TKM

I had a dream last night that our home was infested with giant cockroaches that I could not kill. They were too smart and agile to stomp on, and spraying them with Raid only pissed them off. In sharp contrast to the other dream I remember from last night, in which my supervisor told me I should definitely ask for a $20,000 raise and that he’d make sure I got it, the cockroach dream was one of sheer terror.

I’ve never thought twice about stomping cockroaches when I see them in our detached garage; if I let them live out there, I figure, it’s just a matter of time before they’ll ask to come inside. And actually, they won’t ask.

Spiders, on the other hand, I’ve always treated with a kind, if not downright welcoming, manner. When I see one in the house I generally go find a newspaper or Dixie cup to gently scoop it up so that I can release it into the backyard. If you’re a bit of an arachnophobe and don’t want to get quite that close to the little guy, here’s a transfer gadget that probably breaks when you look at it funny.

Me, I don’t even bother depositing spiders far from the house; I just open the door and set them down to make their merry way where they will. There are times when I see a spider far up the bathroom wall and think, Meh, let it be, but that’s usually because it just seems like too much trouble to go get a stepstool. I may even feel a little lazy or guilty in those instances because I know that the spider needs insect prey to survive—I really ought to put it outside where it can thrive, but again, I have to go get the stepstool.

Concern for insects’ nutritional needs, I’ve recently learned, is not a personal quirk. On Friday night my wife and I went to see Cheryl Wheeler play live at McCabe’s Guitar Shop, where Wheeler asked whether anyone in the audience followed her practice in hotel rooms whereby when she encounters a fly and can’t manage to shoo it out a window or door, she goes to the vending machine to buy it something to eat—usually a granola bar—because she worries that it will starve in the sparse confines of a hotel room. I adore Cheryl Wheeler.

I have to admit that I kill indoor flies, and even outdoor ones if they get to be a nuisance on the patio. Choosing a fly-control method is its own nuisance. I’ve always thought of fly strips as trashy and bug zappers as cruel, so last summer we purchased a trap that you load with bait-infused water; flies enter for the delicious attractant (which smells like sewer water, but no one ever accused fecal-dwelling flies of having good taste), find themselves unable to escape, and drown in the water. That’s cruel too, I realize, but it was one of the few truly effective solutions out there (said online knowers) that I thought wouldn’t be gross to look at and handle. Besides, at least the poor fellas would have a good meal before they died.

I was wrong about the not-gross part. As the dead flies collected in the reservoir they became a liquefied pool of death, and if I was tardy in emptying the container—for which I wore a dust mask and Playtex gloves—maggots would begin to spawn in the death pool. It was, frankly, one of the most disgusting tasks I’ve ever been forced to confront.

This summer, with due diligence, I discovered (through other online knowers) a not-at-all-gross fly deterrent that seems to work pretty well. Apparently, the crap-eating, garbage-loving, maggoty little beasts despise basil. Enter basil plant on patio. Not so much trouble with the flies this year, though I’ll admit to some suspicion that the enormous number of flies trapped on our patio last season was in part a result of the trap’s bait attracting more flies to our patio.  At any rate, even if our relatively fly-free summer wasn’t really about the basil, the plant smells great and can be useful in cooking besides. Win-win.

But the question remains, why so hostile toward flies and cockroaches while kind toward spiders and “cute” insects like butterflies and ladybugs? There’s a good argument to be made for usefulness to the environment. Spiders control insect populations, butterflies help pollinate gardens, and ladybugs eat aphids, a common garden pest (in the 1980s, after Southern California was blanketed with several cycles of overnight malathion spraying via crop planes to control a fruit fly infestation, ladybugs also disappeared, after which aphids ran rampant in household gardens and commercial orchards; when humans mess with shit, other shit gets messed up).

Flies and cockroaches, on the other hand, are omnivorous refuse dwellers who spread germs and disease. That’s probably why we have a superhero called Spider-Man and not one called Cockroach-Man.

Sing it with me: “Cockroach-Man, Cockroach-Man, does whatever a cockroach can!”

But eating garbage is purposeful, and we humans produce an awful lot of it. We also happen to be omnivorous consumers who efficiently spread germs and disease. So we either discriminate against flies and cockroaches because they’re ugly (and we’re shallow) or because we’re competitively jealous.

Consider the cockroach, which can survive for up to a month without food, up to 45 minutes without air, and up to 30 minutes underwater. It can slow down its heart rate at will and can withstand up to 15 times the amount of radiation that would be lethal to the average person. It is one of the fastest insects (or animals) on the planet, clocking speeds of 50 body lengths per second, the equivalent of a human running 205 miles per hour. And unlike their relatively short-lived insect pals, a cockroach can live for up to a year.

The housefly, by contrast, lives only 15 to 30 days, but what it lacks in life quality it makes up for in reproductive quantity, with the ability to lay up to 500 eggs during a single cycle—oh, and females reach sexual maturity at 36 hours old. Here’s a couple of flies getting some.

Houseflies are really anything but common: They can walk on walls and ceilings and, of course, they can fly, all feats of storied human fantasy. They’re also pure ninjas. Professor Michael Dickinson of the California Institute of Technology released a study in 2008 revealing that a fly’s brain is able to anticipate a threat, calculate the angle of attack, and evade the maneuver in the course of 100 milliseconds. Though Dickinson has an affinity for flies owing to their technical talents and claims that he personally never swats them, his research has at last given humans’ fly-swatting technique game.

Given all that potential, Dickinson might ask, what’s not to like about the housefly—except for the fact that they constantly vomit and deposit fecal matter on household surfaces?

It’s not like spiders are Polly Perfect. Some of them bite, as I was reminded Thursday night when I couldn’t get comfortable in bed and discovered an irritated red bump on my rump. I’m fine now, thanks. Apparently it wasn’t a brown recluse spider, a species whose bites can kill you dead. I would post a picture here of an advanced BRS bite, but I don’t want to ugly up my blog that much—and I say that having posted that cockroach picture. But go ahead, take a moment now to look up “brown recluse spider bite” in Google images, then try to come back and not hate on me.

The good news is that, as implied by their name, brown recluse spiders don’t so much like people…or other animals or insects for that matter—they prefer to scavenge for dead insects rather than live prey. But they take up residence in dark, undisturbed spaces like attics and basements, and they hunt for food far from their webs—which they use for nesting, not trapping—and tend to take temporary refuge during hunting expeditions in bedding and such. So while they would just as soon not come in contact with humans, and humans would way rather not come in contact with them, the opportunities during which we might meet each other unexpectedly are rife—and then they try to kill us.

My spider bite has proven unfatal thus far. Still, I feel utterly betrayed. After all that not-killing, some spider up and bites me on the ass. It was probably one of those that I saw in the house and ignored—now starving because I killed all its flies—and if the bite wasn’t enough to get my attention, now the little fucker is sending giant cockroaches to haunt my dreams. A fitting retribution, I imagine, for our delineation of good insect from bad, beautiful from ugly, friend from nuisance, welcome guest from marked for death.

After 20 minutes of deliberation a jury has found Scout Morrison guilty on 118 misdemeanor charges stemming from a December 2007 harassment incident involving a California ground squirrel.

Morrison, a 2½-year-old German Shepherd mix who was tried as an adult, wagged his tail merrily as the jury foreman read the guilty verdicts, including one count of assault, one count of kidnapping by confinement, one count of torture, one count of reckless mayhem, and 114 counts of criminal barking threats.

Morrison in a 2009 file photo

Morrison was just 11 months old at the time of the incident, during which he chased the squirrel up an elm tree located in his backyard, then barked and paced below for a solid hour, preventing descent by the squirrel, who testified that he was “paralyzed by his fear of heights, and also of being eaten,” and therefore was forced to remain in the upper branches of the elm to a point of mental and physical exhaustion that required immediate hospitalization.

