III

When I went to Russia I was excited to see these whitish weed-like plants planted everywhere.  I recognized them as the plant I’d used to make a floral decoration for my sister-in law’s bridal shower the spring before.  I needed something white to mix in with the bright colors, and their lacy texture was perfect.  To see them in Russia seemed miraculous, that we could have the same flowers in such different parts of the planet.

Those plants ended up in a row in front of my house, but without their brightly colored companions.  My father put them there after my mother told him to dismantle the flower arrangement.  They kept the colorful ones.  As much as I liked the whitish lacy plants, they were never as pretty without the colors to set them off.  I figured they would die and I could replace them.  They didn’t, for years and years, they grew bigger and bigger and showed no sign of dying off to make room for anything else.

I didn’t want to tear them up.  I don’t like to tear things up after they are planted on purpose.  So I lived with them.  This winter they started to die.  Almost all of them fell over and turned brown.  This morning, I pulled up the dead ones and planted some color.

When I went to buy said color, I only had two choices unless I wanted to plant fruit trees.  I’m no green thumb but I don’t think you should plant fruit trees in a flower bed against your house.  I’d never planted primroses before, but the primrose selection was better than the pansy selection so I went with primroses.  It didn’t even occur to me that the ones I rejected were pansies.  Pansies and petunias are some of my favorite flowers, but I didn’t want to plant pansies for CW.

When I think of the dead I often want to plant flowers.  I used to chose rose bushes but their survival rate did not seem better for being planted in memory.  Now I don’t care, planting annuals seems as good as anything else.  The dead never see them anyway.

I wonder why those whitish plants decided to die this year?  Why did they make room so I could throw in some color this morning?  Sure, they died some time ago but no more than a month.  This year, this year they decided it was time to make room again.

There’s nothing like taking a picture of new flowers to make me realize my house needs some paint and the bricks need washing.  Cleaning out the dead is too painful unless you can put something pretty in its place.  If you can make it beautiful to look upon, even just give it the hint of promise, cleaning up the mess is less of a chore.

I wonder what told those plants it was time to let go, time to cut back and move on.  I think I heard it too.  At this moment I feel like it’s time to trim down, clear out the debris, dig up my life again, say hello, “nice to see you again.”

No, it isn’t really, but we both knew this day would come, we’d see each other again and have to apologize.  I pull the Pilsner Urquell out of the fridge, put it in the cupboard to make room for some Bitter American.  It’s low calorie, it isn’t happy about it but it puts a good face on it anyway.  It is what it is.

I tell myself I need to write about hockey today.  I’m overdue for a blog post.  Other things, the past and the present and all that stuff life has been keeping for me while I went walkabout with hockey…. it’s shown up at my door and it doesn’t care if there’s a game on.  It wouldn’t care if the Sharks and the Flyers were playng game seven of the Stanley Cup Finals, it has been waiting too long and also it’s kind of rude and selfish that way.  It wants what it wants and it wants it now.  I guess it sent CW’s ghost as its advocate.  Hah.  He was, after all, a lawyer.

I thought that not being able to choose one hockey team suggested a lack of commitment, a flighty quality I could not be proud of. Today, sitting here writing about flowers and beer and memories I feel like an unrepentant whore.  Oh well.  No one’s actually tried to throw a rope on me yet, I guess I shouldn’t feel guilty.

Hah hah.  Now I feel like writing about hockey.

I got a very late thank you note from my brother and his wife, thanking me for going to their wedding.  It said they hoped I’d enjoyed the wedding.  I got unreasonably upset about that note.  How could I possibly have enjoyed the wedding?  I hate weddings and also it was in New York.  And it was when I learned about CW being dead.

After a while I thought that maybe I never did mention that part to them.  Or maybe the wedding was so long ago that they simply forgot.  No, I know I told them.  I told them that was why I had to go to Russia.  Maybe that doesn’t make any sense to them, or anyone else.  But usually when you mention someone died and you leave the country, people remember it.  I guess not, not if they just got married.  Or something.

Many years before that wedding, I saw CW in New York.  His brother was visiting too.  The first question his brother asked me, after much hesitation, after starting and stopping and wrestling with the question “do you like men?”  I said yes.  I don’t think I laughed.  He seemed relieved, then hesitated again and asked, with a barely disguised hopeful puppy expression, if I was heterosexual.  I am pretty sure I laughed at that.  I laugh now, remembering it.  I reassured him that yes, I am a heterosexual female, born that way and everything.

I don’t think he was even single. I think he’d just spent a few too many hours with his brother on Christopher Street.  Maybe a long tour of  that scene with CW was over-taxing for a red-blooded straight southern boy.  He was like me, when I first met CW, suffering from an isolation that is hard to explain unless you’ve been there.  He needed someone, anyone who spoke his language.  We didn’t really get much time to speak, CW was on a center stage tear.

I wonder how his brother is now?

CW was not well in New York.  His hunger, for everything, everything, was getting the better of him.  I don’t know what he was using, I don’t think there was much he wasn’t using.   He was younger than I was by a year or two, I was only 24 or so.  He’d already been hospitalized with a heart attack.

