[To Douglas Blazek]

March 22, 1966

the dog poisoners are legion and slinky and seldom get caught, and we don’t have enough death, they have to play dirt with the little we have left. I was supposed to go to WAR to save such creatures as these? the dog poisoners are usually members of long standing in the neighborhood, respected, churchly, own their own homes, and are often childless or their children have grown and tend not to see them anymore. the dog poisoners are usually between the ages of 55 and 70. most of them loved animals as children but American society and what it extracts from the body and the mind and the soul can grow very special monsters of its own. most of them are concerned with property and “property rights” as they like to call them. and since they have nothing else to hold to, this becomes everything. not so long ago there was a doctor out here in one of the suburbs who clubbed a puppy to death with a pistol butt. it was not even a grown dog. and he did it in the open, on his lawn, with children and people watching. (I was not there.) but his excuse was that the puppy had no right on his property. being a doctor and fatted with the worship people tend to give doctors and fatted with $$$, he was simply bolder and more insane than his brethren dog-killers. the case came to court but I didn’t hear how it came out. they didn’t print it or I missed that edition. probably case dismissed or a fine, say $15. property, property. I had a beautiful hound once (half-wolf, half-collie; but gentle, gentle) and I was walking him down the street on a leash and he stopped to piss on a plant outside a real estate office on Beverly Blvd. I had him trained to crap in vacant lots. but he pissed on this bush and this real estator leaped out of his office, he screamed at me: “HEY! GET THAT DOG OFF THAT BUSH! HEY! HEY! HEY! PISS IS POISON! HE PISSED ON MY BUSH!” you could hear this guy all the way to Bensenville, Illinois. I just looked at him, looked at his acid face and his eyes and his body dangling there. “I can’t control my dog’s piss,” I told him quietly. “Well, let him piss somewhere else! move him off!” I didn’t move off. either the dog or I could have killed him if we had so chosen. “Your chicken-shit bush won’t die,” I told him, “and if it does, I’ll pay you for it.” “Get that dog outa here!” we stood there until he went back inside to count his blood chips of profit. sometimes I think that these people almost know that they are dead, ugly, wasted, and they don’t want to see anything or anybody happy and careless and easy; they don’t even want to see anybody unhappy in the way we tend to get unhappy—it has to be their way. my wolf-collie got killed by a car when I split with this woman. I had left the dog with her. pets seldom die of old age. how I hate the fucking world and their special ways and values! Blaz, you’ll get over the dog (dogs) but you’ll never get over what did it: The American flag. money. property. the dead citizens in cities of horror and madness and fear. christ, christ.