Taking Fences

Regular writing for irregular people.
June 19, 2013

Snakes on the plains

Late one summer my older brother Greg came across a snake skin clinging to a rock on the pine needle floor of my family’s hillside property. The skin appeared at once wispy and crispy, like dragon wing Kleenex, and it was gray, and tattered. He carried it into the house, where our father poked at it with a pencil and explained how the snake had gotten loose of it by rubbing up against a rough surface. Healthy snakes shed their skin as they grew, and our hillside sheltered many healthy snakes, our father said.

They prospered, these snakes. They thrived; held christenings and debutante balls and weddings, scattering their dated dresses about the landscape. And our family lived amongst them. Our family – of all families.

At this – the sight of a snake skin in her house, my father’s blasé announcement that we lived on a hillside teeming with snakes – my mother shuddered. Snakes terrified her. She seemed always scanning for them, and if we happened on one while out for a drive she would order my father to stop the car, back up, and drive over the snake again and again until we were sure it had truly buckled under our 2,500 pound station wagon and would not simply lie in cunning wait for our return, attach itself to our undercarriage, slither up through the ventilation system and coil, hissing, at my mother’s feet.

She had heard of a snake getting into a car once. She had heard of a snake coming up through a toilet, once. She had heard of a snake infiltrating a basement and laying the eggs which hatched umpteen baby snakes, which themselves reproduced, turning a nice, family home into an actual snake den. Once. She’d heard about this, once.

Ten snake species live in Montana; only one, the Prairie Rattlesnake, is venomous, reassures the state’s Fish and Wildlife division. Of course, no one wants to run into a rattlesnake, but my mother’s phobia extended to the other nine, hapless species – your garter snakes, your milk snakes, your bull snakes.

Faced with any of these snakes, my mother screamed, trembled and clutched at whatever might be handy – be it another person, be it a building, be it a tree – until the snake had moved on, at which point she stood absolutely still for several minutes more lest the snake, in confusion or malice, return.

Settling in a glass, steel and pavement world would have been a good choice for my mother; instead, we lived in the country, and her three children tramped around the outdoors because that’s what you do when you’re surrounded by it.

“Where have you been?” she might ask us as we leaned against our kitchen counter, gulping plastic tumblers of Kool-Aid, sweaty and breathless from a long afternoon exploring fields and dry creek beds.

“Playing in the hills,” we’d come back.

“Ug,” she’d say. “Snakes! All of that tall grass back there! Snakes love tall grass!”

But we hadn’t seen any snakes, we’d report; just snake skins, glimpses of the fragile, gossamer stockings, never the lady’s leg. We never saw any snakes.

“Oh, but you will,” she’d say. “You will.”

And then what, I never thought to ask. Would we die? Go blind? Pee ourselves? Become drug addicts? Republicans? What, pray tell, were the consequences of encountering snakes? If only I’d asked. But I didn’t.

Perhaps it goes without saying: My mother rarely ventured outdoors. Camping? “Snakes!” Hiking? “Snakes!” Fishing? “Snakes!” But periodically she’d start up on the exercise, which meant walking on the grassy shoulders of country roads. We’d go along with her on our bikes, pulling a few hundred yards ahead before circling back to check on her. Every so often she’d hear a rustle in the grass and jump.

On just such a walk I’d gotten way out in front, my filthy bruised summer legs peddling vigorously to attain the momentum I’d need to make it up our hill, expertly navigating the ruts along our shale road, riding out of my mind, really, 9 years old and pure speed. No fear. Pure speed.

Naturally, this is when I saw the snake.

When you’re a kid, you can pretend, as I did, that your mother’s likes and dislikes, her fantasies and worries, her hopes and dreams and fears, don’t matter. That they don’t touch you. But of course, they do.

I braked hard, tires skidding, shaking palms slipping off the handlebars as I fell, the snake close, very close, panic coursing through my body as I scrambled out from under the bike and ran to my mother, weeping, screaming, “Snake!”

I pointed at where it had been stretched across the road, sunning itself, a good 100 yards away. But by then it was gone.

She’d seen it; my brothers had seen it. We all agreed: This was a massive snake, nearly as long as the road was wide. I’d suckled on my mother’s phobia. Absorbed it. Manifested it. And no way, no way, was I going to walk past the spot where I’d seen that snake. That snake was out there. Somewhere. Mad at me.

“Harmless,” my mother said. “Just a bull snake. Big one.”

Just a bull snake? Just a bull snake? Where was she getting this whole “just a” business, anyway?

“It’s long gone. Come on up the hill.”

“No.”

I clung to my mother. She sent my brother up the hill with my bike to get my father, and when he came with the car I collapsed in the back seat, feet propped up, high above the floorboards.

I’d outgrow this fear, many years later. Twenty years later? Probably. It didn’t happen all at once. Several ridiculous scenes followed, culminating in the evening that my brothers, mother and I stood on our front steps throwing free weights at a small rattlesnake that had the misfortune to snooze in our yard. Most of the weights missed. He probably died of boredom.