I was there for a wedding then too, another strange social fail where I was apparently a big hit with the father of the bride who did not speak English.  I did not and still don’t speak Japanese so I don’t know how that could have been the case but that’s what I was told.  I do remember him speaking to me a great deal, though I did not respond, since I had no idea what he was saying.  Maybe I smiled.  And seemed attentive.  Men like that, don’t they?

It made me miss CW, the CW from Semily.  I don’t know what people expect me to think, telling me they knew it would be a good idea to put me with the bride’s parents who don’t speak English.  Or French.  Or Spanish or even Czech.  At least I could have tried in Czech.  CW always made me feel like a girl.  A man with no romantic or sexual interest in me at all made me feel like a girl when everyone else made me feel like a gender-neutral piece of furniture.  Sometimes he made me feel like a throw rug, but at least it was a girly throw rug.

But CW wasn’t there, at the wedding or in New York.  There was just that voracious person I didn’t know and wasn’t crazy about where CW used to be.

I don’t think I ever knew how much I wanted to be treated like a girl, and really, like a woman would do too,  until I met CW.  That’s whacked.  It’s whacked because he wasn’t actually a model of how a heterosexual woman should want a guy to treat her, I don’t even mean because he preferred men.  That was beside the point.

In Nashville, he dumped me in the largest gay bar on the planet. Not “dumped” like “broke up with,” just abandoned to go chase boy tail.  That wouldn’t have been a problem if I had a car (the largest gay bar on the planet was a long drive from my hotel) or if I knew whether to wait for him or if I enjoyed drag shows or if I had realized that we were going out for that.  I thought we were catching up after years out of touch.  So that was rude, even if he still walked on the street side.

And bringing a guy back to my hotel room so he didn’t have to let the guy know where he lives?  Not cool. At all.

That was all after New York, that was closer to the end than I realized.  I guess.  That isn’t what I remember when it snows.

I didn’t know any of that when I wrote this:

Old Chair Isis

The island’s lip in river sips,

Sunlight dances regal, hair twirling bright

In our blood, soft warming red wine.

These my round beams are pillows pleased,

Proud and staid, all longing pales, gilt-woven shroud

Animal ease, blissful moment

Give no groan or creak abandoned:

Gallant solitude, stillness dignified,

Let seasons and all comers pass.

Weather denudes, peels and feathers.

Sway-backed chair, melancholy emblem cracked,

Fading and stoic in autumn dusk.

Giddy spring heat is sorely missed,

Curling memories flutter, a late breeze.

Whispers are careful of mourning.

~1993

Yes, furniture is a common theme for me.  I don’t know what I was trying to do with the meter there.  I must have been copying something.  In any case, I didn’t know there would be mourning, not in the most literal sense, not in ’93.  The mourning wasn’t even timely, though it coincided with going to church and a big family get together, the wedding.  But the timing was off, I don’t even know when he died, only when I heard about it.

What does CW have to do with Russia?  Nothing. Everything. The wanting everything, right now.

I’m sooooo stupid.  I said I don’t want to talk about him anymore now.

Some days life seems so fucking cruel.  Hearing of Whitney Houston’s death, I thought immediately of CW.  I hear Houston’s name and I think of The Bodyguard and I think of CW bursting into “Ayyyyyeeeaaaayyyy will aaaaaalwaaaays looove yoooooooUooo….” in the square in Semily.  In the snow, surrounded by the stone and plaster buildings, as we walk somewhere.  The bar or the massage parlor or the train station or wherever,  I remember walks with him in so many towns and cities.  My God, in Pompeii and Naples and Athens and Istanbul…

Going to see “Regarding Henry” of all things in Istanbul.  Drinking apple tea and plum brandy and who knows what else.  The man who found us by the mosque and said he had carpets for sale, the way CW said “I don’t have a house, why do I want a carpet?” and the man said “I will sell you a house then.”

Trying to order beer during Ramadan.  And they say people don’t have patience with Americans.

Sitting by the river in Prague, in the shade of that bridge.  My God, my God the totally out of character for my life things we did.

…and Hradec Kralove and Rome and Paris and even New York and Nashville.  But Nashville was different, that was later.  That was after New York, and New York was already bad.  Maybe that’s why I hate New York.  It didn’t take care of him.  It isn’t a nurturing place.  Or maybe that’s just where the friend I knew got lost and never came back.

Before that, he taught me how to walk with someone arm in arm.  I never learned how to do that as a girl, how a man’s supposed to put your hand under and over his forearm.  Or how guys are supposed to walk on the street side, I had never heard of such a thing.  I was 21.  That wasn’t part of my education.  I thought it must be a Southern thing.

He smelled like Nivea cream.  He was one of those people who makes you feel unkempt.  I usually am badly groomed.  He held women to a ridiculous standard, told me about his school friend who was a beauty pageant winner, but who never took more than 3 minutes to get ready when they decided to go out.  “Just run a comb through your hair and you’re ready” he’d say.  I guess that’s true if you don’t sit around in tattered sweats and a scrunchy and no makeup most of the time.

