As if they’d been waiting for hockey season to end, all the horses scheduled to get sick this Spring got sick together.  The new chronic colic case, November, the old familiar laminitis case Kassy, and the latest laminitis case Cookie.  All together now, ail!

Cookie added to the mix with a mysterious leg swelling which the vet suspected was a subcutaneous infection known as… I forget.  Anyway, she needed a week of antibiotics and anti-inflamatories.  Kassy only needed the anti-inflamatories, so they were separated for that week.  November did wait until Cookie was done with her antibiotics to go off his feed and colic.  That was nice, I only have so many pens to isolate horses in.  So, Cookie moved in with Kassy for drugs and diet, and November took Cookie’s place.

Several days after November was treated for colic, he was still mildly symptomatic and started to look dull again.  I remembered from the last time he did this that he gets depressed being alone, especially when his only company is the stallion in a non-adjacent pen.  He might enjoy the stallion’s company more if they could touch noses as they can in the stalls, but with the mares in sight the stallion isn’t very friendly and I don’t think November enjoys being menaced all day long, even from a distance of several yards.  So, he had stopped eating again and didn’t move around much which seemed like just the wrong thing for him to do as we tried to get his guts working again.

Giving him a companion seems like a no-brainer, except that he is so happy to have a friend that he lets his friend eat all the food.  Also, if you are watching intake as well as output, this is harder to do with two horses in the same space.  But he looked so sad that I put his older half-brother in with him yesterday.  November is eating much better now, and his gut sounds match his brother’s so I think things are moving along even if I can’t measure the usual way.

The sisters are less friendly with each other, though I’m sure they both prefer being together than alone.  Kassy is the daughter of the Old Grey Mare.  Though she began life less confident and not so clever as her mother, she has succeeded her mother as the toughest girl in the herd.  It is difficult to know when she’s getting sore-footed because she never has to move more quickly than she likes.  No one can chase her, she never has to change course because some inferior mare is in her way, she doesn’t have to rush to the food tray.  Cookie, on the other hand, is the daughter of May.  May never taught her offspring social skills.  They all had to learn on their own, and each is a little odd in their own way.  Cookie is by far the most sociable with other horses.  Her sister is a loner like their mother, her brother (November’s present companion) is moderately conflict-averse but he gets along fine with others and prefers not to be alone.

It seemed like Cookie and Kassy should get along fine: Kassy gets what she wants and Cookie doesn’t argue.  Kassy is now in her 20s, Cookie nearing that.  Most horses establish their place in the group by the time they are five or six, but I have noticed that, as they get older, horses not only gain rank over younger horses coming in- they also become less patient with old rules that oppress them.

Mostly, if you put a subdominant horse in an enclosure with a dominant horse, the lowly horse will stay out of the way, might even cower for hours as far from the dominant horse as possible.  You may never see the horses engage, but one will move about more freely than the other, seem to ignore the companion.  That one is the dominant horse.  If you don’t pay attention, the meek horse may be deprived of water as well as food, being so fearful of the Dominant’s ire.

Yesterday, Cookie decided she’d had enough of being pushed around by the all mighty Kassy.  I attribute this to Cookie being a little off in the head.  When I said horses will rebel as they get older, I didn’t mean they walk up to the horse equivalent of Al Capone and call him short.  To be fair, I’m sure Cookie didn’t start it.  It was feeding time and at feeding time Kassy tends to assert herself even before the food arrives, in a lazy, over-confident way.  She saunters in the direction of any nearby horse and they move away.  I can’t be sure though, I didn’t see it start, I just heard squealing and looked up to see the mares squaring off as if to kick.  Cookie had puffed herself up, neck bowed, tail raised, body gathered for a fight.