It’d be swell at this point to report that I faced down a snake in the wilderness and prevailed, or learned to appreciate the beauty of snakes during a visit to a reptile sanctuary, or encountered a snake during a walk with my young son and decided, “This fear stops now, with my generation!” But none of that happened. I’m not going to go out looking for snakes, but I can live with the knowledge that they’re out there. Somewhere.

The fear just sloughed away. I guess I shed it, like you do.

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April 10, 2013

Barnacles, old redheads: A day at the dermatologist

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You schedule an appointment with the dermatologist for the first time in four years because the recent emergence of a flat, brown blob on the left side of your face has given you an insurance-approved excuse to talk about your wrinkles.

Anything else you’d to discuss during this appointment, the scheduler asks?

“Retin A,” you say.

“Do you have acne?” the scheduler asks, her mouse clearly hovering over some insurance billing box or other.

“No,” you say, lacking a self-protective mechanism. “I have wrinkles.”

The day of the appointment arrives. You put on the eye cream you bought three months ago: Eye Hope. On top of it you layer the two-step concealer you bought two years ago: Fading Hope.

Five years ago, you had no wrinkles. You were a redhead with no wrinkles. You had smile lines, heavier on the left side of your face on account of the congenital smirk. Professional contacts questioned your skills and intelligence because you looked so young. You grumbled, but really, you were fine with this.

You haven’t been smiling much lately. But those lines .. well, look at them. How many millimeters deep does one have to be before it is considered a “crease?”

The doctor knocks. Her skin is poreless, like someone spilled a box of baking soda on it.

You show her the flat, brown blob. She touches it.

“There’s some texture there, isn’t there,” she says, taking what looks like a jeweler’s loupe, holding it up to her eye, and gazing through it at the blob.

“That’s a barnacle,” she says.

“Excuse me?” you say. “Did you say, ‘barnacle?’”

“Yes,” she says. “You know? Like the ones on a ship? They’re inherited.”

Immediately, your mind lifts up an image for consideration. You think of Ernest Hemingway’s boat, Pilar, and Paul Hendrickson’s description of it in dry dock: “The wood, marbled with hairline fissures, was dusty, porous, dry. It seemed almost scaly. It felt febrile.”

You think of Gretel Erhlich. “The westerner’s face,” she wrote, “is stiff and dark red as jerky.”

You think of the many raised brown blobs on your grandmother’s skin.

“Barnacle is a truly awful term,” you tell the dermatologist,  as she hands you a brochure.

“If you can pronounce ‘Seborrheic Keratosis” you can call it that instead,” she says, explaining that this mat of renegade skin cells is just a harmless wart-like mass you must live with unless you want to cut it off and risk a scar.

You think of the fifth- sixth- and seventh-grade field days, and how at each one you wore shorts and a tank top and not a lick of sunblock for six hours in the Eastern Montana sun, and how you stared at many boys who absolutely did not stare back, not once.

You think of cruising Miles City, Montana for hours on hot July days in a red Dodge Daytona driven by a boy who you knew, just knew, would eventually let go of his bottle of Pepsi, reach over and grab your thigh. The Daytona had a T-top, and you, you did not once think to apply sunblock.

You think of watching, without sunblock, the home opener football game in college on an unseasonably warm September afternoon. You hate football. You only went to that game because you had a crush on a boy who happened to be sitting behind you with his girlfriend, who had a great tan.

You think of the four hours you spent, without sunblock, at the outdoor REO Speedwagon concert in Rock Creek, Montana. You hate REO Speedwagon. You only went to that concert because your boyfriend was 10 years older.

The boys of summer have gone. But you’ll always have something to remember them by: The barnacle.

“Barnacle,” reports Merriam-Webster. “Any of numerous marine crustaceans (subclass Cirripedia) with feathery appendages for gathering food that are free-swimming as larvae but permanently fixed (as to rocks, boat hulls or whales) as adults.”

So they stick to whales, too. Great. Super. Terrific.

Perhaps noticing that your eyes have gone flat, your skin clammy and your pulse, shallow, the dermatologist clears her throat.

“Have you ever seen an old redhead?” she asks.

Your mind, nimble as the newspaper copy boy, now fetches several old redheads. Meredith Palmer from “The Office.” Mona from “Who’s the Boss.” Carrot Top.

You also think of several older redheads you know personally. Hey, they look pretty good. You consider calling one or two and asking their secret, then decide any conversation that begins with you referring to a friend as an “old redhead” is probably destined to fall flat.

“Time to double down on the sunblock,” the dermatologist continues. “Don’t forget your neck.”

“How about that Retin A?” you ask, testily, and the dermatologist leaves the room and returns with a box of Renova samples.

“These are about to expire, but they’re still good for two years. You can have them. Be careful,” she says. “This will burn your face off.”

You wonder whether that’s a bad thing.

“That’s a bad thing,” the dermatologist says.

Renova sells for $100 a tube. These samples could pull serious scratch on the street. You think about going into nursing homes and dangling them in front of old redheads. “Is that a barnacle on your face?” you’d ask. “That’ll be $400.”

Boom. Your MFA financed, just like that.

You stroke the barnacle. It’s a hermaphrodite. Only one more barnacle needs to pop up next to it for it to reproduce.

