Allergy Season

I hate Portland with every fiber of my being and I hope it falls into a fiery pit of hell.

Allergy season has sent me into a histamine rage. I had resolved myself to stay here for Spike's "golden" years (he likes that term, Spikey's a marksman), because who would rent a Los Angeles apartment under $800-$900 to a woman with 2 little dogs, one of whom has made it his life's mission to wake the dead with a yip I can hear from 4 flights of Victorian length stairs or 2 pollen ridden blocks (my old home and my new) away?

13 years ago, when I lived in Venice Beach, Spikey was lost and my friend Harley searched the dumpsters, assuming a neighbor had done him in for his bark. But they hadn't, he was located rows of beach houses away by his yip. Identified by a neighbor whom Harley had grilled on Spike's whereabouts. The guy was desperate to prove himself innocent.

Back to the dead. Spikey, I've always assumed, would piss on his own grave. When he eventually shuffled his mortal coil (another unfortunate term when it comes to dogs), Leif and I had planned to scatter Spike's ashes in the dog park, "the happiest place on Earth". I'm not religious and it's never occurred to me to scatter anyone's ashes anywhere, but Spike so clearly loves the dog park. He doesn't love the dog park in Portland. He doesn't recognize it as one.

But Spikey is here with me because either Leif couldn't handle the ongoing health crises of an ancient little dog, or he just wanted complete bachelorhood. Either way, Spikey is mine and Isabel's.

But allergies are breaking us. Spikey, because it aggravates his 16 year old doggy trachea (collapsed as surely the World Trade Center) and me because it's put me into a hellish desire to sneeze that somehow permeates my skin.

I'm unhappy here enough even I had to research to be certain it wasn't psychosomatic. Though who would have clued in Spike?

 

My mother (with my stepfather) has ordered a $300 air filter. But no amount of money, at least that they've got, can fix the mistake of her not self sufficient enough daughter leaving Los Angeles to come here.