Kassy was shaking her head and squealing for all she was worth.  Neither one actually kicked.  I don’t know if Kassy knows Cookie has several inches of reach on her, or if Kassy was just alarmed by this unfamiliar response from lowly Cookie.  Cookie did blink first and move away, but still looking big and arrogant.  She did not clamp her tail and scamper off like most of the mares do when Kassy menaces them.  Cookie continued to strut in Kassy’s sight for some time, while Kassy voiced her rage and kicked savagely at the air.  By the time I brought them their food, I guess they had settled it.  Kassy did not march back and forth between the piles, trying to take both as she sometimes does while on a diet.

Balancing psychological and physical health is more difficult with horses than with people, though certainly horse psychology is simpler than the human variety.  Horses aren’t generally haunted by memories of long ago, though they absolutely do remember everything that has happened to them.  They are sensitive as we are to being treated with kindness and respect by people and other horses.  A bully needs to back up threats with actions, and a bully is no one’s favorite.  Someone is always going to be waiting to rebel against the bully, even if that rebellion seems crazy.  Today Cookie seems much brighter and moves around with more confidence, and Kassy isn’t complaining about it any more.

November will continue to be a balancing act.  Luckily, we only have one mysterious chronic case like him, but that means he has to be kept alone while being treated.  Classic symptoms of depression are the same as for mild colic: lethargy and not eating.  These snowball into a worse colic as his digestive system shuts down.  We haven’t established what causes these colics, he has been examined every which way inside and out.  It will always be hard to tell if his colic is returning because of the isolation or something else.  I guess this is why vets put so much stock in how “bright” a horse’s eye looks.  The heart rate and the gut sounds and the temperature aren’t always telling, but a bright expression hardly ever occurs on a really sick horse.  Ironically, a dull eye can’t always be cured with drugs or mineral oil.  Sometimes you need to treat the depression as the disease and not merely a symptom of a physical illness.

That sounds like the reverse of that old saying about getting to a man’s heart through his stomach.  In this case, as the horse’s heart goes, his stomach goes too.

After a while I looked up in my rearview mirror and saw a man with a moustache sitting in the far row of seats that don’t exist in my car.  I said “hi! Who are you?”  He said “I’m Ted Knight.”  I knew that wasn’t true, he was the wrong race.  He handed me a business card, it said Ted Knight, and it had an email address on it that I recognized.  I remembered sending an email about the game, thinking I was emailing my old friend.  I realized I may have made the offer to the wrong guy.  I was embarrassed.

When the other Ted arrived, he said hi, as to introduce himself to the guy in the back.  He pointed out that this was not the correct Ted Knight.  I felt badly, but the wrong TK smiled and went away.  Eventually the correct TK showed up.

We went inside.  I gave the Teds their tickets and said I would catch up to them.  The rink was ornate and very old, with wide winding staircases. The walls were slightly gold colored, the ornaments big and round, the stair railings thick, wider than your hand, made of plaster like the walls.  There were heavy drapes everywhere but the space was airy and bright.  Big arched openings without windows in them let in the light and the heat from outside.

I walked up one of the staircases, up and up until I came to a room at the top, a cafeteria.  It was not so ornate but very open, with high ceilings and some table-cloth draped tables.  I got some food and sat down.

There were some women there, I didn’t know them but we started talking.  I was talking about writing.  We were having such a nice time, I didn’t realize the game was starting.  I was leery of the game, I didn’t think my team was going to have a very good first period.  We kept talking.  A woman came up to me, one I know.  She had been listening to the conversation and she said to me, a little excited “did you get a dream?”  I didn’t exactly understand her question but I said “yes, sort of, I think so.”  I did think so.  I felt like I had a dream right within my grasp, like it was almost a reality.

I got nervous about missing the game and went to find my seat and the Teds.  When I got to the rink entry, a man asked for my ticket.  I looked in my purse where I usually keep them and instead found a bunch of receipts.  I pulled out an envelope and looked in it.  More receipts.  I reached into my pockets, only receipts deceptively shaped just like a ticket.