You decide to keep the Renova. It’s every old redhead for herself.

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March 19, 2013

Why Track Town USA needs to slow down

I live in America’s premier running destination, Eugene, Ore., a city that has hosted the Olympic trials five times; a city that boasts a ghost — Steve Prefontaine — as a cultural touchstone and an economic catalyst; a city where, every spring, dozens and dozens of women with waists as big around as a javelin bound down bark-dust covered trails wearing nothing more than sports bras and spanky shorts.

(I don’t know how many men read this blog, but if you’re out there, just think of it: gorgeous, sweaty women in sports bras and spanky shorts. You’re welcome.)

Moving to Track Town USA has, naturally, motivated me to become an enthusiastic and committed … walker. An ambler, really. On a good day I might mosey.

Sometimes my students misuse the term “ironic,” and when that happens I always want to shake them hard and say, “Let me tell you about irony, buster.”

Living amongst so many hard-core, hard-bodied runners should have led me down a different path, or maybe the same path, but at a much faster clip. Actually, as I consider that last sentence, “living amongst” is a stretch. It’s not like I bump into Ashton Eaton at Safeway. The running elite travel in their social circles, and I travel in mine.

I wouldn’t even know what to do if I saw an Olympic athlete in the flesh. No, that’s a lie, too. I’d suck in my gut and feign a sprained ankle, lest he or she wonder why, at that exact moment, I wasn’t running at top speed.

If I saw a gymnast I’d probably try to turn a cartwheel and end up in the emergency room.  Thank God none live here. Where do the gymnasts live? Texas? Right now, I bet there’s some chubby woman at the Huntsville Walmart Supercenter attempting to execute a back flip because she just ran into Jordyn Wieber in the disposable tableware aisle and is feeling deeply inadequate.

I should be grateful I only have to hypothetically impress Olympic track stars. But really, living in Eugene has forced me to face up to what I have long considered a serious moral failure. I don’t run.

High-achievers run. They go to church. They volunteer.

They get up early every morning and run five or 20 miles, shower, and head out the door to cure Alzheimers or run Fortune 500 companies, eating perhaps a protein-rich salad for lunch before returning home for a peaceful dinner hour with their academically gifted children, followed by 90 minutes of sophisticated post-bedtime banter with their spouse, which is itself followed by tender, inventive love-making that just gets more meaningful and acrobatic as the years roll by.

That’s what runners do.

And what do walkers do? Well, this one teaches a basic writing class at a community college and wolfed a breaded pork chop for lunch.

If only I ran. If only running didn’t cause me to hyperventilate and give me shin splints.

I still remember the last time I ran a whole mile, during the President’s Physical Fitness Torture Test my freshman year of high school. One of my best pals and I made a pact to run that mile together, come what may. We finished dead last. Years later she told me she knew I was still alive by the awful rasping sound I made. You know what that friend does now? She runs.

She has left me in the dust. Everyone has left me in the dust, with their fulfilling careers and their advanced degrees and their really smart, hypoallergenic dogs.

I want to feel good about not running. I want to commander the announcer’s microphone at Hayward Field and announce to the crowd: “Athletes! There’s a better way. A slower way!”

A cold apocalyptic wind would blow and the Nike banners and other assorted crap would be shaken loose from the stands.

Everyone would follow me down to the track, and I’d set a 3.7 mph pace, and that show-off Sam Chelanga would try to break away from the pack, but someone would trip him and say, “Slow down, man, you’ll hurt your knees,” and he would, he’d slow down, and that night he’d go home to his wife and they would have a few minutes of, you know, pretty decent sex, and fall asleep.

I like this idea. I like imagining a world of walkers. Because, you see, if everyone agrees to go at my pace, I can be sure of one thing. I will never come in last.

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March 13, 2013

The day the school secretary saw inside my soul

This is my favorite Eugene street sign. Hey, at least it's a town with a sense of humor.

This is my favorite Eugene street sign. Hey, at least it’s a town with a sense of humor

 

School secretaries give me the heebie-jeebies.

To be clear, any omniscient deity or quasi-deity holding sway over many vulnerable people frightens me. The pope. SEC football coaches. Labor and delivery charge nurses. The former office manager of the newspaper where I once worked — a benevolent woman of great and terrible powers.

But no one wigs me out quite like the middle-aged woman manning the desk of every elementary school I’ve ever walked inside. Every scrap of paperwork in the school passes through her hands. She knows every dirty secret, and she knows it first. Every budget cut. Every divorce. Every nasty bully-in-the-making. She sees it — and she remembers it.

So I kept my eyes down and my voice meek this week when I dropped off my son’s kindergarten enrollment forms. I’d planned to simply slide them onto the secretary’s desk and bolt before she could see inside my soul and ask about all the empty wine bottles in our glass recycling bin. (We only take it to the curb once a month, I swear! Oh, Pearl Street neighbors, your judgment, it burns, it burns!)

“Just a minute,” the secretary said as I skittered away. “I need to look over these forms and make sure they’re complete.”