Prosecutor Rocky Lundt, representing the plaintiff through Breaking Down Fences, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization dedicated to fighting the yardification of squirrel habitats, said he believed the jury reached “absolutely the correct verdict” but also bemoaned the slowness of the criminal justice system. “It may be perfectly fine for humans, or even dogs, to wait a year and a half to see justice served, but California ground squirrels have an average life span of four, maybe five years. It’s an indignity, to say the least, that my client had to spend the best months of his life suffering through baseless motions and hearings while his attacker ran loose in his ancestral home.”

Prosecutor Lundt

The case raised a number of questions pertaining to the nature of ownership and clashing land-use rights between native wildlife and the so-called domesticated predators who arrive with host families following a home sale.

Defense counsel Needles, an opossum who disagreed strongly with the jury’s verdict, noted that while she largely felt sympathy for suburban and exurban wildlife, the backyard in question is attached to a ranch home built in 1954, giving this particular squirrel’s forebears 55 years to relocate to a nice nearby park. Besides which, Needles added, “I maintain, as counsel has repeatedly maintained, that dogs are incapable of recognizing the difference between a scared squirrel and a small, playful dog. One can either choose to see that as vicious or beautifully egalitarian; I think you know where I stand.”

Delays in the case were partly due to discontinuity in Morrison’s defense. Morrison’s initial counsel, Slinky—an undocumented cat who may have been angry with the homeowners for trapping, spaying, and re-releasing her to their yard with a nicked ear—disappeared several months into the trial and wasn’t heard from again. Morrison then briefly enlisted a squirrel attorney, but a caseworker intervened on his behalf to request a competency hearing and Morrison’s trial was put on hold until new counsel could be found.

Needles, who took over Morrison’s case in mid 2008, motioned for a change of venue, arguing that it was “impossible for him to obtain a fair trial in a backyard he feels obliged to defend from alien creatures, strange sounds, and shiny things,” but Judge Chi Chi Champaign, a Chinese Crested dog from next door, ruled that the trial would take place under the pomegranate tree, with jury selection to begin as soon as the homeowners could be bothered to fill the nearby birdfeeders to attract a suitable jury pool.

Judge Champagne

The eventual jury of four house finches, two mourning doves, two lesser goldfinches, two Western scrub-jays, one mockingbird, and one starling all fixed their gaze on Morrison as the jury foreman read the verdicts, convicting Morrison on all counts—despite a potentially damning photograph of the plaintiff that emerged during the trial suggesting he may be in the habit of taunting predators.

Defense exhibit A

“Look, this clearly was not a jury of his peers. Some were just too dumb to get out of jury duty, and the rest obviously had an ax to grind. He’s likely given chase to every one of them at some point,” Needles said. “And 114 counts of criminal barking threats? The squirrel was paralyzed by fear but somehow had his wits about him to count the number of times my client barked. Ever heard of a little thing called ‘playing’ possum? There’s no play to it, folks, that’s threat-triggered paralysis—and I could no more tell you how many times a dog has barked at me in that state than I could tell you what you ate for breakfast in your kitchen this morning, because I wasn’t there!”

Needles went rigid twice during the course of the trial, forcing the court to adjourn indefinitely while she regained consciousness. She spoke frankly about her handicap at the press conference. “It’s certainly a hindrance professionally,” she sighed. “The sudden paralysis is one thing, but the foaming at the mouth and the anal secretions—it’s all quite involuntary, but only other opossums can truly understand the embarrassment. Sure, I think about how life might be different for us otherwise. We have opposable thumbs on our hind feet, you know, and 50 razor-sharp teeth that we rarely get a chance to use defensively because of our stupid maladaptive reflex.”

Needles showing off her teeth to reporters

Prosecutor Lundt moved that Morrison be housed in a secure facility pending sentencing, calling him a “loose cannon,” but Judge Champagne remanded Morrison to the custody of his host family.

“That’s ludicrous!” Lundt shrieked. “The homeowners have been completely irresponsible about curbing this lunatic canine! How can you possibly guarantee my client’s safety?”

Judge Champagne, in a rare show of irritation after the long and sometimes circus-like trial, sighed, blowing the forelock of hair from her brow. “I don’t know, counsel,” she said. “Perhaps your client could, for his own good, temporarily relocate to the perfectly nice elm tree just outside the fence line?”

Sentencing is scheduled for the next time the birdfeeders are filled.

A German shepherd mix charged with the unlawful harassment of a squirrel will not face hate-crime charges, according to his lawyer.

The dog, Scout Morrison, confined to his backyard until his court date, still faces a number of criminal and civil complaints related to a Sunday incident for which a squirrel, claiming undue hardship and psychological trauma, seeks compensatory damages in addition to permanent relocation of the accused.

A police sketch of the accused, who was quickly identified in a backyard lineup.

Alarmed at the dismissal of hate-crime charges, the squirrel—who in addition to the unlawful harassment complaint is charging Morrison with reckless endangerment and mayhem—appeared shaken at a press conference during which he called the entire backyard animal behavioral code into question. “I cannot imagine how the court can dismiss such an obvious example of a hate crime,” the squirrel said. “Sadly, the day has arrived when a city squirrel can no longer peaceably live in his chosen backyard, where,” he choked audibly, “my forebears have long acted as the sole remaining visible example of undomesticated wildlife for so many suburban children.”

The squirrel gathered himself and apologized to the gallery. “I’m sorry. It’s been an emotional day for me,” he said, his tail twitching. “I’ve been stressed and anxious since the incident, and now that animal has been confined to his backyard—my backyard!—pending trial. I can’t just pick up and find a new backyard. My family has been farming tangerines and pomegranates here for decades; it’s our ancestral home.”

The victim claims he suffered “extreme traumatic stress” from the incident.

Morrison, just shy of his first birthday, allegedly held the squirrel physically and emotionally captive for a solid hour Sunday, keeping watch at the base of the tall elm whose uppermost branches supported the squirrel.

When a reporter suggested that squirrels are “born tree dwellers,” the squirrel erupted, “We’re not all the same! I happen to be a California ground squirrel, which should tip you off that I’m not exactly comfortable with the heights.” He paused as his lawyer leaned to whisper something in his ear, then added, in a calmer tone, that he has an inordinately high metabolism and had slept only fitfully over the weekend. He said he feared falling from sheer exhaustion.

Reached for comment, Morrison’s lawyer, Slinky, also a backyard resident, said of the judge’s ruling, “Well, of course, it would have been a mockery of justice had the judge ruled otherwise. Even if my client did ‘harass’ the complainant, the notion that he targeted him solely because he’s a squirrel is beyond ludicrous.” Then she added, exasperated, “Look, as an undocumented cat, I certainly understand that canines can seem thuggish during encounters with smaller backyard residents, but we all recognize that dogs have no working concept of different species. It’s just a thing with them. To my client, the squirrel was just another dog, and for that reason a hate crime was plainly impossible in this instance.”

The accused, who chewed a rawhide throughout his preliminary hearing, betrayed no emotion as the judge announced his decision.

The squirrel’s legal team has called Morrison’s hiring of a feline lawyer “at best a publicity stunt, and at worst a calculated act of jury manipulation.” “We see right through this transparent ploy to paint the aggressor as a sympathetic and peaceable member of the community,” said prosecuting attorney Rockford “Rocky” Lundt, also a squirrel. “We’re hoping for an all-bird jury.”

When asked directly whether Slinky’s hiring indicates ulterior motives, Morrison replied that he didn’t understand the question, adding, “She’s the only dog I know with a law degree.”

The only known witness to the events of December 2 is Morrison’s sister, Biscuit, who, though also a canine, is not a littermate of the accused. Biscuit, 3, whose credibility has been called into question by the prosecution team, admitted that Scout “can be a little high-strung, but he was just trying to play with the little dog.” Biscuit called the squirrel’s reaction “a complete misunderstanding and overreaction. Scout just loves meeting new dogs, and he was especially fascinated with this one because he could climb trees!”

