Once a chump, always a chump

Dogsitting. I sit here listening to the ragged barking of two bored terriers ricochet off the neighbor's houses. For the first time it occurs to me that it is not an honor to be asked by vague acquaintances to stay over at their place and babysit their dogs. I used to think that this was a sign that they view me as an upright person, reliable and worthy of being trusted with their possessions and their creatures’ wellbeings. Now I understand that it is simply because I am the only person they know who is not married and with children, or else openly insane.

Also, because I am a chump.

These are the white Westies whose names are Billy and Collins, meaning I get to stand in the backyard screaming the name of the ex-poet-laureate of the United States to the sounds of frantic, impervious barking. They are brothers, and would be indistinguishable to me save the fact that Collins is slightly more sedate and will sometimes stop barking after I scream his name for the fourth or fifth time, whereas Billy likes to bark until I have actually physically tackled him and dragged him into the house by his collar. I would be perfectly happy to let both of them stand outside and bark until they lost their voices, permanently, but this is a fairly upscale neighborhood and the police don’t have a whole lot to do.

Though they are the last dogs I will ever, ever dogsit for, Billy and Collins are certainly not the worst. That honor belongs to two other terriers, oft-mentioned in my former blog, both of whom seemed determined to shit their way into the Guinness Book of World Records with the distinction of the most piles of dogshit ever deposited on a single carpet. This, despite having a dog door. I might add that the more malevolent of these terriers was also responsible for the most harrowing week in my recent memory, in which he decided to randomly stop taking his twice-daily antibiotic pills tucked into the peanut butter/cheese/butter/ice cream I offered him, preferring instead to slink under the owners’ bed where he would barricade himself, teeth bared, snarling and lunging at my hands like something out of Aliens, until I was forced to don a jean jacket and gardening gloves and pull this horrible devil out from under the bed and crouch over him, sweating and trying to force a tiny pill down his throat while he did everything in his power to dismember me. I have never hated any living animal as much as I did that terrier.

Certainly not Billy nor Collins, who are almost cute in a brusque, terrieresque sort of way. When they are not barking. Or nosing my bare feet with their cold, moist snouts. Or peeing on the expensive carpeting because they have not been let out in the past 45 minutes. Or mostly, when they are under the care of their owners.

Columbus: Third-World Fun in a First-World City

Okay, I'm exaggerating--Columbus is still at least 30 functioning traffic lights away from anarchy. And I still have running water at home. The berry has been closed for the past day and a half (and counting!), and the fact that I still have not straightened out the projector situation for a program I'm supposed to be doing tomorrow night on the Peace Corps in Eastern Europe, plus am unable to log on to check my email to find out crucial info on whether the situation has been straightened out because apparently the berry's server is still down, is causing me only low frequency distress right now. Of higher priority is the task of keeping my cat's antibiotics cold, which must happen despite not knowing anyone in a ten-mile radius who has refrigeration capabilities, much less ice to sell me so that I can put it in the cooler I've been loading with a venti cup from Starbucks that I fill with ice any time I go out to eat, which is about four times a day, currently.

To tell the truth, I'm very much enjoying my extended vacation, not in the least because I am not a homeowner. I'm enjoying eating out at every meal (and it was time to clean out the fridge, anyways). The fact that my computer at home doesn't work (I'm at a different berry curently, one that is open and very similar in feel right now to a refuge camp--thank god I don't work here, I'm thinking, as I listen to the patient staff member at the desk explain repeatedly that he cannot move people ahead in the reservation line for computers because they are "in a hurry" or working on "important business"), the fact that my cell phone only intermittently works, the fact that none of the lights work no matter how often I unthinkingly flip their switches...none of these things bother me too terribly much. In fact, if they never got around to getting the power back on, I wouldn't mind too much at all, so long as the movie theaters kept running, and the restaurants, and the one open grocery store kept my favorite cereal in stock, and some kindly benefactor paid off my credit card balances every month.

Any takers?

She's a Lady

I would consider myself an animal lover, but as I get older I understand that it is specific animals that I love (my cats) or general classes of animals (dolphins, alpacas) rather than, say, that dog over there who is barking at me. And so it is that I declare my contempt for my brother’s dog, who is a one-year-old yellow lab and dumb as a rock. He brought her on vacation to the beach with us and I have never seen a creature so obsessed with eating sand. She eats sand, she rolls in it, and then she throws it up, the whole dog cycle of life.

