Dog

Cold Sun

The cold sun of fall woke me early. I’m thankful for that. Sometimes I believe I can do more waking than sleeping. Other times I admit the truth: More goes on in my life when I sleep than when I am awake.

Unbridled joy is just that: untamed, messy, imperfect. It falls. It gets up. This is how I learn from an eight pound dog.

I have a small window, not in the main bedroom but in a closet whose door I keep ajar because I like to see some of what’s in there, but not everything. I like to see the bookcase, the yellow one, and the clear containers full of poems (mine, those of friends and strangers). I accumulated the paper back when the world was paper, when I thought thin sheets organized alphabetically could help me tame, or at least take part in, the world.

The window is positioned high on the wall, right below the home’s eave. It’s only purpose, I believe, was to let cool air in before there was air conditioning. Now it’s stuck shut, like most of the windows in the home. It didn’t do anything all summer, didn’t seem to do anything. But two days ago, when the cold sun of fall was created anew this season, the small window, the small high window, took its opportunity and caught that light. The sun is lower now. Low and clear. The eave can’t hold light back, and so it comes in, thanks to the window—not in a stream but as a single rectangle, a slot, which lands on my face, framing my eyes. The rest of the room remains in relative darkness.

There couldn’t be a more direct wake-up call. So I woke. What was I supposed to do? I can’t remember last night’s dreams. That must mean things are going OK. The dreams come—lucid dreams, night terrors, false awakenings, the half-dreams of hypnagogia, out-of-body dreams in which my dream self hovers over me threatening to float through the wall and stay on the other side forever, long long endless long dreams in which I obsessively play out scenes from my life—when things are not going OK.

We can’t wipe someone off with a towel in this poem. It’s so boring, I tell the children at Farm Labor Homes. Poems are fun, exciting, they don’t do what we expect them to do. I watch as a look floods their eyes the way ink does when it’s injected into water. A crazy look. “Chicken noodle soup,” one of the kids exclaims, jumping out of her seat. The others lean into the table, waiting for my reaction, expectant.

They get it, they get it, I think, relieved. Yes, I squeal. Now that’s more like it. I complete the line of the poem we are writing together: And then the girl who fell / in mud gets wiped off with / chicken noodle soup.

They all laugh. They laugh and laugh and beg to write another poem. I tell them that they made this, emphasizing the word “they.” It’s a poem and they made it. I try to tell them how important this moment is, but they are too busy laughing and grabbing the poem so they can read it again.

My chihuahua was overcome last night, as she sometimes is, with what I can only interpret as joy. She ran as fast as she could through the living and dining rooms, making the same lazy circle around the seating. Every time she hit the wood floors, she fell: hip into floor, side against floor, legs behind her, crisscrossed. Her nails made a “schrwish schrwish schrwish schrwihsch” that would have frightened someone who didn’t know what was going on. “Schrwish schrwish thump.” “Schrwish schrwish thump.” The thumps are the falling, obviously.

I love how my dog slips, and how she gets back up, her joy intact. Unbridled joy is just that: untamed, messy, imperfect. It falls. It gets up.

This is how I learn from an eight pound dog.

I remember my dream, the one I had last night. He and I lived in a basement apartment that had never been fully converted. Concrete walls painted red. Low ceilings. No real plumbing, only a drain in the middle of the space into which everything—bath water, kitchen sink—flowed.

What happened next? He left. We had just moved in when he moved out. Left me there. Took everything. I didn’t have a bed. I would lie on the floor each night and think about how we used to lie in the bed together, with sheets and pillows and a gentle breeze coming from somewhere. Suddenly, I realized I wasn’t living in a house; I was living in a cell and always had been, even when he was with me.

I wanted my home. I mean my mother’s home. I cursed him for not letting me move into it when I had the chance. What I really wanted was her. I went outside, dug in the dirt. I was looking for her, meant to bring her back the way one might bring a radish back from the garden.

Then he appeared. He held me and I screamed.

I just looked outside. Evidence of first frost—a thin semi-frozen mat over grass. Sun and window woke me early to see this.

