Even though it was loudly billed as egalitarian and had some such features, my clan was a monarchy ruled with an iron fist by Mom. An oft-benevolent monarchy, yes, but still a monarchy. Mom had a social caste system like India's. At the top were Mom, my idiot half-brother John, and a succession of dogs.

In the middle was everyone else, in ever-shifting layers.

At the bottom were rednecks and Jews.

Given the dog's status in the elite class, having her well-nourished for max lifespan and least problems would have been a top priority, you'd think. That beast, Tasha, a large German Shepherd Dog, was the lone remaining member of our "noble class" after John was exiled and Mom died.

Dad and Tasha 
Dad was Tasha's whole world and she was his best friend, with Lisa close behind. That wacky dog stuck to Dad like glue, her attention wrapped around Dad's every move to wretched excess, often causing annoyance and hazard to Dad.

Still, he loved her dearly and as a lonely, bored, blind old man, he needed all the friends he could get.

Tasha 
Tasha remains the strangest dog I've ever known. She did no normal dog stuff – no chewing or tearing up things as a pup, no fetching or tugging, no sitting or shaking hands, no barking for treats, no swimming, no interest in toys, no interest in other dogs, no rolling over on her back.

She was wary, suspicious, disobedient, and totally obsessed with Dad.

Tasha was beset by behavioral and health problems. Throwing up at least twice a week and often far more. Ear troubles. Gooey eyes. Skin woes. Frequent short pissing. Wild hyperactivity and neurotic behavior due to a lack of vigorous stimulation and proper training. She chased and chewed her tail until it had to be amputated.

It's worth noting that all the dogs I've raised were solid in their behavior. All the dogs Mom raised were hot messes. She viewed the dogs as people, but one can't properly train dogs with that mindset. They are NOT people, and foolishness breeds trouble. Tasha was raised wrong, trained wrong, and fed wrong, with much woe and expense resulting.

If I got her excited, I was yelled at to stop, even though exuberance and vigor are critical in healthy canine behavior. Repression breeds perversion, and if a dog can't blow off steam, it often comes out in unhealthy ways. You know, like a chewed-off tail.

This disturbing photo says more than I ever could.

Sierra 
Years ago, I had a dog. Sierra was very sweet and well-trained, but suddenly developed severe epilepsy that terrorized us for years. The one success in that battle was a 10 month reprieve fostered by a desperate switch to a quality diet. That led to awareness of how unhealthy normal dog food is - its lone merit is that it prevents the dog from starving. Dogs are not meant to eat corn. You'll NEVER see a pack of wolves chasing an ear of corn across a valley.

On October 10, 2008, there for a visit, I was playing with Tasha. We did our mock fighting game, me acting like I'm smacking her in the head and she jumping around like a bucking bronco, dodging the ersatz blows and gently biting my hands. It's the only play she would engage in after being warped by years of constant yelling from old people to “settle down.” Even late in her life, as a creaky, arthritic old dame, she loved our goofy little game. It's true, and it rhymes!

Mom 
Mom shut down our play, of course, complaining about the dog's maladies, vet bills, and lack of a solution. I strongly disputed her connection of normal, healthy play with illnesses like gooey eyes and ears and vomiting, but that only annoyed Mom. Truth is, like people, dogs become ill when they get “shut down”. A poor diet makes that bad situation worse.

In further response to her complaints, I strongly advised the dog's diet be changed to one that wasn't low quality, corn-based, toxic mainstream crap. And so the battle began.