My brother has trained her to sit, stay, and drop a Frisbee, so I suppose I must give her credit for being slightly more intelligent than a rock. She obeys him about seventy-five percent of the time, but whenever I’m left to watch her she immediately goes charging down the beach like a rabid dingo to bark in the face of someone’s toddler. I have to stumble through the sand after her screaming in my angriest, most urgent voice, making it all the more embarrassing that she completely ignores me. Sometimes she’ll glance over her shoulder as she’s running away, and you can actually see the moment when she decides to blow me off and keep going for the toddler.

Humorously, her name is Lady. Not only is this name generic, inaccurate, and responsible for getting the Tom Jones song “She’s a Lady” stuck in my head for four consecutive days, it also means that I have to holler it at her when she’s galloping away from me at the beach. I worry that people will think that I both own this horrible dog and am responsible for having named her. Which would be untenable.

Lady has fleas. Apparently, my brother put Frontline on her twice before bringing her on vacation, but the fleas persist. Now every time I get an itch on my foot, I have to check to see if it’s a Lady flea. I’m guessing that Lady fleas are somehow special and impervious to all chemical treatments, and I will probably transport them home with me where my cats will have them for the rest of their lives.

I was lying on my towel at the beach this afternoon, drowsing to the rush and roar of waves, when from afar I heard an agitated choking and strangling sound. I continued to drowse. The choking and gagging sounds grew closer, and with them an ongoing wheezing sound, like someone panting as they struggled to push a boulder up a hill. I didn’t have to glance up but I did anyways, and sure enough, there was Lady, towing brother down the beach on her leash. She doesn’t understand, simply does not compute, that she will get where she’s going in exactly the same amount of time but with far fewer respiratory issues, if she simply walks beside the person holding her leash rather than dragging them like a frothing, wild-eyed draft horse.

Today I watched Lady eat some sand, and then trot down to the ocean to pee in the waves. In her, I see an eagerness and zest for life that is matched only by her profound stupidity. In a strange way, I’m almost jealous.

Oh. My. GOD

Watch this. Watch it. WATCH IT!!!!

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/09/lisanova.html

Thoughts for a Friday afternoon

While driving this morning I noticed my car was pulling to the left. Though this would be a great thing for the country, is not a good thing for my car. I pulled over in the shitting-down rain and checked the air pressure and sure enough, my front tire was losing air. Since I am supposed to drive to North Carolina tomorrow, there was nothing else to do but to take it back to the Firestone Tires that had rotated these selfsame tires last week.

“No romance novels allowed!” hollered the Firestone Tires employee, before I’d even made it completely across the waiting area to the cash register. Since I refuse to enter any waiting space where I will be lingering for longer than 10 minutes without bringing along with me a book (even if all I do during that time is hold the book open and stare at the TV), I now found myself the object of intense scrutiny by the aforementioned Firestone Tires guy, as well as four or five other employees and assorted customers.

“Better not be a romance novel!” the Firestone guy hollered again, in case the guys out in the shop missed it the first time. Fortunately, the book was no romance novel, though what it was is almost worse: “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony” by Lewis Allen, the renowned science writer.

“What the heck is this?” the Firestone guy asked, having taken the book from my hands and lifted his glasses to study the cover. “What are you, a psychiatrist or something?”

“I’m a librarian,” I thought about mumbling, then thought better of it. Instead I just smiled and laughed, overjoyed at being correctly pegged for an egghead.

After an extended conversation with the Firestone guy about the merits of James Patterson versus Michael Connelly, I was able to flee to the relative safety of the waiting area, where the news on TV alternated between coverage of Sarah Palin and updates on the hurricane about to hit the place where I’m supposed to go on vacation tomorrow. (I preferred hearing about the hurricane.)

All of which leads me to the moment when I was finally able to tune out this stuff and read the following passage in the Thomas book, hastily retyped into my blog for your Friday afternoon contemplation:

“The world with what is now the fashion to call the ‘Big Bang.' Characteristically, we have assigned the wrong words for the very beginning of the earth and ourselves, in order to evade another term that would cause this century embarrassment. It could not, of course, have been a bang of any sort, with no atmosphere to conduct the waves of sound, and no ears. It was something else, occurring in the most absolute silence we can imagine. It was the Great Light.