“This dumb act has got to stop,” Lundt said. “Dogs understand more than they let on, but they get away with murder because of this reputation they have for compromised critical thinking skills and attention deficits. It really does us all a disservice, and I would think they would be the first species to want to debunk this myth.”

Reached for comment inside the defendant’s home, Morrison’s feline sisters Halo, 5, and Califia, 13, said that they had no comment.

Asked how Halo’s and Califia’s refusal to testify on their brother’s behalf might affect the case, Slinky said, “They’re completely irrelevant. Anything they have to say would be discredited immediately since, you know, they’re ‘indoor’ cats. What are their lives about, day in and day out, other than lounging around on soft, warm things, waiting to hear the can opener?” Slinky then abruptly turned from the cameras and announced that she wasn’t taking any more questions, noting that she had something in her eye.

The accused reacts to the glare of news cameras.

The trial is scheduled for early in 2008.

We’re having butter issues, le domestique and I.

Actually, we’re having buttery spread issues—butter originating in the udder is untouched by the controversy.

It’s sad, really. We thought we had found a buttery spread with which we could form a lifelong bond, but our BBF betrayed us—or, rather, never had our back at all. Land O’Lakes® Light Butter with Canola Oil, a product chosen for its low fat content, rich flavor, and lack of hydrogenated oils, served us in any number of ways for a year or more. We had switched to LO’L from Brummel & Brown®, a yogurt-based spread previously chosen for its low fat content, rich flavor, and agreeable spreadability factor. (For the record, LO’L was a little too spreadable. Straight out of the fridge it was ready to melt invitingly on to—or even molecularly merge with—your toast, your pancakes, what have you. But if you happened to take it out of the fridge too early, like, more than 30 seconds before you absolutely needed to, it assumed its preferred liquid form. That’s what one gets, I suppose, for asking too much of her buttery spread.)

We had turned our backs on B&B—the discovery of which, its product Web site promises, is “like when you discovered that laughing was also a full-body workout”—only because its “vegetable oil blend” (B&B is advertised as 10% yogurt and 35% vegetable oil, leaving the product potentially, by my calculation, 55% puppy blood) contains partially hydrogenated soybean oil—hydrogenation being what puts the trans in trans fat.

I’m not typically a dietary alarmist, but when I heard an NPR story some time ago calling hydrogenated oil “plastic fat,” as in, that’s how it reacts with your biology, those long-dormant alarm bells sounded. My larder is quite full enough, thank you, without ingesting something predisposed to settling into a cozy pocket of my stomach for a years-long nap. Even our corporate-friendly government, by way of the Food and Drug Administration, has declared that when it comes to trans fat, the only healthy dietary intake is no dietary intake.

I labored over my choices. Have you had to choose a new buttery spread lately? The variety is astounding, but while all promise “rich, buttery” flavor, very few lack hydrogenated oils (almost all claim 0% trans fat, but because of business-friendly consumer-hostile FDA labeling standards, those products can still contain significant amounts of the stuff; the only way to figure out whether your butter products contain hydrogenated oils is to stand interminably before your grocer’s dairy case inspecting labels).

After reading the nutritional information on a number of promising products, I settled on the aforementioned LO’L spread, one of only a handful of contenders that appeared to meet all my criteria. And all was sunshine and buttercups until the Human Rights Campaign released its confounding 2008 Corporate Equality Index, a.k.a. the “good to the gays” rap sheet.

As an operative for the Gay Agenda, I’m well acquainted with the Corporate Equality Index, which reports the results of surveys returned by hundreds of large corporations, detailing their LGBT inclusion in employment and public outreach policies. Even if it weren’t my job to pay attention to the list, I’d find it worth studying. With LGBT rights increasingly politicized by BushCheney Inc., how we spend our money has become at least as powerful as how we vote, an idea underscored by the fact that while we’re still having trouble getting a law passed at the federal level that would make it illegal to fire an employee simply for being gay—currently A-OK in 31 states—nearly half of the Fortune 500 companies who responded to the HRC survey met every single LGBT-friendly criterion set forth, which is no cakewalk: In order to receive a perfect score on the CEI, employers must prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation as well as gender identity and expression; provide diversity training covering each of the above; offer a transgender wellness benefit; offer employees’ domestic partners the same benefits package as married spouses; and support an LGBT employees’ resource group. Compared to LGBT rights at the federal level, such corporate policies are nothing short of extraordinary.

Anyhow, this year I have rededicated myself to putting my money where my rights are, and it is with a heavy heart that I report Land O’Lakes received a measly score of 53 on the CEI. According to the chart accompanying that score, LO’L fails to explicitly prohibit discrimination based on gender identity and expression; fails to provide diversity training in areas of sexual orientation or gender expression; has no LGBT employee resource group; and makes no effort to include LGBT populations in advertising, marketing, or philanthropy.

For the record, I’ve identified a number of companies with lackluster scores with whom I’ve done business in the past but have no problem abandoning until they get it together to show my people some love. In most such cases, there is at least one counterpart company that seems to have my back. To wit:

• Barnes & Noble got a 63? Fine. Borders got 100 (and I like its stores better anyway).

• Bayer got a 15? Fifteen? Are you fucking kidding me? Wouldn’t you think a company that’s been sued by multiple Holocaust survivors claiming the company was involved in concentration camp medical experiments and other war atrocities would try just a little harder to redeem itself in the 21st century? It isn’t as if Bayer has no competition in the rarefied field of pain relief, or even more narrowly, aspirin, which, having been invented in the late 19th century, isn’t exactly a patented formula these days. (Interestingly—to me, at least—Bayer fought tooth and nail in the early 20th century to trademark the name “Aspirin” and was repeatedly refused, even by its own German government. When the company finally won a trademark suit, in the United States naturally, it began to charge up to 10 times as much for its product here as in the rest of the world. Then in World War I the Allies seized Bayer’s assets, along with those of just about every other German company, and by 1921 “aspirin” had been reduced to a lowly lowercase genericism.)

Should you care for a tablet or two, might I suggest Walgreens’ generic version? The company not only scored a perfect 100 on the CEI but stood its ground when Christian right organizations appealed to their crazy fundamentalist minions to boycott the brand, asserting that the company, in giving money to the 2006 Gay Games, was promoting casual gay sex in an effort to increase the HIV-positive population and thus the client base for prescription medications sold in its pharmacies. I don’t make this shit up. The company disregarded the lunacy and stood by its support of the Games, held in the company’s hometown of Chicago that year. Go, Walgreens!

• ExxonMobil Corp., number 1 on the Fortune 500, got a big old doughnut, just as it does every year. Meaning not only that it fails to meet any criteria for gay and lesbian inclusion but that its PR folks gleefully return a survey to HRC saying so (whereas they could simply ignore the query), implying that such failures may even be a point of pride in the company ranks. Not content merely to ignore gay rights, Exxon managed to regress them when it acquired Mobil, rescinding the latter company’s existing gay and lesbian nondiscrimination policy and domestic-partner benefits. To put that 0 in perspective, and please don’t take this as an endorsement of Wal-fucking-Mart, but yes, even the big W-M, number 2 on the Fortune 500 list, offers the small concession of a written nondiscrimination policy covering sexual orientation and provides diversity training to its employees, earning the world’s most ironic smiley face a 40 on the CEI.

Like Bayer, Exxon has a bit of a gaffe in its past—the whole Exxon Valdez thingy—that one might think would cause the PR department to work that much harder to overcome its poor public image. (BTW, Exxon has yet to pay court-awarded damages to 33,000 fisherman and landowners negatively impacted by the Exxon Valdez’s pollution of 1,200 miles of Alaskan coastline. After being ordered in 1994, five years after the disaster, to pay $5 billion in punitive damages, Exxon filed appeal after appeal seeking to duck the penalty, which at the time of judgment represented one year’s clear profit for the corporation. Even after the award was reduced to $2.5 billion by a federal appeals court, an amount that now represents just three weeks of profit for the corporation, Exxon appealed to our big business–friendly Supreme Court, which, yeppers, agreed on October 29 of this year to hear the case sometime in the spring of 2008—meaning that we the taxpayers continue to pay for America’s most powerful corporation’s refusal to cooperate with a 13-year-old jury award that has since been reduced by half even as inflation has made the amount increasingly insignificant to the company. Something to think about when choosing a filling station.)