As I do.

I wonder if he was the way he was with women because he was gay or because he was Southern.  I guess some of both. A highly educated gay Southerner.  How deadly.

I didn’t really know him. When we met in Europe, even as we traveled together, we were still freshly met.  I didn’t then and still don’t understand what he wanted from me, why he kept me around.  I mean, I knew he wanted me to do some things, talk to men for him if he didn’t speak their language and I happened to speak theirs.  That was somewhat limiting.  I can’t really manage a conversation in anything but English or French.  I may have tried Spanish if I was drunk enough.  Maybe he needed a beard, but it didn’t seem like it.  I guess I wouldn’t know– if a beard does what she’s supposed to do, no one bothers you.

I don’t wonder why I wanted to be around him.  When we met I’d just spent three months in that solitary confinement that is barely speaking the language and having no one around who speaks yours.  I was hungry to converse.  You don’t know what that hunger is like until you’ve gone without for a long time, like three months.

That’s a side of the cultural immersion process that they don’t cover in most Berlitz courses.

I tried to spend time with a straight guy who took an interest in me.  He was British.  He wanted to go to a football (soccer) game.  I thought that would be fun, until he mentioned that the best part is beating up gypsies.  Way to chase a California girl right out of the sack.

He seemed like a nice enough guy, aside from not knowing that if a woman wants to play pool, you probably shouldn’t offer to break and then run the table.  I thought that was very tedious of him, much worse than making a woman walk on the street side.

Funny I should remember that after learning the other.  My gaydar was a lot better than my psychodar.

I met a couple of Middle Eastern men in a Prague cafe.  They spoke French.  They were so insanely attractive that it was alarming.  That kind of powerlessness does not appeal to me.  Like the mouth of a black hole, get too close and you will never get back out.

I’ve never met anyone with that kind of magnetism since.  Well, maybe I have but I’m older now and I’m not so susceptible.

I ran back to CW.

“You’re soooo stupid,” he would say.  I never quite understood why he said that, in a tone of mixed mockery and affection.  I know, and I think he knew perfectly well, that I’m not stupid.  I am but I’m not.

I can’t help but think of him when I walk in snow.  That’s funny because I walked in snow more recently than when I lived in the Czech Republic.  I walked in a lot of Iowa snow.  But I don’t think of Iowa when I feel snow crunching and shifting under my feet or when I pull up my gloves and tug my coat sleeves down to cover my wrists from the cold.  I don’t think of Iowa, I think of CW.  And I hear that ridiculous Bodyguard song about a brief and ultimately unsatisfying relationship that is supposed to tell us something profound about life and love and people or something.  It doesn’t.

I don’t feel like writing any more about him right now.

The first time a child feels severe pain, it is the most horrible thing she has ever felt, right?  So a kid with a broken ankle might say the pain is an 11, but the same kid, 20 years later, will break an ankle, wrap it in an ace bandage, walk it off and never see a doctor about it at all.

Last night one of our geldings colicked for the first time.  The vet said that, when a horse his age (15?  18?) colicks for the first time, she worries because horses that age tend to be more stoic than a horse who colicks young and frequently.

I thought that was an odd way of seeing it.  I would be a heck of a lot more worried about a 3 year old with colic than a 15 year old who was showing mild discomfort.  I try to raise healthy horses, young ones should not colic.

I discovered this colic while I was feeding.  The gelding did not come over with the gang for dinner.  He was standing a little ways off, pawing the ground violently before he went down.  He didn’t roll, though he did try lying on his side for a bit.  His gums looked pretty good, he wasn’t sweating.  When I got him up and took him out to walk, he didn’t fight me or try to go down as long as we kept moving.  Even when we stopped, he didn’t drop to the ground, he just pawed.

To be sure, he was unhappy.  He wouldn’t eat anything and he didn’t care that he was away from the herd, though he is very herd-bound.  During the initial examination, he was fairly quiet aside from a little pawing.  He took the very invasive (at both ends, poor guy) colic routine in stride, for a first-timer.  I find that geldings are a lot more fussy about the back end than mares are.  That has to be a shock for them.

A few hours later he felt fine.

Obviously you can’t ask a horse how much it hurts on a scale of 1 to 10.  You can gauge their discomfort. Is he sweating?  Is he rolling?  Can you keep him on his feet? What color are his gums?  What is his heart rate?

In my experience, all of these need to be considered as a whole.

We had a gelding, Goliath, colic a few years ago.  His gum color was fine, he was not rolling much at all, he was not sweating, but his heart rate was high, and continued to be so for over 12 hours.  Goliath needed to be treated at Davis with stomach tubing for a couple of days, iv fluids, and pain meds, but he made it.

That was actually kind of a funny story.  Through the night, my folks and I were trying to monitor him, trying to check his heart rate and listen for gut sounds.  None of us could quite hear his heart beat to measure it.  Each one of us tried and all three came up with wildly different numbers.  A horse has a very big heart but knowing how to listen to it is harder than it seems.

