Yes! Emilie has a bid! That was much faster than anticipated. She also has 40 views and 11 watchers.

I got the incense I won yesterday along with some surprise goodies he threw in. Another shiny, glittery cone burner, not that I need one since I don’t do cones. A bag of Polo cones I didn’t like at all, plus 3 roll-on perfumes. Lucky You is strange, Curve is so-so, but Carolina Herrera is beautiful. It smells like gardenias.

I got slight vibes for work for Tom within the first two weeks of March. Something about the 12th and 14th, only the 14th is on a Saturday. Hmm… guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

I won 6 writing contests on Kiwibox! So that brought a nice 1200 points.

So Tom agrees with me that the barking seems to be much more of an issue when I happen to be up and about. Good, so I’m not going crazy after all with this assumption. The question I’ve been asking for the last 17 years, though, is why me? Just like I had to ask why God would whip my ass with the sickos in Phoenix, why has He been using every damn dog I live close enough to hear as a weapon of annoyance against me??? Something sure seems to be anyway. If He’s “cursed” me with barking, why would He punish me with other people’s dogs driving me crazy like this and for so long???

I’ve thought about it and I’ve thought about it, and the only thing I can come up with is that when I was really little, I would take my frustrations out on one of the puppies we had at the time. But a child that age can’t inflict much harm, so the “torture” basically involved tossing it up in the middle of my parents’ bed and letting it fall onto it, although I do vaguely remember my mother saying something about me breaking its leg. I don’t remember actually doing anything to the dog and this could be a made-up story told to me or me not remembering correctly. If I did do any of this, I was too young to know any better much less remember.

I admit it. I often took my anger out on this dog as well as some of our pet rodents, even pulling the tail off a gerbil once that my sister said I supposedly asked to be taped back on.

Or maybe these were just stories told to me by my gaslighting family because I honestly don’t remember either of these incidents. I hope they’re not true!

But if there is a grain of truth to any of this and if this is why I’m being “paid back” by every neighbor’s dog over the last 17 years, why now? Why would it start when I was 26? And why would it still be going on today? And why isn’t 17 years of payback more than enough?

Or is it because I was noisy myself when I was young, often annoying neighbors when I lived in apartments with my loud music or running around? And if this is it, once again, how many more years until I’m “compensated” for being a nuisance?

I guess I can never know for sure why I “coincidentally,” as much as the West truly is full of barking dogs left outside all the time, get hit with this shit everywhere I go. If it is the way I treated animals as a child, then maybe God should’ve blessed that child with a mommy who was nicer to her. After all, verbal, emotional, or physical abuse is usually what drives children to abuse animals, other children, etc., and she may not have been directly responsible for my actions, but I think she helped influence them more than most people may want to ever admit. Including her.

Whatever the reason for the curse, it’s undeniably aimed at me. Two mornings ago they started barking at 7:00. A half-hour later I was going to bed thinking it was a good thing Tom doesn’t mind barking as much as I do cuz he’s in for one hell of a noisy day! Yet when he got up a few hours later, he said it was quiet all day. I know they would’ve gone on and on all day had I just been getting up.

Then just yesterday, all was quiet until I got up to pee around noon. The instant my ass hit the toilet seat the motorcycle started up, followed by barking. I then went back to bed where the fan and sound machine drowns it all out. When I got up in the evening, I asked Tom how bad it had been and he said, “They stopped the instant you closed the bedroom door.”

Gee, how ironic!

So I’m staying on nights as long as possible when I’m safe from this curse and able to get a lot more peace. Although, it does mean being woken up by the fucking motorcycle. That thing is just soooooo loud and there’s just no way to drown it out completely. I guess I could keep turning the sound machine up, but I still don’t know if that’d override the bassy rumbling it makes. Either way, there’s always something. Barking dogs when I’m on days, roaring motorcycles waking me up when I’m on nights, trying to sleep during the day.