All summer I thought the summer sun was clear. It wasn’t. It was overdoing it, trying to impress. Fall sun. That’s where the real light is at. When you have sun without heat, you’ve got something special.

I don’t live alone, though we all live alone in some ways. I live with a man who is a great love, a great love who moves inside the great love of the world.

Lame Skills and Dreams and Being and Doing (and My Dog, Hayden)

I am sitting here, staring at my screen. My dog, Hayden, snores at my feet in her puppy bed, which we call her butt nest. The term is a misnomer, of course, since her entire body is in the nest, not just her butt, and since it’s technically not a nest.

What I’ve been thinking about lately is the difference between doing and being.

I don’t know. Maybe it qualifies as a nest. I suddenly realize I don’t know the actual definition of “nest.”

I’ll have to look that up.

Later.

I feel like I should write something, since I am here at the computer and all. I can’t go anywhere anyway. Hayden just had surgery, her second procedure in three weeks. I have to watch her until she feels better and gets over her predictable but still unpleasant post-op constipation.

I’ve never cheered for poop the way I’ve cheered for poop with this dog. I’ve been cheering all day to no avail. In response, she looks up at me and wags her tail, as if her very existence is worthy of applause—which it is. She doesn’t have to do anything for me to sing her praises.

I also feel like I should write something because I am a writer, or at least consider myself a writer. I certainly don’t consider myself someone who stares idly at the computer all day, fingers curved over the keyboard as if on the cusp of writing, without actually doing any writing.

But the thing is, I don’t know what to write. And when I don’t know what to write, I usually begin aimlessly and somehow end up with a five thousand-word essay on some unexpected thing that wells up in the not-knowing-what-to-write moment.

I don’t have time for a five thousand-word essay today. That’s not true. I have time. I have nothing but time. Time and love and capacity. That’s all I have and all I will ever have. Even on my deathbed, I will have time. Just not a whole lot of it. But technically I will still have some of it. I hope I will have love and capacity then, too. We’ll see.

I just don’t feel like writing and writing and writing, namely because that necessitates proofing and proofing and proofing. Proofing is not fun, especially when you’re proofing your own work, and you’re dyslexic.

Don’t get me wrong: I proofread like a champ. If there were an Olympic event for proofreading, I would take at least the bronze medal, maybe the gold. I have consistently out-proofed every candidate on every editing test I’ve taken for editorial positions. I even find unintentional mistakes in people’s tests, scads of them. At a large publishing company I worked for, one that produced more than ninety magazines and had an editorial staff in the zillions, I was recognized by the group’s managing editor as the best proofreader he’d seen in his decade with the company.

My ability to proofread is, apparently, only outpaced by my ability to brag about my ability to proofread. It’s not even that hot of a skill. Why can’t I be the best planker or illusionist or dog whisperer? Why can’t I invent some awesome new bobby pin-based hairstyle-enhancing device that sells millions? Or a self-folding handkerchief? Heck, a self-folding everything-that-is-meant-to-be-folded!

Can you imagine throwing your sheets, towels, kitchen rags and the like—even your undies—on your bed or linen table after they’ve been washed and dried, and all of them FOLDING THEMSELVES while you kick back and sip on some tasty pomegranate juice? Can you IMAGINE that? I can. But I can’t do anything beyond the imagining. That’s because my skill lies in the area of proofreading.

PROOFREADING! It’s like reading, only it’s a specific type of reading of a specific type of document, with specific symbols and notes for the printer and whatnot—which 90 percent of writers, editors, designers and printers don’t even know anymore! (If there even are printers involved, which there aren’t when it comes to digital publishing. There often aren’t other writers or editors, either. So who exactly are my symbols and notes for?)

What the hell? My whole world is caving in right here, right now as I contemplate the boringness of my skill coupled with the outdatedness of it. My ability to proofread is like a beige argyle sweater vest for men or a brick of tofu sold the mid-’80s at The Earth Natural Foods in Norman, Oklahoma. (Mid-80s tofu, for those who don’t know, don’t remember or weren’t alive in the mid-80s, was so bland it possessed a nasty nontaste aftertaste. At least the kind sold in Oklahoma.)

