Dog Walking

Or: Comments on Politics, Dogs, Love and Death

Photo by Sunita Sookdar on Unsplash

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Announcement: Today is 14 years sober. Fourteen years ago—9/24/2010—I quit the bottle. It’s been a wild ride since then. I am profoundly grateful. Here’s a piece on my story (CLICK HERE).

As usual: Consider going paid: $5/mo; $30/yr; $200/yr

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Well, here I am, dog-walking again, this time in Portland. I did this in 2021 and 2022, pre-Lompoc. (I got zero dog-walking requests or house sit requests there so I gave up after a few months in early 2023.)

It’s interesting, the phases I go through emotionally, mentally and spiritually from one chapter of my life to the next, or even from one chapter line-break or asterisk to the next, or perhaps even sometimes from one entire book to the next, or from nonfiction to a novel. (I mean this both literally and symbolically in my personal life.)

Right now I am sick to death of politics: Writing about it, discussing it, thinking about it. I just don’t care very much. It’s funny, isn’t it, how people get angry if you say that—indignant—and think you’re “supposed” to care, as if caring (aka, bitching with people in your preferred biased tribe) will somehow help your side in the election, will magically change anything in the real world. The fact is: This election is going to be profoundly close and it’s going to come down to a handful of battleground states, primarily Pennsylvania. It could be even a sliver that decides the winner, something like 50,000 votes or less. Nail-biting, isn’t it?

And yet Trump doesn’t terrify me like he did in 2016. Look. Guy is a sociopathic nutjob, a pathological liar (I mean WOW on the lying!) and a terrifying narcissist of the worst ilk. I don’t like him as a person or as a politician, and I certainly don’t want him as president again. That said: The uncomfortable truth is that he didn’t actually do very much at all. He spent a lot on his 2017 tax bill, cutting taxes for the middleclass but more so (and for longer) for the wealthy and corporations. He pushed us further into debt. But most of his presidency—if you can call it that—was dumb, boring bluster, the constant attempt to get the media to pay attention to him. (He won there; thank you MSNBC.)

Of course there was Jan 6, which was reprehensible (though frankly I don’t see how he could have planned or orchestrated that given his level of laziness, verbal vomit, randomness and incompetency), and then his worst moment, in my opinion, the Big Lie about the 2020 election being stolen. The man is clearly anti-democratic with a genuine strongman-leaning instinct. Again, I like none of this.

But I also don’t see him as a serious threat to democracy. He’s not a Democrat or a Republican; he’s a confused semi-psycho who stands for nothing but his own ego. That’s certainly not good, but it’s also 100% not Hitler, a dictator or the end of Democrazy. (Thank you Harris for pivoting away from this dead-horse message.) And, in the final analysis, I DO think our governmental and judicial institutions will hold…just like they did in 2020, and yes, even if he appoints all the scary loyalists. And no, I don’t think he’ll end democracy or the rule of law or anything else like that. He’s not evil; he’s opportunistic and half-crazy.

As I said in a previous post, though I have a lot of criticism of the radical left, and though I find Harris’s rise to power quite surreal, strange and sort of coerced by the Democratic Machine in a somewhat undemocratic way, and though she has flip-flopped more than a salmon freshly caught in the Willamette River (nice little Portland reference for ya), and though six weeks ago the vast majority of both Democrats and Republicans didn’t know, like or trust her…given Trump’s buffoonishness, lying and sociopathy, I’m voting for Harris.

In the end she may be incompetent—though in my view she deserves a genuine chance to see if she can work into the role—but she’s at least theoretically rational. And for the love of GOD and all things holy, she’s pivoting to the middle. At least with the messaging. A democrat FINALLY got the message that 75% of Americans have been screaming from the rooftops since 2020. Yes, there’s plenty to criticize with Harris, including her lack of concrete plans, her unpopularity, and her obsession with government fixes like price-fixing. Being more of a sort of Left-Libertarian myself, I see problems. But we’re up against Trump.

Anyway. Away from politics. I said I was sick of politics, and I am.

So here we are—Britney and I—in Portland, and I’m dog walking and house sitting. Right now I’m house sitting a lovely apartment right above the Willamette River. There’s a balcony overlooking the water. Glancing that way now, I see the calm, emerald-green water, thick green wilderness above, and it makes me happy. There’s a bike path outside by the parking lot, near the lobby. You have to put a code in to enter this place. Yesterday I walked the dog I’m house sitting for—a white, well-trained Pitbull rescue—a good long while along that bike path, my air pods blasting Thin Lizzy, my latest obsession, the album Bad Reputation, from 1977. I have decided that Thin Lizzy might be the best and most underrated rock band of all time. Irish dudes, lead by vocalist/bassist Phil Lynot, who died of a heroin overdose in his thirties. Sex, drugs and rock-n-roll, baby. I almost died a dozen times myself living a similar kind of fast life.

There’s something beautiful about walking dogs, about dog house sitting. It’s perfect for fiction writing, for one thing. Think about it. You enter into strangers’ apartments and homes, smell and hear and see their private lives, their photos, their paintings on the walls, their furniture choices, their pets’ behavior, etc. You can easily begin to imagine life as this person, as someone not yourself. What would it be like to live in this very apartment I’m in now? With a Pitbull rescue, right by the green river, along the bike path, surrounded by wilderness? Can I slip into the psychological skin of someone else? That’s what a fiction writer does, right?