I sat down on the floor and emptied my purse, the man saying “oh no, don’t do that…” I spread everything out, shifting it with the flat of my hand, like shuffling dominoes.  I could not find the ticket.  I started to cry.  I could not get in.  I could not get in.

I woke up and thought I did get a dream.  I’m not sure about the grand scheme of the dream, I’m not sure what getting in there has to do with it, but I do need to get in.  That much I got.

When the Sharks got bumped from the playoffs, I was caught by surprise.  I wasn’t entirely surprised that they had lost, they’d been playing very badly.  I was surprised by how I felt the next day: exactly the way I felt after being laid off. I am horribly familiar with that feeling.  It gave me some insight into the psychology behind that.  There was no financial loss to me, if anything, it saves me money and frees up time to do more lucrative things.  But the sudden halt to my little schedule, the sudden lack of somewhere to be by a certain time, this felt like running head first into a wall.

A week or so ago, as I walked up the road after checking some horses in a distant pasture, my legs felt heavy, I thought I should go take a nap.  It was only 11am.  I recognized that I had been sleeping a lot, a whole big lot more than I needed to to catch up from whatever moderate frenetic schedule I’d been keeping through playoffs.  That was when I realized this was depression.  Depression, like being laid off, is something I am very familiar with.  I realized I’d spent a couple of weeks without putting on makeup.  I’d been wearing sweats all day, not needing to worry what I put on, my only work communication being done online.  I didn’t know where my travel mugs were, or what state my thermos was in.  I didn’t care that my car was almost out of gas.  I didn’t even know where my small laptop was.  I’d completely fallen apart.

So I took a nap.  A couple of days later I started making plans to go into San Francisco for meetings I didn’t really need to do face to face, just to keep in the habit of getting dressed, though makeup is too much to ask yet.  That, and untangling horse tails and making myself get out and move my legs for no reason but to move.  I think this is progress.

I still don’t understand why or where I need to get in, but I sense I need some solid connection to something, even if it is only tangential to my objective, which is writing.  Maybe I’m just sick and tired of trying to do things alone.  Maybe I just need some damn company.  Writing is a very solitary activity, maybe it has just gotten to me.  So why not go find some nice secure, job, related to nothing of interest to me, aside from the getting of money and having some people around?

That still makes me want a nap, even after so many years of not having a job like that.  Is this a temper tantrum, like sitting on the floor crying because I have lost my ticket?  I am not allowed, I will be kept out, even if I believe, in theory, with perfectly good logical evidence, that I should be in, not out.  It doesn’t matter what you believe, if you don’t have a ticket to punch.

Tears come more often from anger and frustration than sorrow, unless you live in a place full of sorrow, which I do not.  So clearly I am angry about something, I should perhaps address that first.   I wanted to name a blog “PABSt” for “Passive Aggressive Blue Stocking.”  I am probably on to something there.  I might not be the most extreme example of passive aggressive behavior, but there’s a touch of it, and a lingering sense that the blue stocking approach is valid (which it really isn’t anymore) only reinforces that unhelpful tendency.

So, I will seek out the object of my anger, transfer it out of myself into some other person, and befriend it.  Like Emma does with people she doesn’t want anyone to know she doesn’t like.   Just like an enemy,  to make it your friend is to defeat it.

Before: this coat has a problem. This is what it looked like after being washed.

Your horse may be old, he may suffer from Cushing’s disease (ask your vet if your horse needs to be tested), you may just have a hairy horse.  But when it’s May 1 and all the other horses around are sleek and shiny looking and yours still looks like something from the set of 10,000 BC, you should probably body-clip him.  I’m saying “him” because the horse I clipped today is a gelding.  You don’t need to do it because other people and horses will judge you or your horse.  You need to do it because your horse is sweltering day after day. You don’t care how he looks, you just don’t want him to suffer.