During the listening attempts, the dogs got into a fight (because when everyone is up and about in the middle of the night, the dogs need to be there too).  They went rolling, snarling and tearing at each other under the old gelding’s legs before we could pull them apart.  The gelding didn’t care.

May, the old black mare, would colic regularly, expressing her pain violently, but usually only needed one treatment to get her through it.

The gelding last night looked, to my eye, like a horse with a mild gas colic or some other passing ailment.  The vet spoke of feeling something strange during the rectal exam.  That was alarming but I’m not sure it was conclusive.  There’s a lot of stuff in there, it must be difficult to know what you have a hold of.

Back to how to know how much pain your horse is in: you can’t.  They are just like us, each one has a different pain threshold, they vary in their ways of expressing their pain.  You have to know your horse.

Unfortunately, if your horse is very healthy, you may have nothing to compare a present crisis to.  The idea that an older horse is more stoic than a younger one is fine, unless the older horse comes from a long line of easy-keeping, rarely colicky, extremely healthy horses, as this gelding does. His father never colicked, died at 23 from a fractured pelvis.  His damsire colicked around 20, from bad hay.  He survived that, but dropped dead from heart failure in his late 20s.

The gelding’s mother “colicked” mildly once, but that was her first pregnancy at age 16.  I guess being pregnant for the first time in middle age must have felt kind of funny to her.  She colicked again at 36 and died from that.

He also had an aunt and an uncle who died from colic, after surviving surgery for lipoma-related colicks that required resections of the small intestine.   The surgery bought them a few more years.  So this gelding has a mixed heritage where colic is concerned.

That doesn’t mean he’s hyper-sensitive, but it certainly makes me think he will notice the first time he gets sick, and tell me all about it.  He seems to be fine now, but I am still watching.  He also comes from a line of horses who suffered from lipomas.  But there isn’t a preventative treatment for that, as far as I know.

For now, I’ll just keep an eye on him and hope he is as well as he seems to be.

I’m having to consider abandoning my pen name.  When I first thought about it, I wasn’t worried.  Not like I was yesterday about angry people and all that.  I got that out of my system.  Now I’m not sure.  I don’t know if I can think and write the same way without my mask.

It isn’t much of a mask, but it is one.  This mask is a coping mechanism, a crutch.  I’m not sure which or how many neuroses it helps me deal with, but that’s a good thing.  I’m not really aware of those things when I’m writing as petshark.

There’s that old story about the cave, about the people who couldn’t see the light because they stayed in the dark cave.  There’s another story about depressed cave men, who wouldn’t come out of the cave. The happy cavemen did go out, and got eaten by the sabre-toothed  tiger.  The light of truth may be out there, but sometimes truth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Petshark doesn’t sound a thing like my legal name.  (It looks a little funny to me with a capital “p”).  I’m not sure Legal Me knows anything about hockey or remembers how to write, period.  Whatever happened to her novels, huh?  Mouldering away, again, going nowhere.  Legal Me is a bum.  She has no respect for her craft, diminishes it at every turn.  I don’t think she deserves a byline.  Petshark is far more industrious.  Petshark does things like go to Russia. Legal Me can barely make it to the feed store on time.

Grown ups don’t use fake names.  Anonymous bloggers are reviled by so many. Why?  Does it matter what someone calls themselves?  Isn’t what they do, say, write, truly them?  Is it worse for flyfanner to pretend to have information and build some fantasy on it, than it is for Sarah Jenkins to do so?

Do I really have to give up the mask, take it off, come out from under the desk?  Really?  That reminds me of a scene from Angel, one after the team has returned from Pylea with their new ward, Winifred:

Fred: “B plus. C minus.”

Gunn and Wes turn to look at Fred, who is sitting cross-legged under the folding table… with her own box of Chinese takeout.

Fred: “A girl can tell.”

Wesley: “Fred – if you feel comfortable enough grading our sincerity (crouches down in front of the table) how about joining us for the rest of the meal? – Isn’t that the point of coming downstairs?”

(-That Vision Thing)

Fred’s doing exactly what I do.  She’s budding into the conversation while still hiding in her cave.  She wants to participate but she’s still worried about the sabre-toothed tigers.  Legal Me knows that that’s childish and abnormal behavior.  So Legal Me doesn’t actually hide under desks.  I just made up petshark to say the things I’m not sure I should say.  It’s a coping mechanism: petshark is my very own talking stick.

Horses have a lot of coping mechanisms, we call them vices.  They aren’t quite like a pen name, though some horses do put on an act under stressful conditions, behave in ways they would not behave if they felt secure.  There’s an old Thoroughbred mare outside chewing through the fence rails of her paddock even as I write write this.  She’s a good example of what I’m talking about.

A lot of Thoroughbreds that I’ve observed chew fences, even crib (swallow air.)   Apparently this is a contagious vice that horses in neighboring stalls can pick up.  That might explain why so many horses off the track do it.  They spend a lot of time young and bored in their stalls, next to other young bored horses, some of whom probably crib.