Chevron (which also owns Texaco) and BP (which also owns Arco and Amoco) both received perfect scores on the CEI. With a gas station at just about every major intersection, we have options, so if you can’t ride your bike or walk or take mass transit to work, while there might not be a true “best” choice for your fossil fuel needs, there sure as hell is a worst.

• FedEx got a 55? Fine. UPS not only earned 100 on the CEI but came in at number 39 on this year’s Best Corporate Citizens list, which scores large companies according to criteria such as community relations, diversity, employee relations, and environmental efforts. Besides which, deliverywomen look hot in their UPS browns.

For the record, the other companies who earned perfect CEI scores and are among the 100 Best Corporate Citizens are, in order of BCC ranking: Nike, Motorola, Intel, IBM, Agilent, Starbucks, General Mills, Herman Miller, Dell, Cisco, Johnson & Johnson, Adobe, the Gap, Google, Eastman Kodak, American Express, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Wells Fargo, Xerox, Bright Horizons, Sun Microsystems, Best Buy, Lexmark, Nordstrom, KeyCorp, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Principal Financial.

Hey, not all corporations are bad.

As much as I want to adhere to the lists for all my consumer decisions, there are instances where that’s impossible. Of the three pharmaceutical giants whose products I require enjoy, two received perfect scores, while the third received an 85. AstraZeneca fails to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity and expression; while this issue is pretty close to my heart—because I think it’s utterly absurd that anyone should get antsy about anyone else’s personal presentation and, let’s face it, I have a somewhat alternative PP myself—I feel that it is, mentally speaking, both easier and wiser to reconcile such an omission in AZ’s employee relations than to go off a med that keeps me relatively sane.

I also recognize that I often have no idea how smaller companies, who are not rated by HRC, conduct themselves. Just as not all corporations are bad, not all mom-and-pops are good. In my nine years of service to an independent music store—during which I served as the senior buyer and witnessed its expansion from a 1,000-square-foot strip mall space to a 5,500-square-foot store, moving twice to accommodate its growth—I never received a single paid vacation or sick day, and I was completely uninsured. Nevertheless, anyone who shopped there felt superior for not shopping at nearby chain music stores like Virgin and Tower, who undoubtedly compensated their key employees more fairly.

While the competing low-fat, non-hydrogenated buttery spreads I’ve located are hardly mom-and-pop enterprises, they are marketed by companies that fly a little further under the radar than LO’L (number 301 on the Fortune 500). For instance: Smart Balance and Earth Balance, my leading contenders to replace LO’L. The Balance sisters are two of only three buttery spreads available at Whole Foods, which outright bans any products made with hydrogenated oils. (While Whole Foods’ score of 90 isn’t perfect, it beats 75, awarded to both Safeway [which owns Vons] and Kroger [which owns Ralphs]. My overall grocer preference is for Trader Joe’s, which is too small to be rated.) The third was a rice-based spread, at the idea of which le domestique made a face.

As it turns out, the Smart Balance® and Earth Balance® products I tried are both contender-worthy. At least I think so. Le domestique criticizes SB’s spreadability factor, which is very low. While it melts obligingly enough on hot skillets and just-toasted bread, it is otherwise as dedicated to its solid form as LO’L is to its liquid. Which confuses me, because the very reason hydrogenated oils show up in so many processed foods is that hydrogenation solidifies oil—fully hydrogenated oil is shortening—making it very versatile in achieving desired consistencies. I had assumed LO’L melted all over the damn world because of its lack of such hydrogenation; it certainly isn’t due to its inclusion of actual butter, which in its refrigerated form is about as spreadable as my dog’s jaw when I need to give him a pill.

Despite my desire to pronounce the Balance sisters both delicious and pro-gay, and therefore my new BBFs, I think it’s only fair that I do my best to hold the smaller companies to the same standard as the larger ones, so I sent the following e-mail to Smart Balance Inc. (as well as Trader Joe’s, while I was at it):

Hi there—

Can you please tell me whether your company promotes LGBT inclusion by including sexual orientation and gender identity/expression in its employee nondiscrimination policy? And, where applicable, are the domestic partners of your employees entitled to the same benefits as married spouses? I enjoy your products very much, and as a consumer it’s important that I spend money with companies that support my rights. Thanks very much for your time!

Best regards—

Teresa Morrison

I acknowledge that whoever fields consumer feedback may dismiss mine as the work of a crank, and I imagine that if I receive a reply at all, it will be along the lines of:

Dear Ms. Morrison—

Thanks for your feedback about our products! Please use the attached coupons to continue enjoying them.

Kind regards—

Your New BBFs

Then I figured that as long as I’m corresponding with the corps, maybe I owe it to LO’L’s rich buttery flavor to give it another chance. After all, according to the company’s corporate home page, “Land O’Lakes Inc. values and recognizes the unique talents and potential of all employees and is committed to continue to build a diverse workforce.” I figured I should drop LO’L a line to let the feedback folks know of my quandary and offer them a chance to tell me about any upcoming diversity planning.

Hi there—

I’ve long enjoyed many of your products, particularly your light butter with canola oil. It’s difficult to find a butter spread that’s both low in fat and free of hydrogenated oils, and yours happens to be my favorite.

As such, I was dismayed to see that Land O’Lakes Inc. earned a relatively low score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. I recognize and appreciate that you prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and that you offer your employees’ domestic partners benefits equivalent to those of married spouses. But many Fortune 500 companies like yours now explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity and expression as well, which I think is necessary for the full inclusion you strive for in your workforce.

I hope that you’ll consider adding such protections to your written nondiscrimination policy; LGBT issues are becoming increasingly politicized, not so much by LGBT people themselves as by our own state and federal governments, and sometimes it seems that our only political capital lies in spending power. In such a scenario, it’s essential that I put my money where my rights are, and I would love to be able to include your products in the “buy” column of my consumer activism campaign.

Thanks very much for your time!

Best regards—

Teresa Morrison

I’ve thrown down the exceedingly polite gauntlet, and now all I can do is wait to see whether either, neither, or both of these companies care to answer my plea for just one delicious buttery spread that has my gender-vague lesbian back. If not, we may have to try that rice stuff. Le domestique hopes it won’t come to that.

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November 6 update!

I have just received the following reply from Trader Joe’s:

Teresa,
We appreciate your inquiry and bringing your concerns to our attention. Trader Joe’s specifically prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. We also offer the same benefits to a Crew Member’s qualified same-sex partner as we would to a Crew Member’s opposite-sex married partner.

Sincerely,
Amy
Trader Joe’s
Customer Relations

Yay, Trader Joe’s!

—————————————————————————————–

November 11 update!

Smart Balance Inc. responds:

Dear Ms. Morrison—

Yes, to all questions asked.

Sincerely,

Smart Balance Customer Relations

Brief? Perhaps. But affirmative all the same.

Q: If a tree falls in the wee hours of the morning, crashing onto the garage roof, yanking electrical wiring from the wall, and demolishing the attic fan from one’s brand-new HVAC system along the way, does anyone hear it?

A: Yes.

Especially if one has already been roused by worried dogs. I feel terrible now for having told Scout repeatedly to “Shut up, shut up. Oh, my god, shut up!” in the midnight to one o’clock hour, during the whole of which he alternately whimpered, growled, and barked his fool head off. Had he the vocabulary, he would undoubtedly have said, calmly, “I’m hearing strange noises from the backyard. Would you like me to investigate?” But no matter how many times we tell our dogs, “Use your words,” they unfailingly turn to their primal barking language in a crisis.

