entire career, there was almost always an old film in some director's oeuvre that we had to screen together.
This was pre-Beta Max even. So he borrowed or rented a film projector on a rolling cart. I'd pull the telescopic screen with tripod legs from the front closet. I'd tilt the green cylinder horizontally and pull the white scrim from inside it, hooking it to a metal loop at the top.

Together we'd watch old movies; Sullivan's Travels, The Third Man, The Philadelphia Story. He taught me how to thread that machine, a thing I loved, looping the film before snapping the lens shut, sliding it through all the slots and over sprockets in correct and precise order before winding it over the back reel and giving it a little spin to gather the header. He might even have some Jiffy Pop, and we'd shake it over the electric burner until the silver dome helixed out from its center, filling with hot buttery air first and then popcorn. More Tab.

He'd pull out the couch in the living room (in that apartment) and we'd together put the sheets on, sliding a pillow into a special single case he pulled from his closet. After tucking me in he'd go back to his room, reading and smoking into the late hours, long after I'd fallen asleep. I might have to pee, and I have a strong memory of him sitting up in his pajamas, half-glasses on, smoke curling up from his bedside ashtray.

A couple of times we went to the bubbled indoor tennis dome - a sort of Jiffy Pop container for tennis enthusiasts. We'd whack a ball around with wooden rackets, dad always torturing my nine year old back hand, with his lefty forehand. Then we'd go eat somewhere. Often as not, dad would take the opportunity to mine for and curse the events of my mother's life. He berated her horribly, and made me feel nauseous under the weight of my loyalties and betrayals, which were of course exclusively theirs. These were dark and mysterious times.

Soon enough my mom hooked up in a serious way with a man I grew to love very much, and after putting my sister in boarding school, the three of us, Mom, David and I, moved to Santa Fe New Mexico, which I know devastated my father and ultimately us, until we moved again, this time to Los Angeles, another doomed year for me, until the following one, when I too went to boarding school and thrived.

It would be twenty years before I would live in the same city as my dad again. By then so many years had shot through the goose-ass of life, so much wreckage and hurt, so many wrong moves and bad choices by everyone around me, that I'd become independent of the grown-ups in my life. I was an adult by the age of thirteen, and an old soul by my twenties. Dad became more stooped and internalized, and I was no longer a child he could amuse easily on a rainy Saturday.

I think back on those days, wading frightened in the dark waters of my parent's adult humiliation and defeat, through their bitterness and regret, and I find kernels of memory that taste sweet on the tongue. Something in there seems rare and momentary, a suspended dream of a time where buoyed by sadness, my dad and I bobbed along on a raft of tissue paper that too quickly dissolved under us.

Going to the Dogs, by Way of Pets

The pressure to get a dog is exquisite. There are a lot of people in this house who want a dog, while team 'no dog' has only one member.

It's me, the giant asshole. The huge, soul-snuffing, puppy-eating, cat-strangling, hamster-drowning, goldfish-slaughtering, poop-stain on the cosmic undies of the universe animal hater. This is how I'm portrayed in the family album.

People pile on.
"How can you NOT have a dog, living on five acres?"( You fuckwad.)
"Your kids are the perfect age for a dog" (Don't you love them?)
"It'll teach them to be compassionate and responsible" (Because they're not.)
"Dog's are so great." (You are Hitler)

We had one hamster who threw herself to a rigid death behind the dresser. I plucked her corpse, gingerly, from behind the drawers with salad tongs and told a loving story of how she had escaped to a better life in the fields.

Our second hamster lived in giant fish tank, pimped to look like the Playboy mansion, with grotto, exercise equipment, and a rotating heart-shaped bed made of pine shavings. Every week or so I would heft the glass enclosure downstairs, remove the divine Miss Bitter to a salad bowl, lift out her urine soaked furnishings and commence the room service and bed turn down that she so richly deserved. I bleached and rinsed her igloo domicile. I emptied and refreshed her on-demand drinking bottle. I tipped the twenty-five pounds of glass into our kitchen sink and scrubbed the sides with a scratchy sponge. I towel dried the insides to limit its humectant properties. I sprinkled a fluffy layer of fresh shavings and re-decorated her habitat to stimulate and amuse her. I bought her a car - a sphere of clear plastic that she could ram into walls and park in corners. When she was forgotten, I would take her out and let her run around in my shirt sleeves. I once told my therapist that I worried late at night that I wasn't providing our rodent a rich enough life.

