A dog named Tahini
Name a crueler fate
A poem came into my mind spontaneously the other day:
I am next to a dog named Tahini and I am going to kill myself
I am next to a dog named Miso and I am thinking of ending it all
I am next to a dog named Tofu and I am bleeding out
Will there be no dip like substance safe from becoming a name for a small animal?
I think Hummus would be pretty bad. Baba Ghanouj you really couldn’t get away with. Tzaziki doesn’t have the right syllabic cant. I was at a cafe and a woman was frantically calling out “Tahini, Tahini!!” over and over again while her dog, a designer daschund that looks like a small, beautiful carpet with a keratin treatment, ran after a small child. On the phone next to me a woman was telling her other friend about it, and revealed she knew that type of dog cost “just $1,500” and “couldn’t wait to get one herself.”
The worst dog name I ever encounter was Mr. Chonks, an overweight beagle I fostered in the beginning of the pandemic at my parents house who had a propensity for escaping and forced me to sprint down the block screaming “Mr. Chonks, where are you Mr. Chonks!!!,” much to my chagrin.
The pandemic feels so Long Ago but obviously it wasn’t and it is mentally effecting people for the worse to this day. Long covid is real, but so is the psycho somatic obsession with being a victim/suffering that has seemed to become stacked onto other identities in particular. Now the reason for your isolating and inability to socialize has a righteous, pathological source, rather than being a choice or something you as an adult have to overcome. I think I was able to remain normal because I lived with my parents for 4 months of the pandemic and existed in a constant state of agitation, and being the 15 year old version of myself was a powerful psychic tonic to the increasing isolation.
I also fostered a string of dogs with differing levels of mental illness, which forced me to leave the house. If I can remember all then names: Charm, Sophie (almost adopted her), Mr. Chonks (but of course), Winter, Percy (was evil and homophobic), a huge pitbull mix whose name I can not remember that bit my dad but it made him so nervous he puked everywhere and honestly, it was mostly my dad’s fault. A puppy named Frank that shit all over my bed. There was no way to fall into a self obsessed psychosomatic illness because I was cleaning up piss all the time. I recommend it!!
One time a medium told me in a past life I had lost myself in having “way too many children, like 12.” So in that sense, cleaning up piss can also not save you, this past-life-Clare who was also cleaning up piss all the time but also probably dealt with a prolapsed uterus or something like that. You know they used to make (still make, actually) these devices for prolapsed uteri in the middle ages called a “pessary” that you could chuck up there to hold it all in? I actually think that is so cool although I hope I never have to use one ever and in fact a medical doctor never needs to use to the word “prolapse” in relation to my body. Preferably these words instead: Perky, Taut, Gorgeous, Shiny, Hubba Hubba, Honk Honk, and Awooga. The last few are not medically correct terms but I think they would be nice to hear in the right context.
The medium also told me in a different past life I was half-asian (specifically, she said I was a half-Mongolian, half-Hungarian woman who sold tea on the Silk Road), which is a risky thing to say to a white woman. A wasian previous incarnation? That is when we typically start getting Bad Ideas™.
Alright see you later!!