“Of course,” I said, resisting the urge to glance at my phone, lest she snatch it and lock it in a drawer for the rest of the day. She can do that. This is her house.

“Are you new in town?” she asked.

“No, we’ve lived here two years,” I said.

“Well, there’s only one person listed in the emergency contact section,” she said. “Generally, we like to see several contacts, just in case. Don’t you have any more friends you can add?”

And there it was. Just like that — like a Nordstrom bra-fitter or a Jungian psychotherapist, she’d bared my great truth:

I might live in this town, but it ain’t home.

We’d only lived in Eugene about four months when I stopped trolling the real estate listings and told my husband not to bother hanging up anything more on the walls of our rental.

“You’re taking me back to Portland,” I said. “It’s just a matter of time.”

I could list the reasons why I prefer Portland to Eugene, but it’d bore you. Suffice it to say that living here has felt like I’ve been wearing the tightest jeans in my dresser drawer every day for two years, only the jeans are tie-dyed, and bell-bottomed, and were sewn in 1974.

A few weeks ago I gave my students a lesson about asking open-ended interview questions. They paired up to practice, with one student left to interview me.

“What do you like about Eugene?” she began.

“I don’t,” I said.

“Really?” she said.

“Really,” I said.

“Why?” she asked.

“Well, I don’t have many friends here,” I said.

“Why?” she asked.

“Probably because when I meet someone new, and they ask if I like Eugene, I say I don’t,” I said.

“I can see why that might make it difficult to make friends,” she said. “It’s a bit of a conversation killer.”

I had to let myself live with that for awhile, that moment of enlightenment, brought to me by the young woman who sits in the back of the class and asks the best questions.

Perhaps I need to actually get out there and embrace what makes Eugene, Eugene. Spend a morning at the Saturday market. Buy a bongo drum. Use it. Go to a football game. Pretend to follow along. Catch a show at the Hult Center without complaining loudly about how it looks like the inside of an Easter basket. Stop being such a grumpy old bitch, you know?

I relented. I asked my husband to hang a new picture on our wall. It’s a picture of the Portland map grid. I didn’t relent much.

And then, just to make sure I was paying attention, the universe introduced me to the Edgewood School secretary.

“Maybe you could try to get to know one of your neighbors?” she suggested. “It’s never too late to make friends!”

What’s next? Life coaching from the lunch lady? But I let myself live with that awhile, too. This life post may turn out to be temporary, but shouldn’t I allow myself to get something out of it, instead of stomping like a petulant child through the streets of Eugene?

Or, if I can’t manage to become civically entwined, can I at least let myself find home at home, with my husband and my kids?

“What are you doing?” my husband asked me one evening, seeing me guiltily slam shut the laptop.

“Definitely not looking at Portland house listings!” I said, and he sighed, defeated, and I felt like a jerk. Time to remove the needle from the marital toolkit.

When a Portland friend asked how I was doing, I reheated the old Eugene grumble-hash. (No, not that kind of hash. Jesus. Is everyone in this town high on something?) Anyway, she listened patiently for a while before cutting in:

“But you know what? You will always remember this period in your life as the time when you took a chance and moved away from everyone and everything you knew and had only each other to count on. This time becomes a part of you,” she said.

It’s not wasted time, in other words.

Not unless I waste it.

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February 22, 2013

Why I always end up in Las Vegas

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We were way down deep in the Mirage, having second thoughts at the tattoo parlor, and in serious need of a way out, when we stopped a security guard.

“Where do we go to get a cab?” I asked.

“Keep going straight until you see two mermaid statues, then hang a left,” he said.

That it is possible to navigate the Las Vegas Strip by using ridiculous sculptures as lodestones is something I finally understood last weekend, on my fifth trip to the city in 18 years.

Other people — healthy people, wise people, balanced people — seek out nature when they need to find themselves. They ski the backcountry, or crouch on a surfboard, or hike 1,000 miles and come back with sore muscles, deep tans and new attitudes.

Me? I head to Las Vegas, and take a right at the volcano.

This trip came about because my friend Julie and I hadn’t seen each other in almost two years, and, in discussing possible remedies, realized that we hadn’t seen each other without a man or children in tow …. well, ever, really. At least, not since college, which we left behind 13 years ago.

Because my children are at ages where they operate on two speeds —  balls out or conked out —  I knew I couldn’t saddle my husband with the sole responsibility for them for more than, say, three days. Julie and I drew a figurative circle on the map and came up with either Las Vegas or Palm Springs as a destination.

But I live in Eugene, Home of Many Earnest People. I’d had enough of nice.

And that’s how we ended up in Vegas, indulging in what felt like, to me at least, 48 hours of weapons-grade buffoonery.

The week before the trip, life unfolded the way it sometimes does, with crushing intensity.

My journalism students caught criticism for a story, and I fumbled when I tried to guide them. My daughter smacked up against a virus that caused her temperature to soar to 105 degrees and her heart to beat so wildly that she landed in the emergency room. My mother, recently diagnosed with a vicious form of neuropathy, packed up all her belongings with my brothers’ help and moved from Montana to Oregon, crashing at my house along the way.

