Let's Reminisce

If you are fortunate enough to be blessed with a dog, or perhaps even twice blessed with two, then you know the axiom, "Let sleeping dogs lie," isn't just something clever to say.

It's not even that clever.

A sleeping dog is a beautiful, taciturn thing. Well, okay-- sometimes it can be a grotesque thing, I'll admit. When Finley sleeps, all 68 pounds of him, he thrashes and twitches and snores with all of the feverish intensity of a gored ox. He looks quite epileptic, as all of his limbs erratically jut about, and it seems improbable that he's enjoying any peace at all. Of course, the optimist might say that he's dreaming about himself as a puppy, twelve or thirteen years ago, gallivanting about and racing through the imagined fields of his youth, with unbridled exuberance and glee.

Oh, my darling. Oh, my pet.

Molly asleep is a thing of beauty. Of course, she's pretty stunning when awake, if you don't mind me fawning and falling all over my own dog, but asleep she is magic. When she curls up onto your lap or falls asleep on your chest, there is just nothing in the world like it. The moments before she falls asleep are edible. She will brace herself up on my chest with her forepaw and stare into my eyes, struggling to keep her little head up, as if to say, "Why? Why are we not in bed yet? I... I don't understand." And her eyes will close of their own volition, slowly, and the head will droop, and that'll be that. Her breath makes a gentle whooshing noise, soft and warm, and she's quite gone.

But, life goes on around her. The dryer buzzes and demands attention, we have to get up from the couch to make lunches for tomorrow, the remote slides out from under the blanket and falls onto the hardwood floor, and the beige head and the gray head jerk up. Canine slumber is disturbed. And it's our own little domestic tragedy.

As a general rule, I try to let sleeping dogs lie in my own personal life, too. If there is a situation from the past that caused me grief or pain, I try my best to let it go, to not hold onto anger or sadness over things that happened that I cannot change. I try not to seek people out from the annals of my own personal history and pick up old fights or rehash careworn arguments. Likewise, I'm not someone who especially likes to engage in the nostalgia effect, either. Recently, my wife found a bunch of quite-forgotten about photographs (you know, actual ones-- like, that were developed in a drug store) of she and I when our relationship was younger than it is now.

"These will make you pretty schmoopie," she said, offering me the packet.

"But, I'm already schmoopie," I replied, looking deeply into her eyes.

I don't know what it is, but I just don't want to go there. And so I didn't. I didn't look. The packet of photos sits on top of a green filing cabinet in our office, leaning up against a sewing kit my mother bought Mrs. Apron for her birthday a year or so ago. I guess I just like to let sleeping dogs lie, even if they're nice dogs. Good dogs.

Stay.

I wasn't always this way, of course.

"Mommy," I used to say, "let's reminisce about when I was a boy."

I couldn't have been more than ten or eleven when I would make this request. And my mother would dutifully pull out the photo album that held the images of a long-ago time when a small boy with a large head absolutely covered with long, fine strands of light brown, almost reddish hair could wear a luridly-hued striped shirt beneath Osh-Kosh overalls-- with bell-bottoms.

And my mother and I would leaf through these pages together, in her bed or on the living room sofa.

Me as a doctor for Halloween-- 1986. My father had carefully applied a felt red cross to the breast pocket of a white button down shirt of mine. I wore a brown clip-on necktie, green pants, and in my hand I clutched a plastic, tan briefcase used to house colored markers. A large red cross, also in felt, was emblazoned upon the briefcase. I looked at the camera with a gaze of utter seriousness, as if I were about to perform a craniotomy on one of my stuffed penguins.

My birthday, 1987. I had just opened a package that contained a beautiful white teddy bear, dressed in a black vest and topped with a black bowler hat. I named him "Oliver," after Oliver Hardy. Of course.

There are others, yeah, just like there are in the albums of your past. I could go on, but I kind of like to let sleeping dogs lie.

As I blogged about a little while ago, last month I capitulated and joined modern society and bought myself a new BlackBerry Curve, letting AT&T put a choke-chain on my soul for another two years. It's not that bad and, sometimes, when they tug on it in just the right way, it feels kinda good. The phone plays the theme from "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" when people call, it shows pictures of my family and my friends when they call, it browses the internet with startling speed and efficiency, it keeps my text conversations in that charming little bubble format, and it sends my Gmails, my Yahoos, and my texts and my Facebook updates right to my pocket where, evidently, they all belong.

In short, in matters vegetable, animal and mineral, my phone does everything I want it to do.

It also does something I don't want it to do.

Every now and then, the phone will blip, indicating that I have an email from my Yahoo account. And I'll look.

Sender: Dave B.

The first time it happened, my heart absolutely stopped. It was as if a voice were calling to me from the dead. Not dead, of course. Just from long ago and far away. My former best friend, who stopped speaking to me-- what is it-- almost three years ago now? It's hard to remember.

And I mean that.

I was utterly confused and frightened and sad-- why could he be contacting me all of a sudden? What did he want from me? Why is it that when I'm about ready to put him behind me this stupid motherfucking piece of fake chrome and plastic boops to announce his return? And then I looked closer.

