Dog-eat-dog world.

The other day, I was walking in a park in Sofia, that’s more like a stunning, verdant forrest than usual curated city greenery. I was ambling around, absentmindedly poking a stick in the ground, when a grey pit-bull galloped towards me. I panicked for a millisecond then stopped panicking. The owner was sitting at a wooden picnic table smoking a cigarette.

In this park, people almost never leash their dogs. If you see a dog on a leash, you presume the dog has issues. So, the fact that the pit-bull was not on a leash told me she was friendly. She was.

“She’s trying to take your stick!” the woman joked. When the dog thief realized she couldn’t nab my stick without giving up the ball in her mouth she trotted off.

There’s a decent amount of research on high trust vs. low trust societies. As I understand it, and please correct me if I’m wrong, in high trust societies people pretty much assume that strangers will act in a kind, ethical, community-minded way that doesn’t cause harm to others, even without fear of punishment. In low-trust societies the opposite is true. Bulgaria is an interesting case. People have extremely low trust in government and institutions, with very good reason, but don’t worry much about being robbed, raped, killed by a stranger, killed by a cop, or pushed onto the tracks by a stranger suffering from psychosis. Or mauled by a dog because their owner couldn’t be bothered to leash them.

***

There’s this ancient dog in Park Slope, Brooklyn. It’s a large white lab mix of some sort. The owners don’t leash him. I don’t care, even though it’s against the rules and norms in the neighborhood. You could tell he’s ancient and always ambles next to the couple who own him, neither falling behind nor running ahead. Just peacefully plodding along.

One day, I watched a young hipster girl berate the dog’s owner. “You HAVE to leash your dog! You can’t do this!” she yelled poking her finger. “Your dog could hurt another dog! Your dog could bite a child! Your dog could … “ multiple dire outcomes were outlined.

The dog owner looked down and nodded, not pushing back. Yet the rant continued. After a minute, the leash advocate stopped being a hero and crossed the street. She looked back and sharply shook her head to express additional disapproval. Her body still heaved with outrage and she waved her arms, continuing to bitch to her girlfriend about the perfidy of people who don’t leash their elderly, barely ambulatory, very sweet, dogs. The girl and I rolled our eyes at each other. “That was absurd. Don’t feel bad,” I said. (Because I’m hilarious, next time I ran into the girl and her unleashed dog, I sharply said, “Hey. You have to leash your dog!” She hung her head in shame and I was like, “No no no I’m kidding!” and she remembered and we laughed about the asshole hipster leash cop).

A point could be made that if someone is scared of dogs it could cause anxiety to see an unleashed one. But most people aren’t scared of dogs, and even those who are, are usually alarmed when dogs freak out or bark at them (this dog looks like it hasn’t barked once in its life). You have to be a maniac that should really seek mental health care if you don’t have that phobia but are so angry and weird you yell at a stranger on the street (I assume she doesn’t have a phobia because she felt safe taking an aggressive posture with the dog’s owner while the dog was there unleashed).

Now, I would never let Riley, the tiny chihuahua-terrier mix I co-own with a friend, off-leash outside. This is because Riley tries to kill dogs that are five times his size when they have the temerity to walk on *his* sidewalk. “Hold me back. Just hold me back!” this furry flea seems to be thinking as he snarls and barks at the confused Laberdoodle who is enemy number 1.

“Make my motherfucking day, Labredoodle.” — Riley

He’d never bite, and is great around little kids even when they batter him the way kids do to show dogs affection. However, he has the temperament of a paranoid meth head, and tries to bolt anytime he hears a loud noise.

If there were even a .00000001 chance that her sweet dog would do any of these things Riley would if left to his own devices off leash, then obviously! She would not take the chance of her dog biting someone or running into traffic! It’s Park Slope, presumably she can afford a leash. Low trust society; the inability to conceptualize that a stranger would take basic steps to care for the safety and comfort of other people in the community.

***

Whenever I write about the low crime rates and the generally “high-trust” society in Bulgaria, the Nazis swing into my replies. “Notice anything? NOTICE ANYTHING? NOTICE ANYTHING!?!! NOTICE ANYTHING!?!! NOTICE. ANYTHING!?!!””

The point of their astute sociological analysis is that crime is low and trust is high because everyone is white. First, this is not true. Immigration patterns in the last few decades make it false. A few weeks ago, I had the delightful experience of watching a Bulgarian couple my parents’ age having lunch with their Black grand-daughter. They had moved to Chicago in the early 1990s around when my family came to Los Angeles and their son’s wife is Black. The family were engaged in the time-honored Bulgarian tradition of, “Let’s fop the kid off on the grandparents for the summer.” She said she missed her friends but was largely enjoying being spoiled by her grandparents in Bulgaria.