At the end of the week, I got to escape. I got to sit in an airport, alone, and read. I got to sleep in, three days running. I got to eat three dinners with no one sitting in my lap (though, in Vegas, surely I could have paid someone to sit in my lap).

It’s so cliche, isn’t it? A woman in her 30s, exhausted and frustrated by her routine, sets out for Las Vegas with a best girlfriend for two days and three nights of carousing against the cheesy backdrop of the strip. That’s the plotline for a buddy movie, right there.

Yeah. I get it. And I don’t care. And here’s part of the reason why:

In the last few weeks I’ve fallen, hard, for a writer named George Saunders, who has been writing forever, but who I just learned about from a profile in the New York Times. The profile, written to mark the occasion of Saunders’ latest brilliant short story collection, included a quote from the man that has been ricocheting around my cranium since I first read it.

“If you have a negative tendency and you deny it, then you’ve doubled it,” Saunders said. “If you have a negative tendency and you look at it, then the possibility exists that you can convert it.”

Before I had kids, I assumed that becoming a mother would cure whatever it is inside me that makes me want to periodically behave like an idiot. In fact, I have found the opposite to be true. It’s by letting the idiot out now and then that I’m able to live — and enjoy — most of my days as a responsible adult and parent.

They were still celebrating Chinese New Year when we rolled into town, with the strip ablaze in red and gold. I bought a new pleather jacket and posed for a picture next to a big, golden snake. While I didn’t get a tattoo, I did wander the Wynn exchanging texts like these with Julie:

“Where are you?”

“At dragon!”

“Was just at dragon!”

Why do I go to Las Vegas? Probably for the same reason that I sometimes dream I’ve decided to start a small campfire in a lumberyard.

I just need the fuel.

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January 25, 2013

Where I confess I’m a stick stirring my own pot of craziness

urlSunday, my 21-month-old daughter caught a nasty virus. Her temperature shot North of 103 degrees; her chest rattled; her nose ran; her eyes took on that dazed, watery quality of a child with a flooded immune system.

Her illness led to many sweet hours of snuggling with her on the couch as she sucked down Popsicles and watched a Barney marathon, asking me after each episode, “Mo’ dinosowr?”

It also meant four days without day care.

Four days of negotiating with my spouse over who would miss work, and how much. Four days of orchestrating pick ups and drop offs, canceling appointments and making excuses.

Four days of obsessively checking my email, knowing I couldn’t answer any of it. Four days of my spouse working until past midnight to catch up on everything and everyone he’d shorted that day.

Four days of me questioning whether my work — the part-time, low-paid teaching and the mostly unpaid, piecemeal writing — has value. Am I a writer, or someone who scribbles around the margins?

Four days of feeling like a stick stirring my own, bubbling pot of craziness.

Four sick days.

“That’s sick,” I’ll hear my students say sometimes, by way of a compliment. Not to me. Never to me. Never, “The way you raced in here from dropping off your kids with minutes to spare, then gave us your undivided attention for 80 minutes, then sprinted out again to pick up groceries and a prescription, damn, we see you’re busting your hump, and that’s sick Paige.”

No. They would never say that. Why doesn’t somebody say that to me? I would like someone to say that to me.

Actually, that is not true. I try mightily, while at work, to pretend like my family does not exist. Like I do not have a 5-year-old’s birthday party to plan. Or shoes to buy the daughter whose feet just decided to grow. Or cupboard coordinates to give a husband who cannot find the raisins.

At work, I dress up way more than necessary because I want to look in the bathroom mirror and see a professional woman, instead of someone who, an hour before, was wearing a snot-stained brew pub hoodie and cleaning dog vomit off the floor.

I would never presume that my students have tidy personal lives just because they don’t have kids themselves, but for some reason, I want them to look at me and see someone who is always managing, always on, never vulnerable, always chatty and handy with a quip or a curse word.

Maybe it’s because I’m an adviser. I want them to see me as someone who, from the imaginary vantage point of her hopping career, immaculate home and argument-free marriage, is actually qualified to give advice.

That’s sick, right? Compartmentalizing like that? And these sick days, they blow the myth to confetti.

I longed to have kids. Sometimes, amidst the chaos, when I am exhausted, it takes a huge effort to remember that.

I heard the Arcade Fire song “The Suburbs” today, and the lyrics reminded me of how much, six years ago, I ached to have children:

So can you understand
Why I want a daughter while I’m still young
I wanna hold her hand and show her some beauty
Before all this damage is done
But if it’s too much to ask, it’s too much to ask
Then send me a son

And I got both, the son and the daughter, by grace alone. And they’re stunning. Who knew they’d get sick so much? Not me. Nope. Don’t kids come sealed in plastic?

I dropped one of them off at daycare this week, set her down on  her classroom’s linoleum floor, chock full of Ibuprofen, knowing she was probably too sick to be there, to buy myself two hours to work.

Two hours.

Sick.

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January 4, 2013

Dog kennel outlines philosophy, covenants of care

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Thank you for boarding your dog with Roll Over, Beethoven Free-range, Free-love Care Center, where we are committed to providing a two-legged standard of care for our four-legged friends.