MOM: We can't do that.
ME: Why not?
MOM (already annoyed by my challenge): She won't eat different food.
ME: How do you know she won't eat something she's never tried?
MOM: She likes her food.
ME: I'm sure she does. What does that have to do with it?
MOM: She won't eat a different food.
ME: That's necessarily untrue. There MUST be some different food she'd eat. Are you saying she's starve if her current food was not available? What if the factory burned down?
MOM: I'm not letting the dog starve.
ME: It's odd you'd say that, but I'm quite glad to hear it. It's not hard to change a dog's food. At best, it's a snap; at worst it takes a bit of technique and cunning.
MOM: We tried other food from the vet, she wouldn't eat it.
ME: That's not good food, it's just bad food with vitamins in it. Don't trust the vet with this matter.
MOM: He's very nice.
ME: Of course he is. Hateful, caustic veterinarians tend heavily to fail. His pleasant personality, though, can't transform that crap into good food.
MOM: He's not hateful.
ME: I know. Why would you say that? You're clearly not considering what I'm saying.

LONG PAUSE

MOM (annoyed): Where do you get the food?
ME: It's delivered by UPS to the porch.
MOM: I have to give them my credit card number?
ME: That's generally the easiest way.
MOM: I don't want to.
ME: Why have a credit card if you're not going to use it?

LONG PAUSE AS SHE THINKS OF A NEW WAY TO OBSTRUCT

MOM: Your father can't be picking up heavy things like that from the porch.
ME (animated): What?!?!? When he buys food at the store, he has to ONE: pick up the food from the store shelf and load into cart, then TWO: pick it up again from the cart to load in the truck, then THREE: pick it up YET AGAIN from...
MOM (interrupting): AaaaaahhhhhhhAHHHHHHHH!!!!!

That's Mom's “Jungle Bird Noise,” a sort of shriek that rose in pitch and volume, uttered when angry. The name itself made her angry - she said I was calling her a bird.

ME (undeterred, louder): …. the truck to the kitchen, which alone is twice as far as from the porch to the kitchen in the UPS scenario! Am I just misinformed on how shopping works? Does Dad have a Sherpa that comes along to carry the dog food?
MOM (laughing derisively and shaking her head in mock incredulity): You are the most tiresome person I've ever seen.
ME (insulted, hurt): I'm simply supporting my argument with highly relevant facts.
MOM (screaming): Why does there have to be an argument!?!?!?
ME (angry): Christ! By “argument” I mean “point of view”! YOU are the one who is turning it into a conflict with all your nonsense and rancor. You complain about things that might be easily be alleviated, yet you oddly stand tall and loud against a simple, common-sense measure to improve the poor animal's lot in life. Don't you care how your dog feels?!?!?
MOM (shrieking, animated): What do you want of me, boy?!? She is fine! You saw how happy she was when you got here!
ME: No, she is NOT fine, she has numerous chronic symptoms that YOU were complaining about 3 minutes ago! And since when does a dog showing happiness mean she doesn't also feel bad? Please recall this very conversation is occurring PRECISELY because I tried to interact with her in a normal, healthy way and you yelled at me to not let her get excited because you bizarrely insist normal, healthy activity somehow results in a bitter litany of expensive, troublesome...
MOM (interrupting again): AaaaaahhhhhhhAHHHHHHHH!!!!! Ha siktir bok, pesavenk! Antipathia! Asholashek!!!
ME: ...health woes!

I got her whole repertoire on that one.

And so it went. Things continued to escalate and flew off into the inevitable irrelevant tangents that occur when arguing with someone who engages in so much bad-faith intellectual dishonesty. The directions in which an argument with Mom could bounce were astounding. She would say almost anything to get the upper hand and, over the years, I've seen her reach for almost every fallacy in the book.

A Gooey Culture of Sickness 
Mom, a chronically-ill, depressed shut-in, built a culture of sickness that reached its insidious hooks even into the poor dog. When I told her this, she grew furious, but it was undeniable - instead of fixing the problem, cleaning the goo from the sickly dog's eyes became a bizarre, valued daily ritual for her and Tasha. How awful.

Despite being a salty veteran of many absurd conflicts with Mom, this incident really spun my head. Why would she fight so bitterly and advance such nonsense in support of her ludicrous, harmful position? I didn't get it.

