The Christmas Presence under My Olive Trees

Dog Poet Transmitting.......

Tomorrow is Christmas; the day they decided to celebrate the birth of the Sun King. Louis might object to being preceded but he was as much the Sun King as any of today’s leaders are possessed of kingly virtues. Most leaders aren’t, nor most kings. Present day royalty... many of whom purchased or expropriated their titles are a pretentious lot. Some earned them in bed and some earned them by carrying out loathsome tasks that were too dicey for the regent to engage in. I’ll admit that Baron Visible has a nice ring to it but I’ve already got a title, it just isn’t operative here.

I’ll be spending Christmas alone except for the dogs. That is not uncommon for me. The same goes for birthdays. I can remember one birthday party in my life. It was attended by eight beautiful women, who were all friends of mine and one guy. That was nice. Otherwise it turns out to be a day like any other. I’ve no idea why this happens to me. I guess it comes with the territory...

A lady who lives across the way from me and who is very wealthy asked me to feed her dog while she was gone. It’s a German Shepherd who is about 15 years old. He can’t walk very well anymore and she mentioned that to me but what she didn’t mention was what I have been discovering in taking care of him. He falls down and can’t get up and sometimes it rains here and sometimes it can get cold. It’s been warm the last day or two- 70 Fahrenheit in the day. Before that it was cold and raining and the dog would just fall down somewhere and have to lay there until I arrived.

His water bowl was black with some sort of accretion that comes when water sits for a long time. Didn’t it occur to her to clean his bowl? I found him laying in his own wastes today. I lift him to his feet and try to care for him. He stumbles about the way someone really intoxicated might do and sometimes he falls down and I have to pick him up again. She feeds him this dry food which he seems to like. My dogs get hamburger or chicken and rice which I fix for them. It doesn’t seem fair, so I bring chicken dogs over to mix with his food.

He’s a wonderful dog. I took care of him last year around this time and he could get around pretty good. He’s a very big dog. He must have been something in his prime. When I come over to the house now, (which is surrounded by high stone walls with a chain link fence on the side that faces my property across the field that I walk to get there) I can hear him lifting his voice in a plaintive bark. There is no question he is crying out for help. I’ve gotten to where I’m checking on him now and again in the day but what can I do really? I can’t get him into his dog house and what about getting him out when he has to go?

I have to suppress my resentment against this woman who insisted on giving me a bottle of cheap champagne and some pastry for 3 weeks of attending to her dog. I don’t expect payment for doing the right thing but this is difficult for me. This noble champion dog is just left there after all those years of service, to lay in the rain and his own excrement because he can’t get up. He’s probably lying there right now. If I go over and lift him up he will just fall down soon enough again.

I can’t bring him back to my house which is what I want to do because my dog Poncho doesn’t play well with others and I’ve got a little German Shepherd puppy that I pulled out of an olive grove a couple of weeks ago and he’s real fragile and I have enough trouble getting Poncho to be indulgent of him. This big, crippled Shepard would be a problem.

This woman is a millionaire several times over. She could have hired someone to stay at her house and give the dog full time attention. It is little enough to ask after all those years of love and protection that this dog gave her and I just don’t understand people. I don’t understand people at all. They do this to their pets and they do this to their farm animals and they do this to each other. They are clear sailing in their minds and it just doesn’t seem to bother them.

Susanne has a sister named Tatina Lieberman (she married another Roger Nietzsche to get the Swiss citizenship; I’m referring to Bagwan Rajneesh... later called Osho) and lives in Basel in an apartment she purchased with money borrowed from their joint inheritance and never paid back. The reason we live with Susanne’s mother is because I found out, while we were living in Munich, that Tatina was trying to get her mother’s driver’s license revoked and put her in a home. I told Susanne we had to move down there.

Because we did this, Tatina stole nearly seven hundred thousand Swiss francs from her mother’s account and cleaned out her safety deposit box of certain valuables including Krugerrands and a kilo of gold. She also took items from the house. She’s a despicable character and she has no shame whatsoever. Every now and again she used to call and say that she had a terminal brain tumor but she never seemed to die from it. Now she doesn’t call anymore at all. She’s wired into the Osho fellowship and she’s got all kinds of pictures of Buddhas and goddesses and spiritual books.

Susanne and her mother and I, including the dogs, get by one way or another. I don’t miss what Tatina stole because it was never mine in the first place. Besides, I am one of the richest men on Earth, I hardly lack for anything important.

Susanne and I have taken care of her mother for the last ten years and I must say that it has been one of the most rewarding things that ever happened in my life. Her mother is just about as sweet a person as you will ever find. She is immensely grateful for every small attention and always has a smile on her face. She seldom complains and she’s also very sharp. So is that dog, whose name is “Black”. He’s deaf and he can hardly walk but he knew Poncho was outside of the solid metal gate even though Poncho made no sound and he unerringly found his way to the low rock wall where I had laid the chicken dogs for no more than a minute. Even though they were gone, he knew they’d been there.

Why am I talking about this dog and this Vampire Sister from The New Age on Christmas Eve? I’m alone this Christmas and I don’t miss people much anyway but I am alone and I will be alone through the holidays and until I head north, whenever it is that I do but... I’m not sitting outside like Black tonight (thankfully it is mild at the moment) and I’m not Tatina. Black is far more human than Tatina will ever be and right now he’s laying out in the grass (I hope he’s laying in the grass) and he can’t walk and his mistress went off on a trip and left him and I know just how fine a creature he is because I’ve been watching him for several years and I know a good dog when I see one. Meanwhile Tatina is living it up on her stolen dime ripped from her mother’s savings for her old age. Tatina’s defense of her theft was that it was for her old age. She glides through life, air kissing the empty space between her lips and the cheeks of the people she pretends to care about. She should be in Hollywood. There are plenty like her there.

The real reason I am writing this is out of gratitude that I am not like Tatina and that I am not in Black’s situation. I don’t know what to do about Black. The logistics are che non consentono. There are a lot of dogs worse off than Black tonight and there are more people like Tatina than we care to admit. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard variations on this same theme happening to some old lady or old man. I watched a football game tonight that was played in San Diego last weekend and I watched the crowd and they were howling and shaking their fists and jumping up and down and I thought, there are so many more of them than there is of us.

I’m glad to be who I am even if it means I am alone a lot of the time. I am truly glad that I never stole my parent’s money when they were unable to care for themselves and I would never leave my dog in a situation like I find Black in. I just could not do such a thing, so I consider myself a very lucky man. I’ve made my share of mistakes but they have been mostly crimes against myself, or reckless blows against the empire. People who knew the facts would say that I’ve had a hard life until recently but I wouldn’t trade any of it for what it has taught me. In the spirit of that I wish all of you a wonderful day tomorrow and I hope you know how to count your blessings because most of you are as rich as I am.

Something for Jesus Christ and Tatina too

Visible sings: ♫ Imaginary Queen ♫
'Imaginary Queen' is track no. 10 of 11 on Visible's 2001 album 'God in Country'
Lyrics (pops up)



The New Shangri-La.