We have two fish left, from the eight we've bought over the years. The two beta's, who share a divided tank on Lily's dresser, are hanging in. They were asked for and delivered within the hour, by the children's father, who shall remain nameless.

Fish, when crammed into an inadequate living space and overfed, are fetid, rancid creatures. I learned this again recently when I thought our daughter's vagina was rotting, but discovered it was only the cloudy fish tank wafting out an other-worldly odor of putrification and death.

Using a soup ladle, as I have many times before, I scooped puke-fish one into a coffee cup and covered her with fresh water. Gag-fish two got his own measuring cup. Holding my breath, I poured the feculent, malodorous, swamp mung down the garbage disposal. The miasma filled the kitchen and discharged into the living room. I have sniffed some pretty terrible things in my day - food stuffs, forgotten wet things, flood damage, sewage, homeless people, wounds - but this is the worst of them. No hyperbole. The worst smell I've known. It's like I imagine other smelly times in history - plague-rotted corpse piles, the underclothes of dueling knights after weeks afield, the signing of The Declaration of Independence; all those hairy men in summer-weight woolens, trapped in an airless room in the July Philadelphia heat. This is why I don't want a dog. Because of the Declaration of Independence.

When I went to a friend's house for the weekend, I came home to six fluffy chicks, pooping in a box under a heat lamp in our guest room. Tiny, sweet things with little peeps, small as a child's balled up sock. A joy. Until, like human babies, their poops turn to shit. Smelly, stinky shit. And they started kicking their sawdust all over my work space. A fine mist of sawdust filled the air, and landed like talc on everything in the room. Before long they outgrew the smelly box that once held my winter clothes, now a pile on the basement floor, and we moved them to the garage, where they continued to grow and crap while walking in an enormous old furnace box made of steel. Every few days I would climb into the clanging box and rake out their space, shoveling their crumbled, dry feces that once leaked wet from their chicken anuses, into a wagon and roll it into the woods. I'd lay down more sawdust, change their water, refill the crumbles, talk to them in dulcet tones.

Soon enough we converted the children's play structure into a coop by removing the slide and swings and flattening the clubhouse into a roost. Vildy and I moved the thing with muscle power only, by walking it, this end, that end, over to a shady spot so as to not prematurely fry the chicken.

They are amusing little pets, chickens. They lay eggs, for one thing, so they are like living slot machines - you pump in about five-hundred dollars in quarters and you get the thrill of a two-dollar jackpot every couple of days. Plus, they are genuinely sweet and curious creatures who act out enjoyable little chicken behaviors, fluffing, pecking, flapping, clucking, while digging forever in the straw and comically kicking it up onto each other's head. But they are profluent shitters, caking their hen house with a mortar of turd that needs to be scraped off with a hoe. Enter me, a hoe, in pajamas and wellies.

I climb into their disgusting little abode, sometimes with the willing help of my girl, often not, armed with my scraper, rake, snow shovel and steely resolve. I chisel their grime off the floorboards. I hose off the broom handle perch. I disassemble the feeder and waterer so I can replenish. I drag the cubic meter of straw or wood chips from the man-barn so I can bed them in clean fodder. I even hooked up a fan, with a long extension cord from the house, to better air out and dry their penthouse apartment. Once upon a time I had only to buy a carton of eggs.

Our cat, Ella, is sleeping next to me as I write this. She is my only friend. She understands my need for personal space, but also my desperate longing for affection. She provides both. She has the courtesy to poop outside, in the woods somewhere, and bury it in the pine needles. She is immaculate in a way I only wish my children would be, cleaning behind her ears with a paw and licking her own butt clean. She requires of me only the occasional lap, and my dexterous ability to pull back the tab on her dinner once a day. She too does not want a dog. We've talked about it.

My husband says a dog will keep the raccoons away. A compelling prospect, considering that I am the ONLY person who wakes up when the raccoons sneak into the kitchen through the cat door to throw our garbage all over the room. I am the only person who goes downstairs in her undies to hiss the raccoon out of the house and then clean the giant steaming man-sized raccoon shit pile off the counter. I am the one who tapes the cutting board over the cat door with duct tape at four in the morning and redeposits the coffee grounds and egg shells into the trash.

In closing, I will relay this impossible story: an OCD friend of a friend, who doesn't like people to disrupt the neat lines in the carpet made by the vacuum cleaner, got a dog. She dries the dog's paws with a towel every time he enters the house and also, I'm not making this up, wipes his asshole with Windex.

Who's the animal lover here? The one who promises never to squeegee a pet's ass with window cleaner, or the person who gets a dog?