But this mare hasn’t been in a track barn for years.  She hasn’t even been in a barn for a long time.  She’s been in a big pasture with friends, grass, trees, lots of things to explore other than wooden fences.  Still, she eats fences.  Obviously, it is a habit, no longer associated with the original stress trigger.  She doesn’t swallow air as far as I can tell, so the habit doesn’t pose a serious threat to her health.  It’s just a pain if you want your fences to look nice.

I could make her stop.  I could paint the fences with some caustic substance that would make the wood taste bad.  I could put a cribbing collar on her, to make biting the fence unpleasant, though that might not work well since the cribbing collar is designed to prevent swallowing air, not biting things or chewing.  I could wrap the wood in chicken wire so she could not get her teeth into it.  There are a lot of things I could do.

Or I could move her to another pen, replace the rail and repaint the fence.  If she wants to eat wood, give her a tree to chew on.  I don’t know how important chewing wood is to her.  Maybe she just likes it.  Or maybe she would start chewing on herself or eating rocks if I took the wood away from her.  She has her reasons for eating fence rails, who am I to stop her?

Maybe I’m just being a coward, trying to justify letting myself keep the pen name.  Maybe I would be just fine without it, maybe I should wrap it in chicken wire and move on.

But I don’t want to.

I told my brother that I was nervous, even scared, of this new adventure I am embarking on.  He said “what do you have to be afraid of, what, are they going to stop not paying you?”  I started to try and explain, about not wanting to look stupid, and feeling like it was a lot of pressure, like I needed to do this thing well.  Then I remembered that my brother also likes to write, and I told him that was a ridiculous, even stupid thing to say.  He knew perfectly well why I was scared.

He was right about one thing.  I’m not getting paid.  My reputation, future happiness as a writer may well be on the line here, but no one is paying me.  So if I want to bring my fuzzy slippers, security blanket and petshark mask to work I can.  No one has said, in so many words, that I cannot.

I think I will.  I don’t really have fuzzy slippers, I’m more of a shoeless kind of girl, and I don’t have a security blanket, never have had one.  But I do have petshark, and for now I’m bringing her with me.

…In my view, bloggers in the last couple of years have slowly but surely separated themselves from their readership with a conceited attitude like they’re “above” normal fans… Not all, but many.  Why?  Well, I think Twitter has certainly exacerbated the attitude.  Read your Twitter feeds, regardless of what pro season it is.  It’s full of statements from bloggers, not beat writers, such as “As I expected Player X is on the fourth line” or “Player X WILL NOT be traded”.  Huh?  You’re a frickin’ blogger, bro, nothing more. -Tony, The Confluence

First of all, I say: don’t blame Twitter.  People who want to be arrogant jerks will find a way.

Secondly, I can think of a lot of reasons for a blogger to retire a blog.  But I’m not comfortable with a departure declaring that the quality of blogs has anything to do with it.  I’m mystified by the conflation of the medium with the messengers.  Plenty of professional writers also have blogs.  It’s just a format, a word processing system, nothing more.

Blog programs give everyone the ability to produce something that, layout-wise, appears professional, visually on a par with things some people are paid to write.  It’s up to the reader to figure out if the content is of any value.

I have wrestled with the these words,  “professional” and “amateur,” as I experience their implications in the horse world.  A professional is someone who gets paid.  An amateur does not.  That is really the only difference.  You can speculate that the professional has some credentials or credibility that an unpaid person doesn’t have, but you can be wrong.  I prefer to focus on the message in my quest to establish the credentials of the messenger.

Figuring out who has good information, and who offers informed opinions instead of random rumor-mongering, or worse, tries to start completely unfounded rumors, that’s just a matter of practice.  Even without formal training you can learn to notice who says something will or could happen, and compare it to what does or plausibly might have happened.  Then you use your bookmarks, or follow them on Twitter, or like them on Facebook or pay attention to their message board posts.

Then remain vigilant- there are impostors who prey on the good name of your trusted sources.  You have to trust your own nose to properly identify horse shit.

What does it matter if a writer publishes in print or on WordPress or on a fan blogging site like Fear the Fin and Kuklas Korner, or the NHL’s official news list?  I won’t say categorically that blogs are better or worse than any other publication.  Some are more accurate than others, as with all media.

That said, I can appreciate how someone would throw in the towel, either on a particular blog or blogging altogether.  There’s a difference between finishing and quitting. It all depends on what the purpose of the project is.  If you run out of new ideas, or feel you have really said all you want to say on a topic, that might mean you have finished.  If the purpose of the blog is to address a particular topic, then to change topics could ruin it.

If the purpose is less specific, if the work is the purpose, then you may have trouble deciding when it is “finished.”  I could argue that my goal is to write something, anything, for the rest of my days.  But I’d like to think I will put a bow on it when I feel I’ve run out of things I want to talk about on a specific topic.  I won’t make any guarantees, I’m self-indulgent that way, but I know how it goes.

