I love the sound of you walking away

I don’t like having to read poetry about pets dying. It is just depressing. I know it’s all beautiful to commemorate the deep and meaningful relationship you have with your pet, and I don’t disagree with the act of writing poetry (well, sometimes…). Writing is a great way of working through grief. I once woke up in the middle of the night and wrote a letter to an individual who had passed away that day. It is the best way of dealing with grief that I have found so far, I give it a rating of five soggy tissues out of five.

With the poetry, the bit that I feel is unnecessary is the bit after the writing where people feel the need to share their bad poems with other people. Then added to this is when others respond with statements like “I know just how you feel” and “that’s beautiful, it’s really moving”. People who respond like this are of two kinds. The first group are heartfelt in their comments, which means that they probably have some unfinished grief of their own to attend to. The other group are just saying what they feel they have to say, because you can’t tell someone their poem sucks when they are in a delicate emotional state! Unfortunately this then encourages the grieving person to continue writing more poetry, and lets others know that this is apparently acceptable behaviour. The person who is grieving has a good excuse for not thinking straight. Unfortunately they are breaking a basic rule – Thou shalt not share bad poetry!

Perhaps people are under the impression that grief increases their creative ability. Just because the depth of the emotion is deeper, it doesn’t mean your skills have increased. The power of emotion is not linearly equated with technical prowess. If people tried to use painting as a way of paying tribute, then I wouldn’t be having this problem. Bad painting is a lot easier for the artist to detect than bad poetry is for the poet.

Apart from bad art, I do not want to read another poem where someone has clearly projected their emotional deficiencies onto their darling little Misty, Fido or Gargamel. They need to feel special and loved, so they become convinced that they have some kind of deep emotional bond with their dog that no-one else could possibly imagine. When their dog looks into their eyes, they are looking deep into their soul...

And I suppose the dog is thinking: “Sometimes when I look all solemn like this - I get treats!!!”

I have another problem with this situation, which is that some of the dogs that appear to have really strong bonds with their owners are like this because they are mentally unbalanced in some way. Separation anxiety, dislike of other people and dogs, etc, can be misinterpreted as being “love” for their owner. In reality these are problems involving fear, and they need to be addressed before puppy can relax and live a normal life. Some owners are selfish and/or ignorant, and they use their dog’s behaviour as an ego boost without considering the anxiety suffered by the dog. I personally wouldn’t want to be in a situation where the dog only hangs out with me because it is too terrified to do anything else. It’s attachment by default, and I don’t like being only the default. (Because I’m special… right?)

It seems that most people like to think that their pet is special in some way. It’s usually just because they’ve spent a lot of time with it. When you have time to observe all of the cute little character traits, then your pet starts to become distinguishable as an individual. You also know it better than other people, so that is a unique thing that you have. It’s the same as how your (human) friends become special to you because you know them. Not because you are flukily living in the spot where all the amazing people are.

People the world over share a bunch of traits that make amazing people equally likely to appear anywhere. Of course this also means that there are low-life hogswindlers everywhere as well. Unfortunately this is not the same kind of Peace On Earth/We Are The World, type of thought.

Sorry about that.

Ok, I’ve started off with a rant about Dead Pet PoetryTM and ended up harping on about the ways of the world…

I think it may be time to finish, I’ve gotten all serious in here and it’s freaking me out. Plus this post is way too long. Oops!