When one brainy soul is insisting to another brainy soul that we ought not to offer the chronically-ill dog a good diet because an old man would have to carry the food from the porch (again, MUCH less demanding than the store!), something is afoul. How can someone who'd known me from pre-birth, taught me much of what I knew, and spent an eternity arguing with me think for one second she's ever going to get away with such bullshit with me??? It ain't gonna happen.

Fucking Autocrats 
Foremost, we've the autocrat factor. Mom, Neila, John, and Aydin behaved as autocrats. When one is not reliably held accountable for foolishness, it often expands in quality and quantity and the offender becomes comfortable asserting the absurd. Neila's claim, seen in the nauseating Neila's Silly Ass video, that she didn't have the time to send a brief text is an example. When one is not reliably told to take their nonsense and shove it, the nonsense keeps coming.

In my camp, nonsense is simply not allowed, period. Try it and you will get called out and set straight. Since autocracy is nonsense, it, too is not allowed in our fairness- and freedom-based model.

Add the credibility factor. I was Mom's arch-nemesis, the college dropout hippie redneck rock and roll freak stoner bulldog who wouldn't bow down to her, called her and her golden boy John out on lots of bad behavior, raised bloody hell over her treatment of Dad and Reagan, and simply was not the son she "ordered."

Even though I was again and again proven right, right down to the exile of John that would come soon after this very conflict, when I was at odds with Mom, she'd take on a "There goes the dope fiend spoutin' off again, let us hope he tires quickly" type-attitude and dismiss me. When on the trolley with her, though, I was "utterly brilliant."

That's how it goes with them. Play ball their way, you're overvalued.  Obstruct or vex them and you're dirt...a roach...an antipathia.

Even though my values and methods much more grooved with his, Dad always backed Mom. Conflicts would spread to him and I'd end up being the bad guy. Those incidents would make me feel as if kicked in the gut and could take the wind out of my sails for a surprisingly long time. I hated impoliteness, but it was Mom who escalated conflicts by becoming angry, shrieking, saying cruel and senseless things, and pulling out every dirty trick in the book. She would sometimes have a fit when challenged, and her responses were too often nonsensical.

The Switch
I finally got to change Tasha's food.

Why?

Mom died.

But, of course, it's not that simple. About a year after she died, I took action upon becoming, uh, fed up with cleaning (and hearing about) Tasha's giant, awful piles of puke. Just listening to her barf was motivation aplenty, for few things disrupt a nice dinner like a 75 lb. retching, vomiting dog.

Mom never had to clean any of it, so she didn't respect the situation - she'd just yell to Dad that Tasha threw up again and to clean it up. He had a stash of cut box pieces for the regular affair. It was part of their culture.

That ended one night after I'd eaten more super-sized home-made tacos than any civilized person should even consider. After, Tasha, perhaps to show her disgust at what I'd just done, puked a mountain of rank, half-digested dog food and water in the den. Leaning forward to scrape it up with pieces of cardboard while gorged to the larynx and fighting not to add a pile of taco barf to the mess in a Family Guy-style conflagration was so not cool.

A light bulb went off in my head - it's time.

Things changed immediately upon switching to a healthy products. Corn and offal became brown rice, lentil, trout, and lamb. The awful treats were changed to duck and sweet potato sticks. The chronic vomiting halted THE SAME DAY. Ear problems and the chronic gooey eyes lasting almost a decade normalized. Behavior leveled out to more calm and content.

We still would wave a tissue at her and say “clean yer eyes?” and she'd come a-runnin' for a mock cleaning.

The Piss Parlor
A serious problem remained, though - Tasha had gotten in the habit of pissing in the massive front living/dining room. My UV light told the tale - hundreds of quick-squirt excursions among the massive stains sugestive of UTI irritation from her apparent allergies to the old food. I expected the diet switch would alleviate the discomfort and urgency.