Dogs, too, are simply comforting, especially the well-trained and, for me, the bigger ones. Smaller dogs can be a little much sometimes, with their yapping and hyperactivity. I prefer the big ones, but I love all dogs and in fact all animals. Something about their unconditional love, their total trust, their avid acceptance of you as their leader, their master, their owner. Don’t let that language fool you; for me it’s never been about control. Nor is it about the dog controlling me. It’s about doing a light, complex little dance between control and the opposite; making sure they get exercise on their walks but also allowing them some freedom to stop and smell the roses sometimes.

If only people could be more like dogs, right? Loving and easy and trusting and open. But we’re not. EYE certainly am not. People scare the crap out of me, honestly. (And I also love being around people, but in snips and snaps of time, and in small groups.) Our bigger, more evolved, more complex brains seem to be both our friends and our enemies. Our self-consciousness is helpful yet harmful. In order to psychologically survive most of us feel the necessity to wear social masks, and to flatly deny death as deeply and for as long as possible. Because we want to belong and be accepted by our peers, and because the concept of the total void of consciousness is in many ways simply too hard and tragic to comprehend. All we’ve ever known is consciousness, so how does one come to terms with the termination of everything we understand and are made of?

But dogs and cats, as far as we know, do not have this spiritual quagmire to wrestle with. They simply live, acting in the golden present, eating and pooping and peeing and copulating. And of course they require love, physical affection, exercise, etc. But they don’t sit there like Rodin, pondering the great, wild depths of humanity or doghood or cathood, wondering how technology, say, will change our lives forever within half a generation from now.

This I see as a positive trait. As humans become more and more complex, entangled with AI, and disassociated from each other in real life and live their lives online, we need sentient creatures who still love us for who and what we are here in the real world. Physical play, attention, exercise, love is crucial for our survival. At the rate we’ve been going as a civilization it seems that humans and robots will fulfil that terrifying “singularity” faster than most of us are anything like ready for it. So we need animals there along the way. (Of course there will be robotization here, too.)

My bigger point here is: Dogs, for me, provide a sort of temporary cure from that painful realism that is Our World, with all it’s obsession with money, its superficial judgments around material possessions and physical beauty, it’s neediness of external validation, its caring most about how “big” someone is online, how large your “platform” is, how many countries you’ve been to, how much you make at your job or have in your bank account, etc.

All of these things stem from our collective insecurity about the simple fact that we die. The one thing we want so desperately to control—death—is out of our grasp. And because of this we cannot face our true reality; instead we stubbornly look away, rejecting the void, and focusing on what is Here Now. We stay distracted, busy, focused on easy superficial conversations, drama, electronics, whatever we can use to numb out and not face the cold, black inevitable.

Funny, isn’t it? We say we want to live life to the fullest and yet by rejecting death we cannot ever truly fully live. How could we when we’re denying the very thing which gives life any meaning? Life possesses meaning precisely because it ends. It’s unstoppable, it’s coming; there’s nothing any of us can do to prevent it. Isn’t that terrifying? And yet, it doesn’t have to be. It can also be warm, forgiving and peaceful. It’s a total gift in many ways. Would you truly want to live forever? Would you want to live your whole life trapped in this non-stop thinking machine that forces you to open billions of mental drawers every year?

Not me. This is why I write, I suppose; writing allows me to express something less logical and more emotional, aka more spiritual which comes from deep within. I know little (some things) other than my own lived life experience, my own feelings and thoughts, my own terrors and fears, my own loves and hates, rejections and acceptances, my own acknowledgment of death.

Dogs are an antidote to death, at least symbolically. They want what they want and are not burdened in the way we are by reality. I feel this more, I am sure, than the average person. Too sensitive, too needy, too afraid to be always wholly “in reality,” which is why I escape into fiction and writing in general, or else my imagination or my thoughts, like rabbit holes into great open caves in the depths of my consciousness, hundreds of miles underground. Thing is: There is no cure for fate. And we all know our general fate: Neutralization; death; the termination of life; the ending of everything we know/love/understand.

I like walking into strangers’ homes. Living their lives in a brief sense. Sensing their distresses, their insecurities, their problems. Because we all have issues, boundaries, limits, walls, terrors which are insurmountable. I have mine. Others have theirs. I like meeting theirs, if only for a little while and semi-superficially. I like looking into a dog’s eyes and seeing the forgiveness I cannot get from humanity, or maybe even from myself. That unconditional offering is akin to Christ’s sacrifice for mankind 2,000 years ago. Dogs aren’t gods but they’re something holy. Ditto cats, especially our three cats, and especially especially my baby, Lucius, my 8-year-old Tuxedo cat. Animals, man.

Life isn’t all pain, that’s for sure. And I, like all of us, enjoy rejecting depth and death for medium-length stretches at a time. Right now we’re very busy dealing with two rental properties, having just moved out of state, having blinds put in, discussing our 2024 taxes and how to save money after having sold a house, getting to know a brand-new city, dealing with three needy cats, etc.

The emerald-green river water is shimmering now, moving a little with slight wind along the top. A mower is thrumming somewhere nearby, the lazy up and down drone of the engine percolating like mid-afternoon coffee. The dog I’m watching is relaxed, cool and calm in his crate.

Probably it’s time for his walk.