Mission statement

At Roll Over, Beethoven (ROB), we believe dogs are both seers and seekers of the human soul. We believe your dog, like every other dog, is a telepathic creature, sent by the Uberlord, Steve, to serve as a portal from our Low World to the Highest World.

Philosophical underpinnings

At ROB, we believe the Low World was born the day Jimmy Carter ascended to the presidency. We believe he was sent by Steve to save us. When we didn’t accept Jimmy as our One True Leader, rejecting him after one term, and for stupid reasons, Steve empowered the Dog to return us, over time, to grace.

Sacred covenants of ethical dog care

At ROB, we practice non-restrictive, non-judgmental dog care free from gender bias, i.e. “Neuter Care.” One trained human attendant is assigned to each dog for the duration of that dog’s stay.

While at ROB, your dog will be allowed to roam, off-leash, for up to 12 hours a day in our 3-acre “Kennel Without Cages” romping facility.

We respect dogs as sexual creatures, and will make no efforts to discourage dogs from licking, humping or sniffing behaviors. Dogs who desire penetration will be offered a private space, i.e., “The Champagne Room,” until such time as both/all dogs are satisfied.

If, at any time, we intuit that a dog feels disrespected, unsafe, or just bored, we will separate that dog from his/her pack and place him/her in a Chill Space, i.e., “Kennel With Cage.”

A word on our Kennel With Cage: The floor of this space is heated and lined with a pillowy, 100 percent recycled, biologically-based material, i.e. “Your Dog’s Own Poo.” The space is lightly perfumed. Ravi Shankar is piped in at a soothing volume unless other music is requested. Your dog’s trained human attendant will sleep with your dog on the Poo Floor at every moment your dog is confined to his/her Chill Space. The attendant will hold and caress your dog according to your specifications.

A word on our Trained Human Attendants: From time to time, after long, affectionate nights in the Chill Space, a dog and its trained human attendant may develop bonds that transcend society’s restrictive definitions of dog/human interactions. We ask that you not judge either the dog or the attendant, but simply respect them as beings with Needs, Wants and Desires.

We believe the dog walks us. We do not walk the dog.

As such, twice a day, your dog’s trained human attendant will be harnessed to your dog, and your dog will be free to drag the human about for two (2) hours, or until such time as the human loses consciousness. We’ve found this to be an invigorating, trust-building time for both the dog and the trained human attendant, and we must ask, if you see a dog walk in progress, that you not intervene out of concern for the human’s safety. The human is “Into It.” Trust us.

We understand your dog has certain diet restrictions. We offer vegan, all-meat, gluten-free, dairy-free and Kosher menus. Many other dietary needs can be met upon request. Since so many of our clients have asked, yes, we do carry that hideously expensive sweet potato/salmon dog food your dog’s health care professional prescribed.

A small amount of hashish and/or hallucinogenic mushrooms will be offered to your dog twice a day. Dogs are not required to ingest drugs; however, we find that those who partake seem to have the most fulfilling relationships with their human attendants.

We respect your Sober Dog. For every day your dog maintains his/her sobriety while at ROB, we will award him/her a small, edible coin. Dogs who achieve fourteen (14) consecutive days of sobriety will be released into a field and allowed to feast and/or roll in a hog’s rotting carcass (diet permitting).

Dogs were put in the Low World to teach us a thing or two about the human condition, and every lesson your dog offers will be cataloged and archived in a digital record that will be shared with you upon your return from your Period of Abandonment, i.e. “Vacation.” Additionally, we offer SKYPE services.

Thank you for sharing your dog SLOPPY with us. All that is imperfect within us honors all that is perfect within SLOPPY.

Enjoy your time in ST. CROIX.

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December 24, 2012

A heartfelt plea for quiet in the coffee shop

This piece is set in a coffee shop. My apologies. You hate coffee shop scenes, don’t you? I hate them, myself. But here we are, together, on the precipice of a coffee shop scene. And now you have to decide: Do I flee in horror and disgust from this, the most trite and hackneyed of all personal essay openers? Or do I sit back, and hope for something more, and indulge in Schadenfreude when it flops?

I am writing this from my favorite seat in the back corner of my favorite Eugene coffee shop. Actually, that is not true. I began to write this in the back corner, but I’ve since moved twice, to infinitely less-desirable spots, colder spots, more exposed spots.

I have moved because the people around me will not shut up.

They see coffee shops as public spheres, places to share ideas and feelings in earnest conversation. They traffic in a common misconception, built on the pre-Great Recession notion that coffee shops are social spaces, when, in fact, they are places where out-of-work or under-worked adults go to kill time or to try to get shit done once the walls of their own home have begun to clamp down on their brains and pressurize the contents until the positive, ebullient thoughts evaporate in a wisp of steam, and all that remains is a bubbling cauldron of self-loathing, anxious, depressive thoughts.

And once that happens, man, it is time to leave the house.

Back in times of yore, when one wanted the veneer of human companionship without the human interaction and certainly, absolutely, positively without the dynamic of human conversation, one would seek out the confines of the publick library. Why the “k” on “publick?” Because these were times of yore, dog. We change the spelling in times of yore.