And more commonly, there are so many Iraqi and Syrian refugees either passing through or staying in Bulgaria that I get a green card marriage proposal every time I leave the house.

No. It’s not about racial uniformity. It’s the lack of extreme, psychopathic income inequality.

Virtually every single part of life here is structured around the fact that outside of a handful of Mafiosos, no one is THAT rich and no one is THAT poor. So the perks of a good life—health, socialization, walkability, access to nature, access to exercise—are far more accessible. 

The range from poor, to working class to upper middle class, is, by one metric, the difference between vacationing on the beautiful Bulgarian seaside or vacationing on the beautiful Turkish or Greek seaside—every year.    

A few more things: Every summer my friend Lynn tries to find an affordable outdoor pool in New York. Some years Lynn’s hero journey succeeds; most years it fails. The only outdoor pool I know of is on the top of a hotel in Williamsburg and costs $100 for the day.

In Sofia, there's a pool complex with two outdoor Olympic sized pools and a high dive pool. It's a 3 minute walk from where I'm staying and it costs ... wait for it … $10 a day, for all day. Even the refugees save their money and come once a week or so (swimming is the best exercise, better than running I found because it doesn't bust your joints). So, health.

I chipped my front teeth, slightly. A Brooklyn dentist charged $200 to inspect it, and then told me fixing it would cost $1,000. A Bulgarian dentist did a perfect job and charged me ... $90. I have a ton more dental work to do, and will do it. (health)

Healthy food costs pennies, and so there are fruit and vegetable stands everywhere. Diet health is not only for people who can hire a private chef or those who can afford to only eat organic. Imagine fruit and vegetable stands in Bed-Stuy? The forest park where I made my pit bull friend is next to the pool; it's magical, and there's no entrance fee. Imagine a forest in Bushwick, a place for people to relax and exercise (health, etc). 

The trains are clean and literally never late. (mental health! In New York I overdose on cortisol when I realize I'm going to be half an hour late because the trains are messed up).

In the US, I think people in every class—poor, working class, middle class, upper middle class, even arguably wealthy—are like frogs in boiling water, unaware of all the degradations and little cuts, to our mental and physical health, we experience daily that add up to poorer physical and mental health, because of how different the lives are not just of the 1%, but of the .01%, who hoard not just the money but the experiences that make people healthier and happier.

***

One more dog anecdote. About a year before the pandemic, my friend Kristen and I moved into an apartment on the edge of Bed-Stuy and Bushwick in Brooklyn. This was a mistake. The income inequality in the neighborhood is jarring enough to cause understandable tension. There are hideous projects, where the Overlords had decided that poor kids aren’t allowed to have trees or nice playgrounds. And then you’d have some hipster coffee shop where a bourgie donut costs $15.

The Overlords also decided to put the worst hospital, Woodhull (my friend Sandra, who was homeless and suffered seizures, called it Woodkill because they kept trying to feed her tuna sandwiches even though she’s allergic) in the neighborhood.

Then, the Overlords decided to have so few beds that people are released when they are still clearly suffering mental health problems. The Broadway-Myrtle M stop? The street is lined with people in various stages of overdosing or disrepair or psychotic breakdown.

Once I was jauntily walking to the train when a man still in hospital clothes just flung his coffee directly in my face. For a second I thought it was acid.

***

I used to be a runner until the ole joints began to complain. I was so psycho about it, that, yes, I got runners high and I’d feel really strong and badass and like a fucking super hero, like Riley about to vanquish the Labredoodle once and for all…

And then, another skinny white girl in yoga pants and a bobbing pony tail, exactly like me, would jump in front of me and start to jog, our movements parallel. “Jesus christ we’re like a white girl gentrification train,” I’d think in shame.

It’d always make me think of this girl I used to work with, Rae. She was Black, and she was rich—her Dad was like the head doctor of the biggest hospital in Houston or something like that, so she too was a gentrifier. She told me about sitting at a bus stop with an older Black woman, watching a skinny white woman jogging. “There goes the neighborhood,” the woman told Rae, who felt like a weird imposter.

Anyway, after Kristen and I moved to the Myrtle-Broadway train stop, I was running in the neighborhood. I ran past a dog, tied to a fence, and the dog lunged at me and tried to bite. It was pretty terrifying. The owner restrained her and started to berate me. “You’re running! She thinks that you just robbed us! Be CAREFUL. I HOPE you LEARNED AN IMPORTANT LESSON TODAY!”

He … definitely could have been nicer, but I imagine his cortisol levels were through the roof, given the likely consequences, if his beloved dog were to bite a stupid jogging white lady.

The dog didn’t trust me. I didn’t trust him to restrain his dog. He didn’t trust me to not be a dumbass running past his dog. No one trusted anyone. Low trust society.