Maybe you are working your horse in the winter, in which case you may be preparing to show or do something else where other people do see your horse and judge you by his appearance.  If this is the case, you should just pay a professional groom to do it.  It takes a lot of time, equipment and skill to do it so your horse to looks good.  It is probably worth paying someone else to do that if you don’t know how, which you don’t if you are unprepared.  Don’t make the mistake of thinking it will grow out by show season.  A bad clip job will last all year.

This horse is a couple years older than the first horse. This photo was taken on the same day, in case it wasn't clear that the first horse needs to be clipped.

How you can get prepared:

• Buy several sets of clippers, at least two, preferably the same type and size.
• Buy multiple sets of blades for each clipper, of the same size (You don’t want to switch between #10 blades and surgical #40s. That will make some crazy uneven lines and encourage you to make too many passes, which will make you and your horse grumpy and also irritate your horse’s skin.)
• Wash your horse thoroughly and let him dry
• Give your horse a light dose of bute
• Schedule a few hours for the clipping alone
• Have a brush handy
• Get a bucket and some of my Secret Special Blade Coolant Formula
• Do the clipping somewhere with a lot of natural light
• Clip a whole big bunch of horses to develop some skill.

Body-clippers, what I call sheep shears, blades about 3"-3.5" wide. I think.

Can’t do all that?  Accept that your horse will probably look pretty awful when you are done, though he will look better than he did in the 10,000 BC costume.  Also, he will be a lot more comfortable.

Get a body brush, a bucket, clipper lube (did you know WD40 is non-toxic?), a fresh set of blades (#10s are best, you’re not shaving him for surgery, just giving him a hair cut), and clippers.  Try not to work in the dark.

You should have big old electric sheep-shear type clippers but any will do.  If you use little face clippers, you probably cannot get by with only one set of blades.  They will go dull half way through the job, and all blades will get dull faster clipping dirty hair.  No matter how unprepared you are prepared to be, don’t even start without new blades or freshly sharpened ones.  There is just no point.

If you can wash him, great.  It may be too cold to wash your buffalo-haired horse.  You can brush him like crazy.  Better to clip him dirty dry than wet, so choose beforehand.

Decide before you start if you want a saddle pad.  If you are riding your horse, you should leave one, or wait a couple of days after clipping to ride.  It’s the kind thing to do.  Visualize it, draw it with chalk, whatever.  Make it large enough to protect the horse’s skin from the saddle, but small enough to hide the jagged uneven edges under your saddle blanket.

Long before you’ve finished, you will want to get my Secret Special Blade Coolant Formula, but you can pick it up whenever you get tired of sitting around waiting for your blades to cool.  It is that widely available.   Details to follow.

Spray some lubricant on the blades before you start.

Presumably, by the time your horse is old enough to be getting hairy like this, and if you care enough to go through this, your horse is used to clippers.  Any horse who is used to having his face and legs and ears clipped will not freak out about you clipping his belly, sides, back, chest, or neck.  Many mares are a little fussy about the udder and flank region.  Be prepared for some squealing there.

If your horse is only used to those nice silent-running clippers, the big old shears may startle him, since they sound a little like a lawn-mower.  Give him time.  Start with his itchy butt, or his itchy chest.  The fact that he has been sweating for days under all this hair can be used to your advantage.  He is itchy.  He will enjoy this full-body scratch once he gets over the noise.

On the other hand, rain rot loves long hair, so your horse may be very sensitive along his back and spine.  You should consider leaving that hair on the horse for now.  You can buy and use all kinds of products to cure rain rot, or you can just brush it daily, as vigorously as the horse will permit.  Don’t have a brush handy?  Gently pull off the loose hair and give the affected area a good scratch with your fingers.  Maybe I use the products wrong but I’ve never found that any of them work faster than brushing and scratching.  In case you are wondering, I don’t believe I have ever contracted rain rot by doing this.

Face/leg trimmers, blades about 2"-2.5" wide. I think. I don't keep a ruler around because I'm not a prepared sort of person.