Dad's house was unfit for human habitation, just like our first house a few blocks away ended up. Action and a plan were badly needed and he wanted to have his family members over as guests now that Mom was gone.

I had a pro do a basic cleaning. He did what he could for a few bucks, but cited the matter as a disaster remediation affair with a four digit price tag. So, I got a Bissel carpet sucker for a song at an auction, hunted down the best, least-noxious products for the tragedy at hand, and spent over a hundred hours across months in a gag-inducing war in The Piss Parlor. The concentration and quantity of what I was pulling out of that carpet was just plain scary.

It was successful for all except for, of course, Tiffany. She claimed the pet disaster neutralizer juice made her sick even though I pulled it out with straight hot water after each round. Everyone else was fine. Dad, an 87 year old former heavy smoker with a chronic respiratory infection was not bothered. Just young Tiffany.

Dog Potty Pervert Flozzie Cam 
Next, I set up a laptop with a motion-activated camera to see if, when, and for how long she was squattin' in there. It offered a bonus of documenting how little time The Flozberks spent with Dad on their shifts.

We learned Tasha was often slinking into the front room and pissing even shortly after being taken outside. Her regular furtive glances back toward the den and Dad suggested she knew she was doing wrong. The squats ran normal in length, suggesting habit over urgency.

So, I switched to software with a motion alarm that would scream bloody murder, including even a recorded message of my voice hollerin' at her, if she entered the monitored area. That scared the piss into her and worked like a charm. I was finally able to catch and surpass her bladder in the trench war for The Piss Parlor's carpet.

Victory :)
This held for a couple years until late 2018 when she got real old, then the Piss Parlor reopened. Dad was astonished that I was able to change Tasha's behavior - he starkly declared it impossible.

After the diet switch, Tasha never threw up again that I know of after harfing at least a thousand times and probably twice that. Her health improved greatly and we were able to squeeze a couple more critical years out of her. In a huge, unlikely victory, she barely outlasted Dad, sparing him the agony of her passing.

So, a big-ass woo hoo! for that, but now for the bad news:

Defeat :(  
Tasha may have suffered the worst of all of us, but that's a complex and debatable quagmire of a discussion. Her brutal run in which she was nauseus and vomiting for a decade is way on the dark side of epic. It was like being on old-school chemo for 10 years. Every day it continued was a travesty. The way Mom handled it was a disgrace. Dad didn't exactly distinguish himself, either.

My failure, too, was severe, both before and after Mom died.

When Mom and I had the insane conflict outlined above, I was right, but approached it badly. Sarcasm-laden accusations and challenges just made her madder. She was very subborn, so a gentle approach was not likely to work, either, but somewhere in the rational zone sat the right answer.

What was important was that Tasha not be sick and all of us no longer suffered from it. There was a path to that, but I lacked the character and wisdom to find it. Instead, I thwarted the mission and caused more suffering by challenging and ridiculing Mom. There was no need to mention Sherpas.

I needed to make right, not be right. They needed a mentor, not a dick. Tasha suffered an additional 8 years after this failure, I felt like shit for a long time, and the quite rancorous argument dented my relationship with Mom, and perhaps even Dad, for a good while.

Interestingly, it took about a year after Mom died for me to switch Tasha's food, and that was only after she put a damper on taco night afterglow. That's humanitarian, procedural, and cognitive laziness far outside our daily standards. How in the hell did that grievous failure happen?

I think the dog food argument cast such a heavy shadow that it actually somehow managed to outlive Mom. It so disappointed me that I disengaged, a bit as if hypnotized or drugged. When I re-realized that the option to change her diet existed, it was like being dropped in a cold dunk tank. How could I have been so obtuse and remiss?

Another year of suffering for Tasha that absolutely should not have happened.

I get a C- or D+ here. This should have turned out much better. Again, it's not the good you do that defines your character; it's the bad that does so.

Sorry, Tasha :(

Return to Appendices
Many more canine difficulties in A Doggone Shame