The strange noises, which I did not hear, were undoubtedly the cracks and creaks of our 1,000-, or at the very least 50-year-old mulberry tree as it succeeded in casting off its mortal coil. To look at the tree, one might conclude that this was a long time coming, appearing as it does to be consumed by disease. I’d come to think of it as the “elephant tree,” such are the tumorous growths that riddle its core from the trunk up. Were it possible to send trees out on film shoots—as one might her cat or middle child—our tree would surely have enjoyed a career as a set piece in horror flicks.

So jarring is the tree’s appearance, we assumed when we bought the property that it would have to be removed. But when we consulted with an honest-to-god arborist, who winced when he first saw it but later affectionately patted its trunk like the head of a beloved nephew, he pronounced it sound—diseased, to be sure, but uncompromised in its integrity. In other words, it wasn’t about to fall on our house. So, really, the question became, Can we live with the tree and its gothic grotesqueries? Or, more to the point, Do we want to drop a couple grand taking this sucker out?

A funny thing happened during those deliberations: I grew fond of its beautiful ugliness. To be sure, no one else in the neighborhood has a tree quite like it, and such a prop can be seasonally decorative come Halloween. But for a little Spanish moss and Béla Lugosi, we could shoot a rogue indie monster movie, Ed Wood–style, entirely within the confines of our backyard.

But fall it did, about one third of it, as though the rotten core at the base of its trunk had simply exploded.



And while I didn’t hear the creaking and cracking, only Scout’s fretting over it, I certainly heard the crash as the tree fell onto our garage roof, after which there erupted paroxysms of pure dog panic. I got up to investigate, but finding the patio undisturbed I went back to sleep with glass-half-full thoughts: The cacophony that had sounded so near was nothing to worry about, really; maybe someone at the apartment building next door had thrown a body into a dumpster from their third-floor window.

Interestingly, had the latter scenario occurred, the owners of the apartment building might have called precisely the folks we did—as recommended by our insurance company—because when shit happens to your house or property, you need the kind of one-stop shopping Disaster Cleanup can provide. Fire? Flood? Mold? Rotten tree? Crime scene? They’re on it. And while I at first balked at the idea of having our tree removed, roof repaired, and wiring restored all by the self-same company that would, by the by, be happy to come and mop up after a murder, when I started to think about contracting with tree people, roofers, and an electrician—and having to submit all that billing through insurance company channels—Disaster Cleanup appeared as a beacon on an otherwise invoice-riddled horizon.

As one might expect, Disaster Cleanup is more of a contracting superstore than a jack-of-all-trades. So it is that Michael, a local construction contractor, was dispatched to my location for an initial assessment. And, because you know I asked, Michael tells me that he has neither the stomach nor the desire to clean up trauma sites. “There are contractors who do nothing but, and they’re better at leaving their job at the office than I could ever be in the same situation,” he says, but he’s happy to take care of my structural damage and subcontract for my tree removal, wiring work, and anything else I might need seeing to—short of human viscera.

It occurs to me that there are more contractors in the world than there are people who actually carry out contract labor, but the idea of a single invoice is so compelling that I don’t want to interrupt the choir of angels in my head to question the American Way. They’re having enough trouble rising above the din of the chainsaws at work dismantling the elephant tree.

Scout, meanwhile, continues to bark his fool head off. If only he could presently access his language center, he would say, calmly, “There are guys I don’t know in the backyard. Would you like me to investigate?”

Scout, the sweetest, cutest dog in the whole wide world™, and among the most industrious, has been crafting his own dog doors from which to exit our yard.

First, a dog-size hole appeared in the side gate. It wasn’t a dog-shaped hole as seen in cartoons—that would have been really cool—just a ragged security breach. We thought it was a fluke at the time. After all, that gate had consisted basically of long-since-rotten particleboard an ambitious kitten could have destroyed. Still, it came as a surprise: We’ve had at least one dog for all but about six dark days since we bought our house, and none before had expressed the slightest interest in escaping the confines of our admittedly dystopic yard.

The day of hole #1, le domestique called me at work to tell me the dogs had gleefully met her in the front yard when she arrived home. My heart jumped half a rib in my chest, because I immediately went to what-if land: What if they’d run away? What if I had forgotten to put Scout’s collar back on that morning—the collar I’ve been removing at night because I’m a sucker for a dog with mournful eyes that plead It burns! as he paws pitifully at the silky fabric draped about his neck? What if they’d run out into the street, each of them having the car sense of newborn bunnies, to become two more casualties of the NASCAR drivers-in-training who live in our neighborhood?

But such worry was entirely retrospective because, as le domestique told me, there they were in our only partially fenced front yard, happy as clams at high tide to be able to greet her TWO WHOLE SECONDS sooner than they might any other day, when they have to wait forever for her to get out of her car and cover the five long strides from the driveway to our backyard gate.

The next escape incident occurred several days later, when the dogs were separated for a full half day while Biscuit visited the groomer for her summer cut. A bereft Scout, who has surpassed mere cordial cohabitation with Biscuit to form a near-pathological attachment to his MENTOR, put a neglectfully convenient ladder to use and jumped the fence into the front yard. When le domestique returned home with Biscuit, Scout was lying on the front porch, no doubt exhausted from all that fretting. He seemed to harbor no inclination to go beyond the front yard; he was just bored in Biscuit’s absence and, in all likelihood, wanted to change up his scenery.

I can relate.

You may remember my mentioning back in February a brief stint in the mental hospital. It was, readers, an experience so lacking in stimuli I was inclined to attend everything on the daily grid, even nonmandatory groups addressing avenues far outside my personal experience. One can never really know too much about probationary meds-compliance issues for drug offenders. Then, in addition to the mandatory group therapy sessions and psychiatric consults, there were the optional occupational therapy classes: crafts (I finished only half my basket, leaving me nothing to show for the effort; completed crafts are kept in the contraband cabinet—yarn hangings, though undoubtedly rare, remain a concern—and the half-baked works of discharged patients are unraveled and recycled); sing-alongs (what happens in the psych hospital stays in the psych hospital, or so I warned my discordant fellow inmates); and “exercise.” The physical activities on offer were pitiful: either supervised time in the gym (a couple of stationary bikes and some free weights, the latter’s presence striking me as queer in a population denied shoelaces) or a supervised outside walk—neither of which option exceeded 30 minutes per day.

I don’t think one need be a mathematician to calculate that a population of folks fed six times daily (three “square meals” of fatty institutional food, plus three snacks), the vast majority of whom are on one or more prescription meds with weight-gain and/or metabolism-slowing side effects, really need at least the option of more than 30 minutes of exercise daily. Still, that was what was offered, and I jumped at every opportunity. During my scant four days inpatient, the gym was opened an even scanter once; on the other three days, we went for a walk.

The walk occurred on hospital grounds in the staff parking lot, but still, it was outside! We got to leave the sameness of the hospital halls and dayrooms and nurses’ stations to pass through the doors alluringly marked with cautionary “Elopement Risk” signs (which never failed to provoke an image in my head of patients running off to Las Vegas for a quickie wedding, taking their vows in pajama pants and unlaced shoes). I remember thinking how strange it was to so enjoy a walk through a parking lot—just to smell new smells, however tinged by the whiff of asphalt tar, and see the world immediately outside those elopement doors—and at the same time not want to go any farther. After all, I hadn’t committed myself on a lark, and the world beyond the parking lot was uncertain.

When le domestique called the dogs in from the backyard on a recent Saturday morning, only Biscuit responded. She called several more times before she ran to tell me that Scout seemed to have gone missing. She went out front and called his name loud and long, while I went to investigate hidden places in our backyard that might yield a somnolent dog. Scouring the nooks and overgrown hedges, I missed the obvious: a slat in our six-foot wood fence whose middle had gone missing. Before I even noticed the broken fence, Scout wormed back through the hole from the outside in and came bounding through the backyard, wagging his tail as if to say, “Look, I made the fence better!”

