Blurred Rage

Yesterday I was human…without any Being in sight. An episode added to less than handful of times in my life where “I lost it.” I become inarticulate, screechy, without plan and barely a thought of what I’m doing. Some may indentify this behavior with blind rage, but that seems extreme and violent. This was more of a “blurred rage” which I identify as my sun sign Aries fire bursting through the water of my planets in Pieces. All very pretty sounding - but it wasn’t.

The conflict?

An ongoing battle with our next door neighbor’s dogs charging into our yard. They do this several times a day. You can tell when they are let out of their house you hear the barking begin in the distance, and get louder as they appear beyond our shed running like mad dogs directly into our driveway, barking at our house or under our windows if our German shepherd is not out on her line.

They’ll run up to our fence to terrorize our dogs inside it which sets off our poor guys to barking, and frightened cats scramble to their safe places. They come several times a day, every day. When we come home from work they tear out of their yard (or sometimes our other neighbor’s yard, for they terrorize them, too) and chase our vehicles…four dogs running after our wheels, running in front of us and following us into our driveway. We get out of the car, they are right there barking at us in our own driveway.

There are three mobiles on our road and we all have dogs, but this person is the only one who lets his run free at all times. Everyone else’s dogs are kept well contained behind fence, on leash or on zipline.

For most of the winter it was four dogs until his daughter took two of them with her. Since then it has mostly been two dogs, but sometimes she visits and brings the other two back with her.

Yes, we’ve spoken to our landlord (who we all lease our land from), and yes, we have conferred with our other neighbor who has also spoken to our landlord. But nothing’s been done.

Although we've not been able to capture their barking arrival, here are some video samples, so you can get a feel for what we experience daily,

One

Two

Three

Four

So, yesterday when the daughter was visiting with her two dogs, it was after the four pack’s third excursion over here that my Aries took action.

In a natural alignment with Aries comes ego and vanity, which is how I explain why I grabbed my raincoat to cover my too tight sweatpants and shirt. I didn’t want to look fat, I guess. I also pulled on my LL Bean rubber mocks and grabbed a yard rake to defend my ankles from the bastards (and I’m glad I did).

After that, I had no idea what I was going to do or say beyond, “I’M SICK OF IT!”

And so, I charged across their lawn chasing four little dogs with a rake, walked right between their house and car with a nipper biting at my heels when the daughter came out of the house and onto their stoop.

I screamed a lot of variations of “I’m sick of your dogs coming into our yard and terrorizing us.” Mind you I have a horrible cold at the moment and my voice is quite the smoker’s grovel. That’s basically all I recall saying in response to whatever she said back to me. She, of course, called me a bitch and told me to get off her property. It sounded so funny to me at the time and even in retrospect, but I didn’t laugh. I felt like I was watching reality TV, but I didn’t feel like its star.

Eventually I woke up with a rake in my hand standing in their driveway and apologized for coming over in attack mode, but said that I felt like I was being attacked several times a day by their pack of dogs. Nothing she said to me made sense or made any difference. This wasn’t a conversation. There were accusations that our dog had done damage to their car, which was impossible because she is never, ever out of our sight.

I came home, cried for a while; looked at the calendar to see how close my period might be coming; got frustrated because the calendar never is accurate anymore; then sat down to write.

It’s been almost 24 hours and I haven’t seen any of their dogs since.