This was during the “pre-caffeinated era,” also known as the “pre-Colombian era,” that period before coffee’s rise to power as the fuel of modern American thought and productivity. Libraries’ fall from favor closely tracks coffee’s ascendancy. If librarians would lighten the fuck up (and I say this as the daughter of one), and allow the consumption of hot, caffeinated beverages on the premises, they could pass a few bond measures and cloak themselves in the chunky, handknit sweater that is job security.

But they won’t. They just won’t. And this confluence of personal, political, social and economic forces has brought me today to a table next to two stay-at-home mothers who’ve procured babysitters for the afternoon so they can sit over coffee and chat about 1. Their spectacular children, and 2. How sick of them they are.

Look, ladies, I can relate. I can. After my own, ill-advised, 22-month foray into stay-at-home-motherhood, I get how damn glad you are to be out of the house right now, drinking a cup of coffee without a child launching himself into your lap and laying claim to your last bite, your last bloody bite, of toasted bagel; and I also understand why you’re talking too loudly and repeating everything twice and in a sing-song voice.

However. I must move, as I have only recently broken free of my own children for the afternoon, and I cannot bear to listen to you talk about yours.

Forgive me. I am a misogynist and a Godless jerk …

… who has chosen a new seat next to a table of Young Life Christians. Why, God? Why?

If I knew more (anything, really) about the Bible, I could sweetly approach their table, point to a passage that emphasizes the need for silent worship, and suggest they meditate on it for the next hour or so. Instead, all I can do is mutter my own prayer: Lord, make them stop talking about you. Let your love fill them, fill them full, too full for words. Lord, be with them now.

Fine. Lord, be with me now. Guide me to a silent part of this coffee shop.

Not next to the 20-year-old man with the werewolf beard and t-shirt with a question printed on it in French. Not next to the couple playing cards, the guy chastising his girlfriend for fucking up the shuffle. Not next to the scruffy, twinkly-eyed graduate student. (What is it? Philosophy? Literature? I’m getting a definite liberal arts vibe. I AM MARRIED. WALK ON, JEZEBEL.)

Wait! Lord, protect me from that which cometh my way, this young couple with the flushed cheeks, clearly too busy getting it on this morning to take showers. (Take it from a pro: Next time, do it in the shower! Kill two birds! God, you’re so young and stupid and beautiful.)

Do not let them sit at my table and stroke one another’s faces and ponder loudly how they will bear the long Christmas break. Move them along. Seat them by the Christians. It’ll give everyone something to think about.

Lord, guide me to the communal table where everyone is wearing earbuds and is looking intently at either an organic chemistry textbook or Faulkner novel or guide to the benefits of Vitamin D or the Oregon Employment Department homepage.

Yes. Here. Among my people.

This is it. My sweet spot. Out, among, but apart.

Image

The world’s greatest coffee shop, San Francisco’s Caffe Trieste, back when it was OK to talk over coffee. Photo courtesy Harold Norse.

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December 18, 2012

Nordstrom customer service for lonely people

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Photo courtesy of Nordstrom Group on flickr.

Did you know you can live chat online with a Nordstrom customer service representative 18 hours a day?

For reals. It’s my favorite Nordstrom feature. You can write in with any question – literally, any question — and a chipper Nordstrom associate will respond, lickety split, with courteous, efficient service, engaging in lively banter if you’re so inclined.

So I write to them like six times a day. I get lonely, you know? Here are some of our recent conversations.

9:19 pm PST

Billy: Hi, I’m looking for a medium women’s bathrobe.
Chloe: Excellent question, Billy! I’m happy to help. Thanks for live chatting with me today!
Billy: It’s great to be here.
Chloe: It’s great to have you so excited to be here! I’m just searching now. Here’s a link to a Nordstrom bathrobe.
Billy: I’m looking for something shorter.
Chloe: Great! Happy to help. I’m searching now. Is this a gift?
Billy: No, I just like to wear women’s bathrobes. I find the men’s robes too cumbersome.
Chloe: I understand! Here’s a link to that same bathrobe in the mid-thigh length.
Billy: That’s better. Would you say that it’s a silky robe or a cozy robe?
Chloe: It looks like a cozy robe to me.
Billy: Can you send me a picture of yourself wearing it?
Billy: Chloe? Chloe? Are you there?

10:21 p.m. PST

Lucy: Hi, I’m having trouble finding a gift for my aunt and uncle.
Ali: Hi, Lucy, I’m Ali! I’m happy to help. Tell me more about your aunt and uncle.
Lucy: Well, my aunt is really into 50 Shades of Grey. My uncle likes dogs. They love wine. Can you draw a Venn Diagram and help me come up with something they’ll both appreciate?
Ali: Certainly! We have some dog collars that might suit them both.
Lucy: That’s brilliant, Ali. How long have you been doing this?
Ali: Since November.
Lucy: Would you say it’s your calling?
Ali: No. I have a degree in comparative literature from NYU.
Lucy: So you’ve taken “Revisiting the Western Classics: Old Materialisms—Matter and Gender in Classical Antiquity,” then?
Ali: Indeed.
Lucy: I see from the course catalog that you’ve traced “the emergence of discourses of materiality alongside and in concert with tropes of sex and gender.”
Ali: If you’re so great at looking up shit online, why do you need me to help you find presents?
Lucy: Point is, I think that course brought you to this moment, Ali. The economy sucks, doesn’t it?
Ali: Yes.
Lucy: Have you considered graduate school?
Ali: You know, this has been fun, but I need to get to my next chat.
Lucy: I’m always here for you, Ali. You just call out my name. And you know, where ever I am, I’ll come running.
Ali: Sure. Whatever.