Le domestique generously offered to go to Home Depot while I kept the dogs in the house. She returned with four new planks, three of which we put to immediate use: We replaced the plank Scout broke, another that was on its last wooden leg, and the one next to the latter because it was so warped we couldn’t fit the new plank in without removing it. Scout looked on with a wounded expression, as if he had presented us with a craft he made—like, say, a half-finished basket woven from dark brown yarn—and there we were, blithely unraveling his effort.

I felt for the little guy. After all, the yard may be big and full of diversions, but how many holes can you dig, how many relics can you excavate, how many times can you bark at the same dumb neighbors doing the same dumb things before you need a change of scenery? I was in country for just four days, and the sameness of them seriously threatened whatever sanity I had brought to the party. Still, I have to be the mom here, not to mention the dad, nailing up the holes and keeping him safe, and that’s no fun at all.

Le domestique and I have been planning to landscape the backyard for some time, and this year we’re committed to actually doing it, especially given that Scout has an unfortunate tendency to bite the heads off weeds—cute with dandelions, not so much with foxtails. He’s aggressive toward other plants as well, as evidenced by our diminished birds of paradise, our no-longer-viable Brazil plant, several upended and de-potted aloes, and the climbing mandevilla that one day permanently ascended. Any colorful border flowerbeds or precious little vegetable gardens would quickly lose a war of attrition with the little yellow dog. And who are we to stop him? We may pay the mortgage, but the dogs put in the most yard time and squatters’ rights do apply. That’s why I’m thinking we may want to go in a different direction and make the backyard so enticing only a fool would want to escape it.

While I’m at it, may I propose that bounce houses would make a mighty fine (and inexpensive!) addition to psychiatric hospitals.

Ho yeah! The only problem with this padded room may lie in getting patients to leave it! Until such time, consider me an elopement risk, but don’t worry—I’m like as not to confine my meanderings to the front yard.

I have a lyric loop bouncing around in my head, the refrain from an air freshener commercial that proclaims, “Spring is in the air!” sung to the tune of “Love Is in the Air,” and I wonder whether my mad itch to revive the backyard is motivated by the song, or maybe the song loop has been triggered by my efforts at renewal—I can’t remember which came first. I prefer to think the latter, because I don’t want to be the kind of person who’s spurred to action by a commercial jingle—that gives Madison Avenue conjurers way too much power, even if I didn’t buy, and can’t even specify, the brand of air freshener in question.

I don’t want to be that neighbor: the one who lets her yard go native and never cleans her house’s exterior and whose property eventually comes to resemble an extremely unintriguing around-the-clock rummage sale. I want to be part of the “improving” neighborhood we moved into, not the albatross that makes fellow homeowners shake their heads as they pass, lamenting, “If it weren’t for those lesbians, our Zip code would be unstoppable.”

Happily, ours isn’t the least-kempt house in the neighborhood; it’s not even in the top 10. Hell, the corner house at the opposite end of our block looks like the set of Sanford and Son, so we have a long way to slide before we’re property value–enemy number 1 in this quarter. Still, don’t encourage us.

To be fair, and I think I can extend that courtesy to myself in my blog, our backyard was dead when we bought the house, so no harm, no foul there. And while the front yard at first appeared ripe with brilliant green promise, it was merely a lawn gesture, a costume the yard had donned for “curb appeal”—the sellers had installed full-sun sod, a groundcover that didn’t stand a chance of thriving in a yard 80% shaded by four mature trees. (The sellers’ bad decisions didn’t stop there: They also installed white wall-to-wall carpet, which would be practical only if we enforced a strict no-shoes policy and carried our pets at all times.)

I was initially determined to make the backyard hospitable for outdoor grilling and dining; maybe we would even have a house-warming party (though we’ve never hosted a get-together of more than six people, ourselves included). And as it happened my mom and dad were simultaneously preparing for a move themselves, so Mother’s extensive inventory of plants came up for grabs. (The county farm bureau once called her to pitch membership in their organization; based upon the amounts of fertilizer and gardening supplies she bought, she had been flagged as a commercial farmer.)

I couldn’t take on any of her hundreds of varieties of fuschias—her “farming” specialty—since they couldn’t withstand the heat of the valley, but we loaded up on begonias, brugmansia, clivia, sego palms, and the like. She even entrusted to me her mother’s amaryllis, which had been confined to pots since the day my mother dug them up in 1980, when Grandma was moving to a seniors’ village and was determined to take them with her. The flowers did poorly at Grandma’s new place and Mom took them home to her own yard to coax them back to health, an endeavor that took on added significance after Grandma died. I’m still not sure why my mother decided to hand them over to me, as by that point they had taken on the significance of heirloom, but they seemed happy to at last shake off their confining pots and spread their bulbous roots in limitless soil.

The next chapter in the life of our yard wasn’t so bright. After tending the plants assiduously for about a year I slid into an emotional fissure that enveloped all in a pall of meaninglessness, my efforts most of all. To say that I stood idly by and watched our yard die would indicate a presence of mind I didn’t possess. I sleepwalked through the next couple of years while our property, despite my partner’s desperate efforts to the contrary, went native.

Flashing forward to the present, I feel that I have my depression more under control than ever before, and I’m emerging from an 18-month-long energy slump concurrent with an until-recently undiagnosed condition that’s also feeling more under control these days. In short, spring is in the fucking air!

If I’ve learned anything in therapy, it’s that we can’t coax much new growth without clearing out all the dead branches and detritus begat by neglect, the kind of stuff that, if we squint, can fool us into thinking that it is life. It gives a woman pause, cutting all that crap out, because the process really is an acknowledgement of death—the end of that life cycle—and an expression of readiness to exit the static fallow phase and move on to the next cycle, with all the thoughtful and anxious attention that fragile new growth requires.

Nevertheless, I’ve been darting about the yard from one project to the next, grooming and pruning and clearing whatever and wherever necessary. I understand that my efforts are off-season, but what the hell, Southern California doesn’t much observe seasons anyhow, and something tells me that anything managing to live thus far in this backyard—birds of paradise, I think, could survive the nuclear option—is hardy enough to recalibrate to the demands of my psyche.

Some plants are so stricken they have to be cut back flush with the ground to be, with any luck, wholly reincarnated. Others are leggy and overgrown and are cut back to resemble mere sticks emerging at jaunty angles from the earth. Spent branches are laid to rest in our big green recycling container to be hauled away by the city and rendered as mulch, achieving relevance at last in another life cycle.

I visit with the most vulnerable plants daily, testing for hydration as my mother taught me, by inserting one knuckle into the soil, so as to avoid over-watering my charges. With the largest plants and trees I’ve left the hose to drip overnight, moving it to a new host each morning, reassuring each in turn that it’s safe to grow, that any tendrils ventured will be met with all due nourishment. I’m not talking to them exactly—at least not by speaking aloud—but there has been communion. I feel like I’m performing a kind of penance for my past neglect, and I like to think the plants understand that I need them to come back as badly as they need me to feed them.

I remembered noticing some time ago that Starbucks promotes the use of spent coffee grounds as compost and fertilizer for acid-loving plants, an idea confirmed by enough organic gardening sites that I’ve begun sprinkling my daily grind around the camellias. I brew for one, so the grounds barely season the soil. Still, it’s cool to find new ways to repurpose, and any acid-loving, coffee-drinking plant is surely a friend of mine.

My partner has been, understandably, a little anxious about my ministry. She acknowledges that the yard desperately needs help but fears that I’ve been a pinch overzealous in what she calls my “scorched-earth policy.” And I admit that I’m prone to extremes: I tackle projects full-bore or not at all. I also admit that the “yard” I’m paying such precious attention to really does resemble nothing more than dirt and sticks in the big picture.

But when I squint I see the little shoots poking out of the ground, the tiny sprouts along the sticks, and I know that we’ve begun a new chapter together.