I mean, PROOFREADING? That’s what I have to work with, to show off about? That’s a bragging FAIL.

The problem with proofing my own work is that I like to publish my writing as soon as I’ve written it. (None of that waiting around to see if the work is “quality”—that’s not how I roll.) My tight production schedule gives me very little time to go through the entire editorial process before putting the work out there. Sure, this is a self-imposed schedule. I could give myself overnight or something instead, or as much time as I want.

But no. Once it’s written, it must go live ASAP. That’s my compulsion derangement style.

Now Hayden is looking up at me, with that look that tells me she trusts me completely.

Why is it that almost all the dogs and children I’ve met have trusted me implicitly, while few of the adult humans I’ve met have exhibited the same level of trust?

I dreamed last night that someone I care about, a poet, was living behind a crack house in a hole he’d dug in the earth and covered with a rock. One day, he pushed the rock aside, left the hole and fell in love.

He and the woman he loved rented a studio apartment a few blocks away from the crack house. He bought a folding cot that resembled a hospital bed. She said it was hideous. He said the metal frame could be painted bright blue and that the color would really liven up the space. She told him to get rid of it.

Dejected, he ran off, leaving the cot behind.

Nobody could find him. Weeks passed. I knew where he’d gone. Back to the hole.

I made my way behind the crack house and started shifting rocks until I found him under one, lying next to Charles Bukowski. The soil was carved to fit their bodies perfectly, earthen molds designed to accept them and only them.

They were high. Each had a glassy look. Each was close to anger, but the drugs in their systems prevented them from reaching anger, the way water at the edge of a lake is prevented by various forces from reaching the land just beyond its reach.

“This is what people mean when they talk about being blissed out—this look that is so close to rage but does not permit rage,” I thought.

I pulled my friend up into the world and took him back to the woman he loved.

He never wrote another poem, but he became famous for living under a rock behind a crack house with Charles Bukowski. He was all over YouTube spouting off about Žižek. Everyone loved him, even more than they loved Žižek.

He kept taking drugs. He took up smoking and drinking and abusing. He spray-painted hideous folding cots in bright colors and people called them works of art and put them in museums and bid on them at auctions.

When he walked down the street, long lines formed behind him, like the tail of a comet. This pleased him, but not as much as having the love of the woman he loved. And he had that, finally. He finally had that. And cots galore.

What I’ve been thinking about lately is the difference between doing and being. I find myself shifting into the realm of being, as opposed to doing.

Not that being and doing are mutually exclusive. Not at all. But for me, doing has always been the driving force, with the idea that being comes from doing and not the other way around.

I am inside of being right now, and inside of becoming. From this position, the doing will reveal itself, what I am meant to do—assuming there is anything I am meant to do that my being does not accomplish.

Ultimately, I want to not have to do anything for me to sing my own praises. Once I can do that, I can go back to doing, if that’s what I want to do.

It’s all very confusing. I am confused by it. I am sitting inside that confusion. I am petting it. I am trying to make the confusion feel so comfortable with me, and to feel so comfortable with it, that it rolls over and lets me lightly touch its stomach, its paws, its long, graceful arms. I want it to trust me implicitly, as I am learning to trust it.

Confusion. Confusion. That’s not what it is. Not at all. Not that, not that. There’s the pesky trap of language again, and the trap of culture that led me to the trap of language. Confusion is like the hideous cot before it’s been painted a bright color. What I feel is something else: the hideous cot after being painted the bright color.

Uncertainty. That’s what it is. I am sitting with this uncertainty.

Right here. I am right here.

I have a writer’s dog, there’s no doubt about it. She’s sleeping with one eye, watching me with the other. The click of the keys under the direction of my fingers seems to calm her. He ears are up. Her breathing slow and steady.

I don’t think she’d rather be anywhere than where she is right now, beside her writer. Her writer who loves her.