Some of you peeps might have noticed that things have been a bit quiet around here lately, but I can assure you that the only “quiet” things going on behind this keyboard and mouse (and my microphone and headphones) occur between 11:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m…. Trust me on this.
About a month ago, I decided to proceed with a project that had been in the back of my mind for a while. My last piece here, the one about Happy-ness, was published on July 3rd. Two days later, I published the Introduction to a new series I have titled “Human Sense” over at my Politics, Society, and Culture Newsletter, Essential American Wisdom, and my nose has been a foot away from my computer screen ever since, except for eating and sleeping and bathing… And contending with my life coach – Miss Alice – as she has bitched and barked and head-butted me, using her snout to bounce the headphones off my ears until I stop everything I’m doing and give her some hugs and kisses and cuddles and extended outside time.
There is an old expression that some of you might have heard before: ” Opening your kimono,” which basically means sharing a piece of personal information publicly that not many people know about(get your heads out of the gutter, people). In order to”get” the inside joke on this entry, I’ll share it here for purely entertainment value.
All my life, I’ve had this particularly annoying trait where, if I am completely engaged in something I’m doing, I have the ability to completely shut out the entire world around me so intensely that, if my house was on fire or the apocalypse was going on outside my window, I would have no clue it was even happening. Apparently, there have been quite a few studies, and allegedly, it’s a”guy thing,” although I have known plenty of women in my life who are equally intensely tuned in to what they’re doing with no clue what’s going on in the world around them at any given time… So there’s that.
I can tell you that it drove both of my Ex-Wives batshit crazy, so much so that I spent quite a few years convinced that my name was not David but “Goddammit David” before I would hit the “off” switch and go back to what I was doing. Funny thingis, since my medical issues back in’14, it is far far worse; my occipital lobe, parietal lobe, and temporal lobe (now almost unidentifiable in an MRI) have even fewer interruptions to what little trains of thought I can carry anymore. But as wonderful as this might sound to writers begging and pleading for silence, peace and quiet, and no interruptions… Well… My newfound enhanced Spidey senses of laser focus abilities to concentrate came at the risk of what little short-term memory I had left that I had not killed in my alcohol and drug-addled brain of the ’70s & a bit of the ’80s… I have to ask Alexa what the date is, and don’t even bother asking me what I had for lunch yesterday.
For those of you who have not seen the bottom of my signature in my emails, I included a quote that Daisy inspired many years ago: “If your dog hasn’t taught you things about yourself you never realized, you aren’t paying close enough attention to what she’s trying to tell you.” If there is such a thing as canine reincarnation(a Dog’s Purpose, anyone?), or even pieces of every soul being returned to the cosmos only to come back, a little bit, in a subsequent life… I couldn’t be more sure that there is a little bit of Daisy in Miss Alice.
She won’t let me out of her sight, has to lay on me whenever I sit still long enough, and howls and cries even the few minutes I have to go downstairs to grab Emma for the morning drop-off and bring her back upstairs so they can get busy destroying my house some more. I love these dogs with every fiber of my being, but they will simply have no part of me spending more than 20 minutes at a time trying to create content. Of course, I wouldn’t have any of this any other way, but once one of them has knocked my headphones off of my head and I have to gather them up and get dragged around in the backyard while they wrestle and play, I have not the first clue what the fuck I had just learned after some research that I wanted to articulate in a properly structured sentence or paragraph.
In the morning, over coffee out at the veranda where we discuss the day ahead, she reminds me that she understands how important this work is to me but that I need to remember how important we are to each other, how much neither one of us wants to be out of the other’s sight, and that sometimes regular planned brief times away from the work more often than not improves the quality of the work that much more and makes the finished product that much more personally rewarding and satisfying. I mean… How do you argue with that? Best life coach ever!
I have long ago accepted that my dog is smarter than me, and I thank the stars above every day that she doesn’t have thumps because, if she did, I’d be the one begging her for computer time to work on my projects rather than her telling me she’s got to catch up on her Alice Diaries before I’ll even get a whisper of a chance at that keyboard and mouse.