The lesbian-killing dogs have come for us.

Just when we thought our neighborhood couldn’t get much seedier—what with our being regulars on the city’s graffiti-cleanup service—backyard dog breeders have moved in next door. We’re one cockfighting den, crystal meth lab, and hand basket away from the breaking loose of all hell.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. We moved into a neighborhood which, while not glamorous, was characterized by optimistic Realtors as “improving.” Sure, our no-nonsense lesbian real estate agent warned us that a house abutting an apartment building and lacking a sidewalk invited a vague sort of trouble, not to mention lower-than-average property values for the Zip code. But it was precisely that crippled property value that brought the house within our financial reach, and given that we were then ourselves apartment dwellers we were willing to give the unpropertied the benefit of the doubt regarding their ability to live side-by-side with sophisticates like us.

Trouble of a less vague sort has arrived not in the form of apartment tenants but homeowners, or at the very least home dwellers, the kind who bark, bark, bark the night away, and presumably the day as well since their ire is particularly roused by our animal companion, Biscuit, who spends her days in the backyard, whimpering. This is Biscuit in happier times:

The next-door dogs moved in two weeks ago, into the backyard of a house that had been vacant since Mrs. Friend died six months ago. (We were charmed by the idea of a next-door neighbor named Mrs. Friend until we found her to be sour, demanding, and ungrateful; when we rebuilt the falling-down fence separating our two properties—a project for which we could have asked her to share the $1,200 expense but didn’t—her only comment was, “It’s about time.”) When we saw a U-Haul truck in her driveway two weekends ago we hoped for the best; the chances of our new neighbors being more personable than Mrs. Friend were at least 85%. I thought maybe I should take some cookies over and introduce myself, get things off on the right foot, but the thought, as so many others, failed to result in action. Now it’s two weeks after the U-Haul sighting and we still haven’t seen our new neighbors—none of the hominid variety anyway.

Our spectral neighbors’ first act of aggression was the clearing, via hired help, of Mrs. Friend’s bougainvillea, which had formerly climbed her back wall to a height of well over 10 feet. The impressive spray of purple flowers once camouflaged the concertina razor wire that rims the property line of the apartment building behind us: Whether it’s there to keep the tenants in or others out, the aesthetic smacks of prison yard. The yard crew also tore out a couple of small fruit trees.

But any palpable absence was forgotten once chain-link became visible over our fence line, and it didn’t take long to intuit that our new anti-foliage neighbors had built a kennel of some scope: Any pack of confined, agitated dogs can tell you that, and if we had been, by some miracle, able to ignore them, Biscuit would surely have alerted us.

The chain-link is an eyesore, and the incessant barking is a nuisance, but we would soon discover something far more insidious about the next-door dogs. When my partner peered over the fence to see just how many dogs had moved in, she saw three adults, one of whom is pregnant, and they aren’t just any dogs: They’re Presa Canarios. This is what one looks like:

You may remember this once obscure breed from a 2001 wrongful death case. In January of that year two Presa Canarios had lunged at Diane Whipple, a 33-year-old athlete, trapping her in the doorway of the San Francisco apartment she shared with her girlfriend, and the larger of the two dogs, a 123-pound unneutered male named “Bane,” mauled her to death as a caretaker for the dogs, neighbor Majorie Knoller, reportedly stood by.

Knoller and her husband, Robert Noel, both of whom were then defense lawyers, were keeping the dogs on behalf of two Aryan Brotherhood prison inmates, Paul “Cornfed” Schneider and Dale Bretches, who, despite the inconvenience of serving life sentences without parole, were running a backyard breeding business, reportedly intending to supply the Mexican Mafia with fighters and guard dogs for meth labs and such. Bane was one of eight breeding Presa Canarios owned by the inmates, who farmed the care of the dogs out to various intermediaries. Knoller and Noel had taken in Bane and Hera—the second dog involved in the attack on Whipple—when another woman who had been caring for them complained that Bane was vicious and should be destroyed.

After the attack, Knoller and Noel might have had misgivings about ever getting involved in this mess, musing, How did two nice Jewish lawyers like ourselves get involved with an Aryan Brotherhood attack-dog racket that resulted in the death of a neighbor? As my therapist is fond of saying, “Those red flags you see aren’t there to cheer you to the finish line.” But where we see red flags, the Knoller-Noels saw an opportunity to bond: Three days after Whipple’s death, the couple adopted inmate–dog breeder Cornfed Schneider. He was 38.

Did I mention the bestiality? Cornfed reportedly circulated pics in prison of “Mom” in compromising positions with Bane, while “Dad” was said to have orally copulated with the dog. Unfortunately, any such evidence was barred from trial as irrelevant. The prosecution had to make do with their 30 witnesses who testified to having had terrifying encounters with Bane and Hera; in fact, had the victim been anyone but Whipple, she might have testified as well: Bane had bitten her before.

Despite the obvious charisma of the defendants, after 11 hours of deliberation the jury stoically delivered a guilty verdict. Noel, who wasn’t present during the attack, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Knoller was convicted of second-degree murder (this being only the third time in U.S. history a jury had handed down a murder conviction in a dog-mauling case), but the murder conviction was later thrown out and she served half of a four-year sentence for involuntary manslaughter. Both are now out on parole, perhaps living next door to us! Bane and Hera were destroyed in the wake of the attack, but their snarling progeny live on, no doubt seeking to avenge their wronged parents. Perhaps they’ve found their mark.

I’m not saying Presa Canario appetites are limited to lesbians, though the Knoller-Noels went for a Hail Mary and blamed the victim, saying the dogs may have been provoked by hormones or pheromones peculiar to Whipple. They might as well have claimed Whipple conjured the dogs’ ire through Voodoo. And the next-door dogs probably aren’t kin to Bane and Hera after all. The popularity of the breed soared following the publicity surrounding the court case. Who wouldn’t want, as one breeder put it, “a pit bull on steroids”?

Well, I don’t. Nor do I want a pack of them living next door, which is to say nothing of Biscuit’s preferences. You see, Biscuit, while a very brave dog in the house, is a total sub bottom in the presence of other dogs. So while she knows in her heart that it’s her dog job to assert ownership over the backyard, and before the invasion of the next-door dogs she was as fierce as could be about enforcing her authority—by barking her little spaniel head off—whenever strangers loomed near, she now cowers and whimpers and tucks her tail whenever the other dogs bark, which is whenever she’s in the yard. As a result she’s become too anxious to do just about anything in her backyard: play ball, chase squirrels, eat, pee, etc. Again, here’s Biscuit:

And here’s a Presa:

So, to recap, Biscuit no longer has any fun in her backyard, and she’s courting kidney damage. And we would prefer not to be mauled.

So I’m dedicating myself to finding ways to get the dogs gone: noise ordinances, a maximum-dog-limit violation, owner negligence, anything. Maybe a nice, nice animal control officer, once summoned, can find illegal fight training implements or evidence of other mischief, like cockfighting, or a meth lab, or some of that legendary Presa-human canoodling. I officially don’t care. And if none of that works, perhaps puppies might enjoy an amuse-bouche of Snausage with shaved white truffle and antifreeze zest?*

*I would never harm an animal, ever, no matter how mean and snarly it is. This line is for comedic purposes only.

We met a neighbor!

It was Wednesday night, “garb night”—which is short for “Ugh, we have to gather all our little trash receptacles and empty them into the big trash receptacles, then lug it all out to the curb for pickup tomorrow morning.” It’s really not such a trial, but we whine about it anyway because it robs us of valuable TV-viewing time, which is in short supply on Wednesday night, what with The Amazing Race, America’s Next Top Model, Top Chef, and Lost all vying for our attention. Before anyone starts tsking, I know that my television taste is pedestrian, but I learn things from reality television, valuable things. Just this week I learned, courtesy of Jade on America’s Next Top Model, that elephants are descended from dinosaurs. I also learned, courtesy of Top Chef, what the hell truffles are. Actually, Top Chef didn’t teach me anything, but because the delicacy was the subject of a culinary showdown I finally asked my partner, six short years after truffles first entered my consciousness at a friend’s cocktail party—what is that in the cheese?—where they come from. She was kind enough to look it up on something called the Internet and tell me that they’re “round, warty fungi” that grow underground adjacent to the roots of specific trees. Yum!