11:15 p.m. PST

Jill: Hi, I need a gift under $50 for my daughter’s day care provider.
Luke: Hi, Jill! I’m happy to help. We have several gifts under $50. What’s your daughter’s day care provider’s name?
Jill: Megan, but last week my daughter called her mom.
Luke: Oh, hell no!
Jill: I know. Do you have any perfume that smells really bad?
Luke: I am so already there! Here’s a link to five or six stinky fragrances. I sprayed this one all over my boyfriend’s pile of junk just before I threw it on the curb last week.
Jill: Thanks, Luke! I feel like I know you! Like we were roommates once, you know? I am toasting you with a mojito right this second!
Luke: Totes, babe! Merry Christmas!

12:22 p.m. PST

Ed: Hi, do you sell sandwiches?
Chloe: Hi, Ed, it is so nice to meet you. We do sell sandwiches, but not online. How are you today?
Ed: I’m trying to shop my way out of an existential crisis.
Chloe: Well, if I can help you find it in black, I’d love to!
Ed: Chloe, will you pray with me?
Chloe: Ed, that’s a skosh over my pay grade.
Ed: OK. Will you send a picture of yourself in a bathrobe?
Chloe: Billy, is that you?

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December 7, 2012

The time we stopped for beetles

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“We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.”

– Annie Dillard

Late spring, after the mud dried out, my parents liked to take the back roads to see the cactus bloom and witness green’s first glimmer on the prairie.

Even in spring, the road dust sifted across our back window as the miles rattled and jostled by. It settled on the bumper, on the tail lights. In the summers, we’d open the windows to feel the breeze and to escape my dad’s cigarette smoke, and when the rare oncoming car caught us unaware, we’d cough out the dust it kicked up, passing.

Striking out on remote dirt and gravel roads in our rickety rigs made me tense. What if we broke down? Who would help us? I thought of the world’s two hemispheres, the one with fellow travelers and AAA tow trucks, the one without. If we were waylaid, as we often were, I wanted someone to see us immediately, and to stop and help.

Leave me out of the lonesome world, no matter the sturdy yellow prickly pear blossom and faded pink wild roses; no matter the late summer blooms on the big sagebrush, or the flash of a black August chokecherry.

My father and mother tried to capture my preteen attention with the landscape, with the fleeting beauty of the otherwise-drab Eastern Montana prairies and Ponderosa pine. These trips were an affordable form of entertainment, with gas at or around $1 a gallon then, and a diversion from the strains of home. But I wanted expensive entertainment — shopping trips and plane trips; a real vacation, not two hours crammed in a bumpy car, scoping out cactus.

Hostile, I’d sink down in my seat with a book, barely glancing out the window, coveting the moment when our tires claimed the quiet pavement, and we quit the gravel cacophony.

On the way home from such a summer expedition, miles from any house or ranch or town, my dad stopped the car, most likely to pee. He stood outside long enough that I looked up, sure we’d knocked a hole in the oil pan or shredded the muffler or blown a tire. What bad turn had befallen us, and how long would we be at righting it, and did I have enough pages to read to wait it out?

Come here, my dad said, excited, calling to me and my brothers. My mother stayed in the car.

“Have you ever seen a dung beetle?” he said, pointing at the road, until I noticed dozens of small black bugs. I bent down. Each one was pushing something round.

That’s poop, he told us. They bury it in the ground and lay their eggs in it. That’s all they do, their whole life: find poop, make it round, roll it, bury it and lay eggs in it.images

We were on open range land, and piles of manure lay here and there in the road, and the beetles climbed over the piles. We each found a beetle and crouched close to study it. We watched those beetles struggle, watched them sort of surf the dung, all headed in different directions. It was bizarre, lovely.

Also bizarre, also lovely: That my dad had noticed them at all. And that he was amazed by them, and thought we might be, too. And that, for once, I didn’t scoff or roll my eyes at his whimsy.

In a moment or two, I understood that when we drove off, we’d squash some of the beetles. I had just formed a 12-year-old girl’s fickle, intense attachment to the lowly dung beetle. They might as well have been kittens. Did we have to go home right away, I asked?  Could we wait until the road was bare? Maybe dad could drive the car carefully, and dodge them?

We didn’t discuss what we did next.

Dad and I each plucked one dung beetle from the road. I could see and feel the bug, frantically rolling his prize in my palm. I cupped the beetle and the ball of dung like precious gemstones, and I followed my father down to the edge of the prairie, to set this small thing down, safely down, right there in the lonesome world.

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