I’ve retired websites.  I leave them up there for years after I’ve stopped updating, let them rot into irrelevance.  I’m not very tidy.  But I know that finally they should come down, if I can’t give them the attention and enthusiasm that first brought them into being.  The same can be said for a blog.  It has a lifespan, it should be properly put to rest when the time comes.

Another thing Tony said in his closing comments got my attention, about how he started blogging and what was involved:

…the new fad of blogging gave me an outlet to talk about my favorite teams with people that (mostly) agreed with what I discussing.  If I was pissed off about something, hell, I just jotted it down.  Conversely, if there was good news to discuss, I did that as well.

But blogging by yourself year after year takes a renewed passion, it takes continuous energy. -ibid

For many years I have tried to find a quote from a book written by Ross MacDonald about writing.  It said something like writers write in order to connect to people, a response to the alienation they feel from the society around them.  This malaise makes them write because it can never be cured.   That I can’t find that quote is but another source of malaise.

The sense of alienation that he spoke of could come in many forms.  Maybe you live in a football town and all you want to do is read Elizabethan plays.  Maybe you live in New York City and all you want to do is be a cowboy.  Maybe you are a Californian fascinated by hockey.   Maybe you are house bound and want to get out.

Anyway, blogging lets writers connect with an audience in ways Ross MacDonald could never have imagined.  By writer’s standards, it’s instant gratification.  No more begging for space on the printing presses.  No more wondering if the right people are reading and approving of your work, though certainly it can come to that.   You know right away that someone could be reading what you wrote and that helps fend off that sense of solitude.

But it is still a profoundly solitary task. Ask anyone who is in a relationship (not one of those wonderful fantasy relationships of unconditional support and faith), with anyone: boss, friend, lover, spouse, parent, child.  People get jealous of your writing, they try to pull you away from it.  Being alone is unhealthy, writing is done alone, hence it is bad.  Unless it suddenly makes a gazillion dollars for you, then it is suddenly good.

Maybe writing is a leap of faith, a deep abiding belief in yourself that you are that good, that someday what you do will be worth a gazillion dollars.  Or maybe it’s just something you do because you need to, because life without it isn’t as good.  It’s like playing hockey even though you can’t find your way to the NHL.  Or like learning a new language even though you will never be paid to use it.

I remember reading one of those advice thingies about writing.  The author explained her writing routine.  She would wake up early every day and write for a few hours.  This was her time.  It fell between 4 and 7 am every day.  She had kids to look after and a husband to pay attention to and a “life” to lead.  That is the way writing is supposed to be, exactly what my mother always told me, something you do on the side, something in addition to, or outside “having a life.”  It’s like the guys your mother warns you about in your youth: writing is high maintenance and all take.  The odds that writing will give back as much as you give it are very slim.

So I guess it comes down to: do you love it anyway?  Does it give you something that nothing else can?  Is it a part of you that nothing else can replace?

Right now I can say yes, through the ups an downs, it is something I need to do, for better or worse.  I hope Tony feels the same, I hope his blog is all he wanted it to be, and that his next project is too.

Seems like just a few weeks ago that the hill looked like this.

The hills aren’t so green anymore, because the hot summer is here. 

I found all 11 mares huddled under those trees in the background.

I found them “brushed up,” I believe the term is.  I don’t know why they prefer this little oak cluster to the big Eucalyptus grove on the top of the hill.  As soon as I appeared, they all came out to greet me, so I couldn’t get a shot of them under the trees.

Some girls just can't help being beautiful.

All is well: eyes, legs, tummies in good order.

Sometimes I get the feeling I'm being followed.

Apparently seeing me reminded the mares that they could come down the mountain and see what they could see. Like water, I wonder?

It's kind of a power trip, until they push me off the trail and run past me.

I went out to do the usual evening rounds, and made a point of checking each horse in the pasture.  On my way out to check the mares, I glanced at the “mash unit,” a half-acre paddock where I’m keeping Dolly and the oldest rescued mare.  They need mash twice a day this time of year.  I didn’t look closely at those two because I would be coming back to feed them anyway. 

As usual, none of the mares in the main herd were remotely concerned about the fireworks.  We have been here for 20 years now and many of them grew up here.  So they’ve heard the fireworks every year of their lives.  Every one was fine.

I returned to finish the feeding, treated an eye, filled some water buckets and finally took the mash to the old mares.  By now it was fully dark.  As soon as I entered the  pen I realized there was only one mare hovering around looking for mash.  Dolly was missing.  I went ahead and put the mash in the mangers, banging the buckets loudly and calling Dolly’s name.

Dolly is 30 this year.  When they get to that age they can go quickly.  You know their time is coming, and even if it isn’t a shock, losing them is still upsetting.  As I called her name, my heart was pounding.  I put the buckets down outside the pen and went to get a halter from the barn.  My mind was starting to race, my hands to shake, I cursed myself for not keeping my cell phone with me at all times.  Should I go get it?  I didn’t want to, I wanted to go find the mare wherever she was, stuck in a fence or rolling in pain or just unable to rise from some catastrophic condition.