Your clippers are designed more for your comfort than your horse’s.  That is, the handle will not heat up half so fast as the blades.  Touch your blades every minute or so to make sure you aren’t burning your horse.  Hot blades absolutely can burn a horse’s skin.  Most horses will let you know it’s hurting but you should not wait for the horse to start fussing and trying to get away from you.  That is cruel.

When the blades get hot, stop, turn off the clippers, swap blades, cool them, or wait for them to cool.  While you are waiting, before you add oil or use coolant, brush any visible loose hair out of the clippers.

For the fastest cooling, dip them in my Secret Special Blade Coolant Formula for about ten seconds.  If you are impatient and don’t want to take the blades off, dipping the blade end of the clippers into the coolant should not harm them if you spray oil on them right after shaking them dry.  They should be cool to the touch before you start again.

Turn them off before cooling them or you will make a big mess and possibly electrocute yourself.  Also, they are hot from running, they will cool faster turned off.

How do you know if your blades are hot?  Put your fingers or palm against them and ask yourself: “would I like to press this against my bare ass?”  No?  They are too hot.  (If you like that kind of thing, try to imagine you don’t.)

Speaking of delicate parts, if you are a woman, take your bra off before you start and remove it from the clipping theater.  Otherwise, be prepared to toss the bra afterwards.  It will never be the same and you don’t want horse stubble making your boobs itch weeks from now.

The clippers should almost always be nearly parallel to the horse’s body, not poking the tips of the blades into him, but not completely flat against him either.  Clip against the growth, just like you shave your legs or face.  You will discover that your horse’s coat grows in a swirling sea of not-straight lines as you get to different parts of his body.  Take a moment to marvel at this and keep trying a new direction until you get an even clip.

How close should you clip him?  I usually leave about 1/2″ of hair, one solid pass of the #10 blades.  You don’t want a naked horse.

You will also discover that your horse’s skin is taught in some places, all slack and prone to wrinkle in others.  Be careful around the points of the hips and the stifles.  There is almost no protective fatty padding there and your clipper blades are very hard.

No matter what part you are clipping, be patient, touch gently, as you should do all things with your horse.  Slide the blades across the horse’s skin without pushing hard.  Test different amounts of pressure (though you should never be making a dent in your horse) to find the ideal pressure.  The ideal amount of pressure will allow the blades to slide fast and smooth, dropping satisfying chunks of hair to the ground.  When you get to his back and gravity doesn’t clear the hair for you, take a break and brush him off.

Sample saddle-pad clip. Good luck doing that, but you get the idea.

If clipping the hair isn’t almost as easy as waving the clippers across your horse, you’re doing it wrong.  If you are pulling on the hair, your blades could be dull.  Stop.

Let me rephrase that last part, it’s important: do not force the blades through the hair.  If it is hard to slide the blade flat through the coat, you should slow down or speed up, adjust your angle,  cool the blades, lubricate the blades, or consider that the blades may be dull.  If you find that the blades are dull, I have good news for you: you’re done for the day unless you have another set of blades.

I begin with the belly because the belly is the biggest pain for you and your horse.  Your older horse’s skin has gotten looser than you ever noticed, it wrinkles up if you don’t keep the blades flat to the skin.  Gently pull the skin flat ahead of the blades if necessary.

Doing the belly will wear you out with all the bending over and working upside down, so that’s a good reason to get it out of the way.  Also, the hair blows in your face while you are leaning over, or kneeling (you better have a very well-behaved horse for that).  Don’t wait too long to wash the hair out of your face.  It is very bad to have horse hair in your eyes.

Incredibly, my Secret Special Blade Coolant Formula can also be used for that.  You will want a separate supply for washing your blades and washing your eyes, but it is so reasonably priced that you will have plenty on hand.

If you do sort of care what the horse looks like, leave the belly for later when you and your blades are less fresh.  Do the sides, butt and neck first since they are the most visible.  If you care what he looks like, that is.

