Dogs. I’m drowning in dogs. Dogs dogs dogs. No: it’s a good thing, of course. Today was a busy one with one dog house sit ending and another one beginning, plus three dog walks. Walking dogs is an interesting job. It’s strange: for a decade, up until 2020, I was a full-time freelance book editor. Then Covid hits and everyone’s budgets nix editing. (Completely understandable yet unfortunate for me.) And then suddenly here I am, almost forty, walking dogs like a crazy man.
Dog-walking is a funny thing: It’s both a hard and an easy job. Of course it’s genuinely lovely to walk dogs all day, under the dome of perfect Santa Barbara sky, near the ocean often, etc. No soul-crushing office job. No irate, asshole boss telling me what to do. It smacks of something like freedom. Control. Ease.
And yet it can also be hard. First there’s the constant driving, all over the city from one house to the next. Plus if you house-sit you have to lug all your stuff around. Parking can be annoying. Traffic can get in the way. Gas money spent. But then there’s the actual walking part, which, don’t get me wrong, is mostly awesome. But it’s also tiring. I often log 5, 8 miles in a day. In the heat and throbbing sun.
Most of my dogs are beasts—I’ve become known as a Big Dog walker. I have a 155-pound Great Dane (see photo). A St. Bernard/Mastiff mix. Another English Mastiff. And in addition they’re mostly loving but fairly aggressive dogs. (That’s why they pick me, the thick tattooed guy versus the more ubiquitous 20-year-old woman.) So when other dogs pass I have to distract mine, or move off the trail/path/road. Or hold really tight and hope for the best.
My point: it’s not all fun and games, sunflowers and rainbows. But still. Who am I kidding? It’s a good job. And I have a lot of work coming in. Dogs calm me. They soothe me. They run up against my fear and anxiety in a healthy way. They’re superhuman. It’s as if they’re beings from another galaxy, here to tell mankind to relax and stop overthinking everything. Just be here NOW, dogs say. Let go. Accept. They bring me back to myself. Remind me why I’m here. To write; to express. To help. To survive. To love.
My dad. The oral chemo finally arrived by rushed overnight mail. Thank God. He threw up at dinner the first night but he’s better now. We have another brain MRI on 12/27 to see what the tumor there is doing. Overall he seems to be in more or less good spirits. A friend of mine sang in a beautiful choir at a church which I attended yesterday. It was fantastic. In the middle of it something deep inside me stirred and I felt emotional. I was thinking of my father. I saw him in my mind’s eye—frail, red-faced, hunched, close to death. I gulped back a tightness in my throat. The music was so breathtaking; enthralling; it swallowed you up in its musical arms. It carried me away. To a post-Dad existence. Not tomorrow. Not in a month, probably. But not far away. We all must walk through that magic mirror called Death. From which there is positively no return. Dust to dust, right?
It’s probably not a coincidence that writing and dogs have come so fiercely to the forefront of my life over the past two years. A time of transition; a time of change; a period of one door closing (my father’s sickness; turning forty) and a new one opening (being in love again; leaving Manhattan).
All my life I’ve been chasing something. That thing has always been interior. All my life I’ve wanted to love someone with everything I’ve got. And to be loved in the same way. I’ve arrived at that point. With my thirties miraculously disappearing. Time sifting like sand through an hourglass. It’s limited, this life thing. Temporary. More fragile than we want to admit. Politics; polarization; media; Twitter: They’re all distractions.
What matters is this moment. What matters is appeasing your own sense of aliveness. For me it’s dogs, love, writing, reading, hiking, travel.
What makes you feel alive?
I feel alive when I see natural beauty in common things. The way the winter sky looks through bare trees. The light through ice on the pines that, at only one point in the day, breaks the spectrum and they turn into Christmas trees. A hawk in the wind. I like to think that for thousands of years people have found moments in noticing these things and maybe it’s just a memory of humanity I see. But it makes me alive in a way other things never will.