I had to walk a little slowly, I was using a headlamp with a dying battery and I didn’t want to twist an ankle in the dark.  I had a little trouble getting the latch open on the gate, managed to close it behind me.  I turned around to go searching and was just in time to step aside as Dolly came galloping by on her last legs, which appeared to be working just fine.  She made a little circle before stopping, breathing slightly as after a run.  Her eyes were wide and her tail was flagged.  She was ready for her mash now.

It had not occurred to me that she might just be tearing around the paddock because of the fireworks.  Because, after all, she is 30 years old.

I guess we all have our own way of celebrating the 4th of July.

This curious little episode of Angel is a wonderful metaphor… no, perhaps an allegory… no, it’s just a story about how we make our way in a community, how we move between and within social circles.  As we find kindred spirits, we get swept up in our common interests, similar viewpoints, we may be overwhelmed and delighted by these likenesses.  To find others who share beliefs or tastes with us is affirming, validating, it creates a sense of euphoria and comfort. We like it.

At Angel Investigations, Gunn discovers a set of clever demon hunters with all kinds of tools and knowledge new to him.  They want him to be one of them, they need him.  He is rapidly engrossed by his new family, a welcome relief from the frustrations and tragedy of his life before.

The social honeymoon inevitably ends. We realize how utterly alone we still are, will always be, how separate we are from those around us, those same people who seemed so familiar. Gunn’s old vampire-hunting gang reawakens his abiding prejudices, something that makes him different from his new family.  It is shocking and unsettling for him, as the murder of the meek slurpee-sucking balancing demon is for the audience.  It feels wrong and confusing.

Also inevitable is the struggle to stay in the community, to avoid exile.  To do this, we push down that which is different in us, either by silence or public denial of it.  When Gunn tries to apologize to Angel for saying they could never be friends because he cannot be friends with a vampire, this is natural.  He cannot go back to his old gang, he needs to stay with his new one.  Angel rebukes this apology by saying they do not need to be friends.  Gunn is left standing alone in the dark alley.

The audience knows that most of the members of the Angel family have gone through the same struggle with prejudice that Gunn is going through.  Cordelia went through it in the first season, learning to live in peace with demons.  But Gunn doesn’t know that yet so he is just alone in the dark.

We are all alone in the dark at different times.  We do not pass through it as a single test from which we are graduated in the pomp and circumstance of ceremony.  We pass through it over and over, in our community, our profession, our family, our circle of friends.  It’s as potent emotionally as the euphoria we feel when we find like spirits.  Just like the euphoria, it passes. We might discover that we made too much of superficial similarities.  Maybe the gang we thought we were saving the world with is actually just a bunch of thrill-killers.

Or maybe the differences are not so great, we make our way back into the fold.  We’re back in the late night Chinese food craving gang again, and it’s someone else’s turn.  Perhaps no one realizes he’s been body-swapped by a lecherous octogenarian.  That will make anyone feel a little alienated.

I don’t think this is any kind of epiphany, but it is one of the reasons I enjoy Whedon’s work. Good entertainment has to make some noise, be a little surprising, but it also has have something familiar about it, something we relate to. Whedon’s stories take that which is mundane yet emotionally fraught and give it form in demons and mayhem and dramatic sweeping darkness.

When it rains here, the internet goes out.  I always find this irritating, not only because sometimes I am trying to do work that requires online interaction with the world at large.  I also find it irritating because there are some things that I simply can’t get locally, like people to talk about hockey with.  That is sort of evil, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t what the internet-phobes are talking about.

Occasionally it dawns on my mother that I am in frequent communication with people I have never met.  We might go out for lunch and I might tell her something curious I read from someone online.  I try not to mention hockey around her.  She considers hockey to be an anti-social topic, like politics or religion.  It ranks below money on her list of acceptable things to discuss.

It isn’t that hockey is offensive in itself.  It is a “bad” thing to talk about because no one (meaning her) is interested in it.  To be fair, I know hardly anyone I haven’t met online who is willing to talk about hockey for more than 20 seconds.  So she is sort of right when she says “no one” is interested in hockey or wants to hear about it.   You shouldn’t talk about things other people don’t understand/like/care about.

This never stops her from telling me at length about antique silver or china sets she saw for sale, their origin or their similarity to ones she has, or the price and specific number of pieces.  I guess I am supposed to be interested in that, being female and the presumptive future owner of at least some of this silver/china/etc.  So if I do not want to hear about it, she might reason, it’s good for me to do so anyway.  I could try to tell her the story of the Stanley Cup, since it is old silver, but I am pretty sure she would see right through that.

Setting my mother’s hypocritical view of appropriate conversation topics aside, she gives me a way to think about online communication and its relationship to local society.  What I started to say is, when she thinks about me communicating with strangers online, she looks at me with a worried expression and asks “you spend hours writing messages back and forth with people you have never met?  Doesn’t that worry you?”  This, I suspect, is part of what internet-phobes are talking about when they say the internet is evil.