You may want to trim of the longest hairs in areas you will not really clip, like the back of the upper legs.  No need to leave him looking like he’s wearing chaps with fringe.  Your clippers should be sharp enough to do this without touching the horse’s skin, and it is a good way to test the blade sharpness as you go.

The neck can be difficult if your horse keeps turning around to see what you’re doing, because this wrinkles even the tautest skin.  Wait for him to look away or gently turn his head away with your free hand.  If you have help, you can ask your helper to turn his head away for you, though feeding him treats will cause inconvenient movement.  As always, patience is key.  Do it right or wrong, it’s going to take a long time, might as well have everyone happy.  Give him carrots after you’re done with his neck if he needs carrots.

Since you don’t care what the horse looks like, don’t spend too much time going over the same spot trying to get it perfect.  No matter how perfect the clip looks now, all kinds of track marks will show up tomorrow, so try to limit yourself to one pass per spot on the horse.  This will save time, blade sharpness and skin irritation.

Oh, the skin irritation: body clipping will cause it.  Some horses develop hives or welts, some hardly notice and just get a little dandruff later.   Horses are not meant to be body-clipped, they evolved with that hair coat for a reason.  Some people use hot oil (the moderately warm hair conditioner, not the scalding medieval weapon) over the clipped area, after the clipping is finished.  Others use a small dose of bute before or after, others just move really fast and hope for the best.  If your horse is already on some kind of anti-inflamatory, yay! You’ve got that covered, you don’t need to add more.  Using all of the above is not contraindicated, except the scalding castle defense oil, obviously.  Do not put that on your horse.

Don’t bother with the horse’s legs and face.  Those you can do tomorrow or never, but you should do them with smaller face and leg clippers and be prepared to take time on it.  Once you have removed the hair over the horse’s body, what is left on the face and legs will not make him overheat, and it will protect him from insects and brush.  This is good news of course, since clipping face and legs takes longer than the body and you won’t feel like doing it anyway.

Ironically, the longer you spend on the job, the more time you take doing a pretty job, the more likely it is that the horse will get skin irritation.  So if your goal is the horse’s comfort, letting him look bad is better.   This will be very reassuring as you go along, getting hair in your eyes and inside your clothes and in your mouth.    By the time you notice it has gotten inside your pants and underwear, you will, if you are doing it right, be nearly done.  Of course by “right” I mean quick and dirty, with no care to anything except not hurting your horse.

You may wonder if you need to bathe the horse after you clip him, since he is now covered in a thin layer of clipper lubricant.  I haven’t had any horses react to WD40, but as soon as I say that some horse will break out in hives because she is covered in WD40.  She is probably a grey mare.  I had one horse react to the mineral oil that wound up in her tail after she was treated for colic.  She wasn’t even grey.  The result was a fan of hives all around her flank and rump where she swished the oily tail at flies.  I cannot make this call for you.  Hopefully you know if your horse has sensitive skin.

Here is my Secret Special Blade Coolant Formula: get a bucket, use a faucet or hose to fill it about half way with water.  Hold your finger in it for about 20 seconds to make sure the water is very cool.  The more water you use, the longer it will stay cool.  Follow above use instructions.  In case you missed that, yes, my Secret Special Blade Coolant Formula is water.

Tell your clipper manufacturer you are doing this and they will have a shit fit because they all sell some kind of fancy shmancy super special coolant designed not to corrode your blades.  Maybe that is true, but my blades have always lasted long enough to be sharpened again several times and I have clippers over 30 years old that still work.  So maybe those coolants are better but I have never found that they work half so well, or cost so little.

After 45 minutes: I used one set of new blades and clippers, on a bathed, dry horse. It could not have been done without my Secret Special Blade Coolant Formula. He's not shiny because I shaved him down to the skin- I didn't. He's shiny from the WD40.