So we were wheeling our color-coded city trashcans out to the curb when a woman called out to me from across the street. I’m in the habit of pretending I don’t hear such things since in general nothing good comes of being yelled at by strangers, but she seemed in some distress, and we had only moments before ignored some loud violent noises, so I acknowledged her and she scurried over.

“Did you hear those noises?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “They were pretty loud.”

“Did it sound like gunfire to you?” she asked, petting her pregnant tummy.

“No,” my partner said. “Just some guy having a temper tantrum.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He was shouting and hitting something, but not someone. It sounded like he was whaling on his car…or maybe his girlfriend’s car.”

She introduced herself and told us she lived across the street and that she was home alone. And that she was pregnant, which we had gathered. We introduced ourselves and remarked that we liked her house, after which she told us how she and her husband came to choose red as its exterior color, then she made a joke about neighbors maybe thinking she was either running an elementary school or a whorehouse.

“I work from home,” she said. “I saw the boys who tagged your fence and I ran after them, but then I thought, I’m pregnant. I shouldn’t be doing this.”

“Oh, thanks,” my partner said. “The fence gets tagged a lot. But the city paints it, so don’t worry too much about it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Don’t put yourself at risk on our fence’s account.”

“I know,” she said. “But it just makes me so mad.”

I wanted to tell her to attack with vigor if someone tagged our garage door again, to weaponize her pregnant belly if need be, but instead I said, “It’s nice to know you’re home and looking out for us. Feel free to knock on our door whenever you need some company.”

Just like that, after over three years in our house, we made a neighbor friend. Over the tops of our trashcans, no less. I’m glad we didn’t have stinky trash, like the time we threw away a dead possum that had been left—in a box, with a dirty diaper—in our front yard. (The dirty diaper wasn’t on the dead possum, which would have been extra extraordinary.) In the absence of stinky trash, and presumably anything else that would have struck her as offensive—suggesting that lesbians in their pseudo-jammies are inoffensive enough—she offered that she and her husband should have us over, and we countered that we should have them over, and while nothing was hammered out on the spot, I think we all meant it.

To be fair, we have met a couple of other neighbors. We’re not shut-ins, for chrissake. There was a woman who introduced herself as Linda Rose, and reintroduced herself to me every time she saw me as if we had never met, who dropped by shortly after we moved in to tell us she was the neighborhood watch captain and that her husband was an electrician should we ever need work of that nature—like, for instance, if we wanted to install lights in our front yard so that more people like herself might drop by. At one point she noticed some trash in our yard and mused that in Mexico there are no trashcans, the implication being, if I understand her correctly, that recent immigrants are to blame for any instances of littering. (Or maybe it was simply an unfortunately timed non sequitur.) Then she regaled us with the news that our overachieving oleander around the side of the house is a favored tryst site for gay hustlers turning tricks. If Linda Rose was right, the boys are either not playing safe or they’re the tidiest hustlers ever: While the oleander sees its fair share of garbage, I’ve never seen a shred of telltale condom detritus lying about.

Linda Rose moved about a year ago, presumably to a neighborhood populated entirely by people who grew up knowing what trashcans are and how to use them.

There’s also this Swedish woman. While we haven’t properly met, she certainly knows who I am. She thinks I’m gunning for her and her dog. I was backing out of the garage one morning when she strode across our driveway like she owned it. (That’s something we’ve had to accept in our hearts, that since we live on a corner lot, lazy Americans—including immigrants from lands with and without trashcans—will cut across our property to save the three extra steps it would take to navigate its perimeter.) I hit my brakes as she scooped up her little yippy dog, glaring at me and muttering something in her native tongue. Another time I backed out and stopped in the driveway to mess with a CD or something. Then, admittedly without looking, I hit the remote to close the garage door. I glanced up just in time to see her rear away from the garage. She had been rounding the corner via the sex oleander and apparently felt in danger of being crushed by the descending door. I rolled down my window to say I was sorry, that I hadn’t seen her, to which she replied, “Every time!” OK, (a) twice does not qualify as “every time,” (b) when a car is idling in a driveway, the closing of a garage door is imminent, and (c) if you’re cutting across my property such that you’re walking within crushing distance of my garage door, you’re so on my property in such an uninvited and annoying way.

There’s also a high school kid and her mom who walk a little white dog so often that my partner and I suspect the dog has psychic power over them. The girl is really nice and always says hello. Her mom doesn’t speak English but often smiles at us. Meanwhile the dog looks at us in a knowing way, warning us with his eyes not to meddle in his business lest he teach our dog his supersecret mind-control tricks.

Those being the neighbors we know, you can understand our delight at meeting a friendly woman who paints her house red and chases taggers—while pregnant! And she owns this amazing company that sells hand-stitched greeting cards made by women in her native Armenia.

Pretty cool, huh? Makes me want to have a great big gay wedding so that I can order up a custom batch. And register for gifts.

In the meantime, it’s just nice to know there’s someone we can wave to when we catch each other outside, maybe even trot across the street to visit with. We could borrow a cup of sugar from her should the need arise, watch each other’s houses for suspicious activity, or just chitchat over the garbage. Do they have trashcans in Armenia?

Wildflower season has come to Southern California! Botanical types are giving this year’s expected wildflower turnout only a 6 on a scale of 1–10, this because our rainy season delivered too little too late. But while last year’s crop—after a rainy season so relentless that the ceiling in our home office buckled and collapsed—more thoroughly painted the landscape in broad strokes of orange, yellow, and purple, the arrival of the class of ’06 is no less spectacular. Like any other native vegetation, poppy fields rise up amid spring showers, blooming as magically—and damn near as quickly—as a tin of Jiffy Pop. Seriously, does this scene strike you as a 6 out of 10?

A mountainside blanketed in wildflowers is one of a handful of sights—others being coastal Northern California and wine country—that puts me in a frame of mind to understand why people once thought my home state paradise.

My mother, having grown up in Iowa, came to California in 1958 with her family to visit her eldest brother, who had moved west only the year before and had been writing home ever since to exclaim, “You have to come see this place!” The story goes that after a two-week vacation they returned to Iowa long enough only to sell their farm and livestock, then moved to California en masse. Their acclimation was a bit Joad-esque in that my grandfather had lost his livelihood in the bargain and spent the rest of his days at a miserable factory job. And then there were all those sailors trying to pick up my mom and her sister at the Pike, an amusement park near the Port of Long Beach. But such were the trade-offs for our temperate climate and dramatic landscapes—the beaches, mountains, and desert competing so fervently for one’s favor it’s difficult to see a downside.

But this entry isn’t about downsides. It’s very much about upsides, and the California poppy is living proof that land, left to its own devices, produces beauty beyond our most virtuosic attempts to improve upon it. I would scrap my plans for bricking in the cursed strip and instead liberally sprinkle wildflower seeds all about if I thought the delicate blooms would stand a chance against the trample of work boots as men cut across our property to get from their parked trucks to the high-density apartment buildings that flank the nearby boulevard. Wouldn’t it be grand, though, to turn our eyesore into a little slice of heaven?

’Course, though merchants are happy to sell wildflower seeds, I’m not so sure the show-offy little devils thrive in domestic situations. I almost never see them occupying orderly rows and beds—the kinds of defined spaces where marigolds and pansies muster in accordance with gardeners’ orders. I like to think that poppies and their untamed kin resist order, choosing to live chaotically and free, thumbing their stamens at the indignity of planters, serving as no man’s “lawn border.” There’s a reason, they remind us, that “pansy” is another word for wuss.