I was at work when I read about Art and Shep yesterday, and I started crying like a little baby. And I’m a miserable (and very manly, I feel compelled to add) old fuck. When you get to be an old bastid you’ve had to deal with a lot of loss in life.

If you’re an animal person, then you’ve had to deal with the loss of your best friends in the world. You lose your grandparents, your parents, friends and acquaintances. People you like, people you’re indifferent to, and people you feel kinda guilty about not feeling bad that they’re gone. Some of us out there have had to deal with the loss of their kids or their brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, whatever, in a pointless, illegal war.

No matter what, it always sucks. Even when you’re making a decision for a loved one that you know is the right one to make, it sucks. I’ve had to make that decision with pets, and it sucks. I had to make very much the same decision with my mother, and it sucked. As tough as those decisions are, imagine if you had people second-guessing you – demonizing you – in that most difficult of times. Imagine if it became national news, and a special session of Congress was used to enact legislation to interfere with that decision, the way it was for Michael Schiavo, and President Dummy came back from vacation to put his official stamp of idiocy upon the whole charade. How these people felt they had a right to interfere with somebody’s family matters like that is beyond me. It surely is the best definition of despicable I can think of.

Everybody I care about is hereby put on notice: you are NOT allowed to die before I do.