Once upon a time, if you liked something no one in your neighborhood or town or city liked, you had no one to share it with.  This was alright if it was a solitary activity (like writing or painting or running).  But if it was something that depended on a sharing experience (like racket ball or wrestling), you were out of luck.  Even solitary pursuits (like writing or painting) eventually yearn to be shared.  They are expressive activities even if you do them alone.  If no one nearby had an interest in what you were doing, the sharing had to be put off to a later date.  Sometimes the sharing didn’t occur until you died.

In this way, the local community limited your activities, professional and recreational, to whatever was popular locally.  Steer wrestling, perhaps, or church functions, or football, or jumping into pits with rattlesnakes.  Peer pressure had a monopoly on what was done.

A minority of people have always resisted peer pressure.  There was always a weirdo in town, or a rebel, or a witch.  Sometimes there were a few together, but inevitably this led to them being called a bad influence on each other.  Their families or peers would try to pull them apart so that they could be better integrated back into the normal community.  Mostly any group of women who got together unsupervised to talk about things they would not later share with their husbands were suspect.

Can I compare enjoying a hockey game to being burned at the stake as a witch?  Physically, I am not in jeopardy, but that’s just because the laws have changed over the years.  But, as recently as 30 years ago, I would have eventually stopped trying to watch hockey games.  It would have been too much of a hassle, they would not have been on local tv, it would have been too difficult to find answers to my questions. It probably would not have been as much fun as it is now.  Also, I do have some locally acceptable habits like horses and writing and going to movies.

I might have been a more effective member of the local community, thus unfettered by an interest beyond the pale.  I would have been forced to engage only in things a majority of people in the community liked.  I would not have been burned at the stake.  I would have integrated just fine, being not very rebellious in my heart. I might not have been particularly happy at it but I would have muddled through.  Community is not about individual happiness, it is about serenity for the majority.

If life among the majority were too unbearable, I could have moved.  A new inlaw recently suggested I should move to Quebec, what with speaking French and liking hockey.  I don’t want to move to Quebec, and I don’t think I would have even 30 years ago.  I like where I live, despite the lack of hockey fans.  Here I can do pretty much whatever I like, within locally designated parameters.

Running is one of the oldest forms of exercise, but it is also associated with flight.  You run away from things or you chase them.  It is a taxing activity, hence the exercise aspect.  Nowadays no one thinks twice about someone running by in the appropriate shoes and comfortable clothes.  They might feel guilty and lazy but they don’t think the runner is a freak.

What if you are NOT wearing the right clothes?  What if you step out of the office one day at lunch time in suit and dress shoes and just start running down the street?  Ignoring the likelihood you will damage your suit and likely your feet, people will look at you funny.  You’re not supposed to run in the wrong clothes.  It is a sign that you are in some sort of distress.  They probably won’t arrest you or burn you at the stake.  But you will hear about it the next time you see the client who was having lunch at the posh sidewalk cafe when they saw you running by in the wrong clothes.  It just isn’t done.

So runners wear the right clothes and run on a schedule.  Similarly, people can follow any interest they like online.  They might even form relationships with faceless written voices, share with people outside their community.  They can blog and tweet and post questions and answers and thoughts about anything they like even if no one in their geographically local community cares about it.

It is a fair compromise, one that allows individual happiness to thrive without interfering with the serenity of the local majority.  A person might even find that, in the larger world, they are a member of a majority.  Maybe they are only a member of the majority in another small locality.

Still, it allows the local community to splinter.  No longer can you be certain that everyone you meet at the grocery store has any common point of reference with you.  Sure, you know the same streets, you probably know the local schools.  You may be familiar with the same political issues.  But you don’t necessarily see each other at the local spelling bee or church bake sale.  You may not know what the local football team is up to, or that there is a charity golf tournament going on this weekend or that your neighbor’s kid’s rabbit won a prize at the fair.

If a person did know all of that, would that mean they cared about it?  Or would it just mean they don’t have anything else to occupy their mind with so they must know it and talk about it?  In some ways, the thinning and spreading of the information pool gives more significance to what you do know.  You don’t have to know about things you don’t care about, therefore if you do know about it you probably also care about it.

But the caring isn’t always what people care about.  People like to share.  They don’t so much care if you care.  In this regard, the internet interferes with the free sharing of information between people who do not care about it.  It makes it harder to get their attention when you want to tell them about something they don’t care about.  They can go away, turn on the computer and talk exclusively about things they do care about.

Of course if you care about someone, you will try to care about what they care about.  You won’t kick your boyfriend’s dog even if it is a horrible dog.  You will sit and watch a baseball game with your Mom and try not to fall asleep, because you care about her.

The internet doesn’t necessarily interfere with that.  It just makes the time between compulsory sharing of things you don’t care about with people you do care about less tedious.  And perhaps, on occasion, someone who cares about you will share back.

The rain has stopped.  Now I can share this on my blog and then go see what my hockey friends are up to.  In a bit, I’ll go meet my brother for a movie which I will see with him even though Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final is on at the same time.  After all, I am not a complete weirdo.