We say it had been chaos before, but it was not the kind of place we use the word ‘chaos’ for today, things tumbling over each other and bumping around. Chaos did not have that meaning in Greek; it simply meant empty.

We took it, in our words, from chaos to cosmos, a word that simply meant order, cosmetic. We perceived the order in surprise, and our cosmologists and physicists continue to find new and astonishing aspects of the order. We made up the word ‘universe’ from the whole affair, meaning literally turning everything into one thing. We used to say it was a miracle, and we still permit ourselves to refer to the whole universe as a marvel, holding in our unconscious minds the original root meaning of these two words, miracle and marvel—from the ancient root word smei, signifying a smile. It immensely pleases a human being to see something never seen before, even more to learn something never known before, most of all to think something never thought before…

The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles, confounding all our efforts to comprehend it, is the earth. We are only now beginning to appreciate how strange and splendid it is, how it catches the breath, the loveliest object afloat around the sun, encased in its own blue bubble of atmosphere, manufacturing and breathing its own oxygen, fixing its own nitrogen from the air into the soil, generating its own weather at the surface of its rain forests, constructing its own carapace from living parts: chalk cliffs, coral reefs, old fossils from earlier forms of life now covered by layers of new life meshed together around the globe, Troy upon Troy.

Seen from the right distance, from the corner of the eye of an extraterrestrial visitor, it must surely seem a single creature, clinging to the round warm stone, turning in the sun.”

On the cenotaph in the memorial park at Hiroshima

"Repose ye in Peace, for the error shall not be repeated."

A day at the races

What I need is an all-purpose excuse. Something to cover all possible dates, times and circumstances. For instance, when my coworker asked me last month what I was doing on August 31, I should have been ready with “tiling my bathhouse” or “rehabilitating my camel.” Instead, I looked at her dumbly and said “I ‘unno.”

There was no backing out of it then. “It” was a 13.1-mile road race that my coworker had not sufficiently trained for, and so wanted to run as a relay of 6.55 miles apiece. This is a not- undoable distance for me, and August 31 still seemed so far off back in those heady days of July, and so I agreed.

Which is how I came to be running yesterday in the most disorganized race in the 13-billion-year history of the universe. The very first race, organized by cave people with only rocks and vines to use as communication devices, could not have been more disorganized than this one was. It was a half-marathon that boasted an “all-downhill” course, which was achieved by starting in the 'burbs and ending up downtown. Makes sense, except that there was no parking permitted at the starting line. Everyone had to park downtown, and then shuttles were supposed to transport us to the starting line. The race was supposed to start at 7:30, and so the last shuttle was supposed to leave from downtown at 6:35.

Notice that all of these things were “supposed” to happen.

What really happened was this: the bus driver picked up his very first load of runners right as I was turning into the parking lot at 6:15 or so. I parked my car and watched the taillights of the shuttle disappear into the predawn, then gathered up my safety pins and race number and jogged across the parking lot to where the next shuttleful of runners was already forming. There, while everyone else jogged around and chatted in pairs or small groups, I stood by myself and felt the coffee quit my brain and head for my bladder.

The sky brightened. More joggers showed up. My relay partner arrived, as did two of the other people she’d convinced to run the race (I’d kill for her powers of persuasion). The sky brightened further. My bladder grew fuller. A woman with a clipboard assured everyone that the shuttle was “on its way” and was “only a few minutes away.”

The start time of the race, 7:30, came and went. The woman with the clipboard suggested that everyone try to get our warm-up in now rather than wait till we got to the starting line, thus manifesting even further the stupidity that had compelled her to stand before a group of anxious runners with a clipboard. People gathered around her with questions and complaints. Meanwhile, the possibility that there would not be time for me to visit a bathroom prior to the race began to gnaw at me. Surely not, I mused. As anyone who has run in a race before knows, restrooms are very important to the runner’s pre-race routine—possibly more important than a warm-up. (Or maybe I just drink too much coffee.)

When the bus finally arrived at 7:35 or so, the story came out that the original bus driver, the one I’d seen pulling out as I was driving in, had picked up the runners, dropped them off and then gone home. A second bus driver then had to be summoned from bed and brought in to pick us up. This should have been funny, but I was too busy worrying about the restroom situation at the starting line. I worried about it for the whole 13.1 miles up to the starting line, but no amount of worrying could have prepared me for the scene when we got there.

