My Old Dog

In between getting thrown out of school for fighting with my classmates I had a dog at home named Hogan and he was crazy and I loved him.

To take you back to my childhood— I have a condition called Misophonia. A condition where my brain interprets sounds as pain.

And, without a frontal lobe, and, in the absence of a fully developed superego, my condition made my childhood a nightmare that I couldn’t explain or understand.

I would yell at the people who could have been my friends for things they could not control. Yelling at my classmates to stop sniffling and coughing. Any loud and repetitive noise needed to be stopped or I would start to cry and further implode my already diminished state.

Fighting with others made it stop. So I did that for so long. It wasn’t until much later in my life that I realized that making people laugh made my meltdowns stop too. So I started to do that instead.

My condition was hard on my family as they knew just as much as the medical establishment did about what I was going through, which, to this day, is next to nothing.

On my sixth or seventh school, after being thrown out of all the others, my parent’s loveless marriage ended and my dad got remarried. This was a blessing, because my new step mom had a dog named Hogan and he was the first creature I ever met that was even crazier than me.