This morning I heard Robert Sapolski on NPR talking about stress in primates.  He had been studying a group of baboons in the wild and he mentioned the following observations/conclusions:

• Baboon females inherit their mother’s status and do not change groups
• Baboon males establish their own place in the hierarchy and change groups as a matter of course during young adulthood.
• Low-ranking primates suffer from stress-related health problems because they are smarter than less intelligent or imaginative animals, which means 1) the dominant primates can relieve their stress by abusing the weaker ones, and 2) all primates can stress themselves out by thinking.
• Zebras don’t suffer from stress in the same way because they only experience stress when physically threatened, not chronically due to social or non-immediate stresses.

He had me until he blurted out that zebras don’t get ulcers.  He had been talking about how primates, if they have enough time on their hands, will torment individuals of lower status, which he called “giving ulcers” to the weaker animal.  So I don’t think he really meant zebras don’t get ulcers, which is untrue but not where the hole in his argument is.

I know for a fact that horses suffer social stress, either from isolation as they experience living in a barn without other horses in sight, or from being the whipping boy (or girl) in the herd.  Maybe prey animals don’t do this as much (pick on the weak) in the wild because they really don’t have time for it- they have to remain ever-vigilant or something will come eat them.

In the security of domesticity, however, you see it all the time.  You also see it a lot among females.  Mares do inherit status from their mothers but they can overcome or underachieve so they do not hold the place they were born into.

Sub-dominant horses not only get ulcers but they fail to thrive as the dominant ones do, they get sick more, they show all the signs of stress that people or, I guess, those baboons do.

I would hazard a guess that primates kill for fun where prey animals do not, not because killing for fun is what smart kids do.  I believe there is a whole field of study on the purpose of play.  Animals do nothing, not even play without a purpose.  Prey animals don’t need to practice or play at killing, because it isn’t something they need to know.  Predators do.  So the difference between picking on someone and killing someone is moot.

My point isn’t that this guy should care what horses do.  He’s studying baboons.  But he clearly draws a connection between stress outside immediate physical trauma and intelligence.  “Dumb” animals don’t feel it, is his argument.  So it doesn’t matter what dumb animals do if we are really trying to learn about humans.

Physiologically he is right- our bodies probably respond more like baboons than like horses or zebras. (Though humans and horses do use the same ulcer meds.)  By studying primates and humans in a comparative vacuum, the conclusions can be dangerous and, quite simply, wrong.

So if he’s wrong there, if you don’t have to be all that smart to experience lifestyle and social stress, doesn’t that hurt his overarching theory?

His theory may be sound, that the smarter you are the more you worry and stress about non-immediate or non-existent problems, but this idea that bullying and suffering from chronic stress is something only higher mammals experience is very dangerous.  It lends support to the theory that the darker side of human behavior is not only innate but also somehow elevated for being something only smart things do.

My simplistic response is: nuh-uh.  Even the most stupid of mammals pick on each other and get sick from worrying and not feeling safe in their community.  There is nothing intelligent about it.  That’s why, despite studies like this, smart people know that bullies are morons and violent acts are mostly done by stupid people.

As humans, shouldn’t we be more proud of our ability to truly choose which animal instinct we give into?  Sure, we can be as amoral as monkeys, but we don’t have to be.

Oh look!  An article about that!

In a weak sense, we humans do have some tendencies inherited from our prehistoric past. For many of us it can be harder to feel empathy and extend compassion beyond our closest social networks, out toward people we may judge as different from us. Primatologist Frans de Waal made this point at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Vancouver earlier this week, linking it to our evolutionary heritage of “in” group versus “out” group behavior.

But de Waal is emphatically not suggesting a hard-wired human nature. And I would assert that there is no set-in-stone human nature. -Barbara King, NPR

Here’s a quote from the article linked in that quote:

Biological research increasingly debunks the view of humanity as competitive, aggressive and brutish, a leading specialist in primate behavior told a major science conference….

New research on higher animals from primates and elephants to mice shows there is a biological basis for behavior such as cooperation, said de Waal, author of “The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society.” -de Waal: Humans are not naturally “nasty”

I feel so much better now.

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.