“Get your timing chips here!” shrieked a new woman with a clipboard, looking significantly more wild-eyed than her predecessor. To her left were the dozens of runners who had been milling around for the past hour or so, some of them elite runners from Africa and across the US. To her right were two full-sized charter buses packed out with more runners, all of us needing to be outfitted with chips. The time was 7:50.

“Where is your bib number?” the crazed-clipboard-woman shrieked at the man in line in front of me. He stammered something in hesitant English, clearly terrified. He’d forgotten his race number, the one that you’re supposed to pin to your shirt during the race, and so now the woman could not properly match him up with a timing chip.

“Are you an elite runner?” she shrieked. The man looked confused. The clipboard woman struggled to control herself. “Are you. An elite. Runner,” she said to the man, as though he were an idiot. He quaked and said something unintelligible.

At that point, I decided that finding a bathroom was much more important than getting a timing chip. I asked a less volatile-looking race official where the facilities were, and she pointed off in the distance. No, not to where all the male runners were lined up to pee in the bushes, but waaaaaaaay beyond that, across a distant field. I got my warm-up in by sprinting across the field to the porta-potties.

That business taken care of, I returned to fetch my timing chip. Crazed-clipboard-woman handed me a chip while tersely explaining to me something about not having enough chips for the relay runners, and so when I finished the race I would have to take the chip to the blue H-tent and explain to them that although this was my chip, I was not who the chip said I was. Confused, my brain reeling with the philosophical implications, I nodded and backed away. I had no idea what the “blue H-tent” was, but was confident that it would become apparent eventually.

And then, blessedly, the race began.

Because it was the least interesting portion of the event, I’ll skip the actual race part, except to mention something that happened right after I finished. I had handed off the existential quandary of the timing chip to my relay partner and gotten myself a bottle of water, then wandered over to sit at a picnic table and watch the runners go by. As with many other races I’ve been in, the organizers felt the need to blast bad rock music out of several tall speakers, perhaps believing that this would help inspire the runners rather than make them feel like a carload of hillbillies had just pulled up alongside them. A bunch of noise that may have been a Lynrd Skynrd cover blasted for awhile, and then another song came on, one of those loud, angry, utterly bland faux-punk songs with the shouting and the predictable chord progressions. I had mostly managed to tune it out, but then my ears, ever-vigilant, picked up an F-bomb.

I looked around me, at the runners coming through and the families and strollers and children lining the trail. This portion of the race ran through a park, so there were also lots of folks completely unaffiliated with the race out enjoying the day. Did I really just hear the F-bomb? I wondered. An F-bomb, blasted at, like, 700 decibels from the official race speakers?

But I needn’t have wondered, because moments later, another F-bomb was dropped, then another. They became so numerous, and (to me) so unspeakably hilarious, that I got out my cell phone and started texting myself the lyrics of the song, because I didn’t want to forget them.

What the fuck is wrong with me?!!!!

Put me out of my fucking misery!!!!!

Below the speakers the runners plugged onward through the heat. None of them seemed to pay much attention to the discouraging anthem being blasted at them, but that could be because they were too involved in their own internal worlds of pain. It was an awfully hot day, after all, and they were only halfway to the end.

Ah, the end. By the time I and the other relay runners rode the shuttle bus to the finish line, pausing for about a half-hour in the traffic jam that our own race had created, I was really to throw in the towel and go home. But of course I couldn’t leave yet, because I had to wait for my relay partner to finish. I should mention at this point that she had come down with a horrible bladder infection three days before the race, and probably would have been better off spending the morning lying in bed in the air-conditioning rather than running 6.55 miles in the by-then blazing heat. But she had insisted on running, by God, so who was I to stop her?

I cheered as she approached the finish line, then remembered that I had to catch her and tell her to go to the blue H-hut to tell them that she was not who the chip said she was. But it was too late—by the time I caught up with her beyond the finish line, she had already dropped the chip in a giant bin of timing chips, thus disqualifying us. This bothered me at first, but then I thought back over the events of the morning. In the end, I realized that I was happy to have my name disassociated with this race.

And now, off to work on my all-purpose excuse.