Individual Life and the Bond

There are many sayings and phenomena in human behavior that remind us that connections between fact and fiction, art and life, and perception exist even if we don’t notice them. Sometimes we may go for years and never notice them. Then one day something happens that suddenly catapults the connection into our awareness. At such times I, at least, feel torn between berating myself for missing it for so long and fascinated by the existence of such a process.

For decades, I’ve explored the role that the presence of a stable physical or mental space plays in animal health and behavior. And I recognize the role this plays in human physical and mental health, too. But as I’ve been working on a book proposal about the similarities between human and non-human animal behaviors as members of all species strive to achieve this equilibrium, I had a light-bulb moment relative to a parallel situation going on in my own life. Or rather, I had a “Duh!” moment because I can’t believe I missed it for so long.

Depending on your point of view, for the past several years I’ve lived nowhere or in two places simultaneously. This hasn’t always been the case. When I bought this house in 1987, the house and about 4 acres of land were in one town and 2 acres of land were in another. This division apparently was determined by running a straight line from the granite town line marker on the road across one end of my triangle-shaped property. At the time, I didn’t think anything about this because a) it made sense and b) I knew New Hampshire has a law that mandates town lines be confirmed every 7 years. Because there were tax records from the previous owners that went back way beyond 7 years that confirmed this division, it never dawned on me that such lines could be the result of a whim.

As readers of my commentaries and podcasts know, I live in an electronic dead zone. Because of this, my best hope of any kind of high-speed connection, even the slowest one, is my local phone company. With each passing year the need for such a connection becomes more pressing because software and website designers increasing assume that everyone has access to high-speed if not something even faster. This results in some almost Kafka-esque Catch-22s for me.

For example, if I need support for my Dell computer or QuickBooks accounting program, I must go on-line to get the phone number or a special ID to call for such help. But because their respective sites are now so huge, I can’t even open them with my dial-up connection. Instead, I must give one of my sons the necessary access data and ask him to go on line for me to get that information. Either that or I must learn to live with the problem, which I increasingly do. In the past year, two banks with which I do business have redone their websites with features that no doubt make the hearts of those with the ability to access them go pitty-pat. For me, the result has been no access at all. Even normally accessible amazon.com timed out on me multiple times during the holiday season. No doubt the slowness of data transfer convinced the software that processes such things that there was no one at this end.

Frustrating though all this may be, for the most part I’ve been able to accept it…

Until this past summer when dsl technology came to a phone pole near me and I couldn’t get it. At that point I fell down a bureaucratic rabbit hole that connected to one I fell down several years ago. Down Rabbit Hole I lies the Kingdom of 911, which came to the boonies and did their thing based on whoknowswhat data back in the late nineties. Back then, I would get calls from them asking me where I lived and I would tell them. This seemed strange to me, but it was the government after all. They then assigned me a street number and name that I knew would create problems from the get-go because it was the nickname used by every local who traveled the entire length of the road regardless what town they were in.

Having trouble following this? Let me give you an example. Suppose the original road that went through two towns was named Broadway Stage Road, but the locals all shortened this to Stage Road. When 911 came in, the name remained Broadway Stage Road in one town, but was changed to Stage Road in the other. Meanwhile everyone kept calling the entire road Stage Road.

Not that long after this occurred, Rabbit Hole II appeared when the town that had claimed 2 acres of this property decided to survey their boundaries for the first time in at least 30 years. The net result of this fiasco was that the town line now runs through the center of my house and the bulk of the land is in the town that used to have the least.

Now you would think that having half a house in one town and half in another would entitle one to have dsl from a pole in whichever town got it first. But nooooooo. Well, not exactly no. For the phone company tech and engineers, running the line is idiot simple because this house originally did have a phone line from that pole. The problem has nothing to do with the technology, but rather with bureaucracy. And specifically something apparently related to 911.

Do you ever think about your 911 emergency coverage?  Back then when I realized that I’d be eating my breakfast in one town and sleeping in another, I did ask those theoretically responsible for such things if this would create any problems. Foolishly, I believed them when they said they’d take care of it.

Then this year, the phone company fell down the 911 rabbit hole at their end when they tried to provide dsl to this house. I can’t tell you what 911 has to do with this because as yet no one has been able to explain it to me in a way that makes any sense. Suffice it to say that the most commonly used word to describe what’s going on is that it’s a “cluster.” I’ll let you use your imagination regarding what this term means.

Based on their rabbit-hole experiences, the phone company suggested that I verify which town provides my police, fire, and ambulance coverage because there seemed to be some discrepancies. At that point my two rabbit holes converged and I’ve been wandering around in this bureaucratic warren ever since. So far, the only answer I’ve received relative to coverage is “We don’t know” plus references to the aforementioned cluster. One person promised that too many emergency vehicles would show up rather than too few. But because at least one of the towns had the wrong address for this place, I’m not sure exactly where they would show up. Would it be in the yard of the person who got 350 gallons of free fuel oil that I would’ve been billed for if someone hadn’t realized that I only had a 250-gallon tank? Beats me. I learned about that error when someone from the oil company called and hesitantly asked me to go down to my little basement and see if there was a LOT of oil on the floor. I’d be really miffed if a similar error sends an over-abundance of emergency vehicles to the wrong house while my house burns to the ground or I bleed out waiting for an ambulance.

The weird thing about all this, though, is that it all started because way-back-when someone decided that ensuring reliable boundaries didn’t apply to them for some reason. That, in turn, triggered a cascade of unintended consequences years later for which no one wants to assume any responsibility. The current problems will require a lot of time and effort on numerous people’s parts to resolve. Nor is there any guarantee of the results.

Sound familiar regarding our relationships with companion animals? This experience has left me feeling even more compassion for animals who come into our lives primed by evolution to expect consistent boundaries, to know they can trust their physical and mental space to remain stable, to know they can count on us to be there for them when problems arise. When they discover that they can’t count on this, do what-if scenarios they never had to think about before occur to them like they do to me? Do they look at lines of communication with us that would be so easy to access if only we could get past the excuses and other cluster-like thinking that keeps us from doing this?

I suspect they do.

But I hope not because it’s not the kind of uncertain existence I’d wish on anyone, let alone a dog.

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