Send Date: April 22, 2006

In the past month, three old emails from Dave have popped up on my phone, all from 2006-- maybe the height of the powerful friendship we shared together for so many years. One email, also from 2006, popped up just a couple days ago-- from the florist we hired to create the flowers for our wedding. And, as touching a memory as reading that one way, I deleted all four emails, because, sometimes, this dog just wants to sleep.

The Imagination of Children

Terry Gilliam has a new film that's coming out soon, and that's almost always a good thing.

He was interviewed recently about the movie, and was asked about why his films tend to perplex movie critics. Rather than saying, "Well, I suppose my films must be very perplexing to people who aren't very bright," like I would have said, he instead answered thoughtfully and eloquently,

"Over the years they want their films to be neatly packaged with a nice narrative that tells you exactly where it's going all the time.

I fight that, because I suppose I'm still trying to make movies for myself when I was a kid and I was constantly surprised by what was going to happen next. People would then say, 'Oh, it's incomprehensible.'

It's only because they don't have the imagination of children anymore."

The imagination of children.

If I were Christian, on this Christmas Eve, you can bet that's what I'd be asking Santa for. Put it under my tree or in my stocking or in my pocket-- slip it into my right ear canal while I'm sleeping, curled up against my wife, holding onto her for dear life.

When I look at all of the accoutremonts that we "adults" feel that we "need" in order to be entertained-- I seriously want to stick my head in the sand and vomit continuously for ten or twenty minutes. What happens to us? What becomes of that innate ability to fantasize and create something magical from pipe cleaners or Lincoln Logs? Scissors and paper.

What happened?

When you get older, you get to call yourself "creative" if you can write a monologue or paint a picture of seagulls or fiddle-dee-dee on the violin at a pub's open mic night. But is the "art" that we sophisticates create-- the Herman Miller aeron chairs and Afro-Hebrew fusion music-- just piss-poor substitutes for the otherworldly, unobtainable, and unfathomable creativity that spawns effortlessly from the brain of a child?

Were our best, most expressive and creative days spent toppling over in the grass wearing lurid striped shirts underneath corduroy Osh-Kosh overalls?

I get very hot under the collar when I listen to interviews or read biographies of artists or musicians who state that they are at the absolute apex of their creativity when they're stoned off their porch on mushrooms or irradiated Kool Aid or Nixon-era Velveeta that's been left out in the sun. Is that what creativity is, I wonder to myself, you hitting the sauce and seeing what kind of mind-drippings you manage to plop onto a page or into a microphone?

And then I think to myself-- maybe they're trying to reach back into something long forgotten, long, long ago. Maybe these people are trying to get back to their childhood brains, to see what shards of their former, more "free and unfettered" minds they can retain or reawaken.

I don't know. Maybe my blog would become revolutionized if I blogged while shitfaced. But I doubt it.

People who have reached the point in their lives where they're referring to themselves as grown ups often bemoan certain admittedly regrettable aspectsof becoming a grown-up. Yes, there are bills to pay-- easily the number one complaint of twentysomethings. Yes, there is the curse of greater social awareness that comes from exiting the college bubble and realizing that there are actually bigger problems in the world than your meal card being depleted or being closed out of "Theoretical Analyis of Oral Sex in Non-Western Civilization." Yes, you have to watch your parents age and forget where they put things. Yes, you have to deal with them constantly asking if you're seeing anybody, getting married, having a kid, having more kids, are getting a better job, moving into a better neighborhood, have a 401-K. These things, somehow, they never forget.

But the single most lamentable fact of growing older is that your imagination, no matter how "creative" you consider yourself, how many pithy Facebook status updates you can come up with in an hour, how good a blogger you think you are, how earth-shattering your thesis on Andy Warhol is, you'll never be a fraction of the engaging, inspiring, wonder-struck being you were when you were a child.

Back in the Osh-Kosh days.

I once read a blog somewhere, I don't remember-- maybe you wrote it, and it was a letter from the blogger to its child version. I wouldn't bother writing my child version a letter, because he wouldn't be able to read it, even though he was pretty precocious, and he wouldn't sit still long enough for me to read it to him.

It would be very long: trust me.

He'd be far too busy for me anyway. I wouldn't know what to do with him. No, I wouldn't write him a letter, but I would just kind of like to hang around him, for a while, and watch. I'd like to watch him, and I'd be invisible if it would be too creepy, if that would make it okay.

I'd love to watch him practice his funny faces in the mirror, and practice his prat-falls in the doorway. I'd love to watch the 6-year-old me fantasizing and preparing to grow up and be Peter Sellers.

I'd love to watch him in his sport coat and tie, sitting at his 1970s-era metal desk, hunched over a pile of haphazard papers, reciting invented, whining monologues about airplane travel and the cost of coffee, fantasizing and preparing togrow up and be Andy Rooney.

I'd love to watch him memorizing the New York City Police Department radio's 10-codes and practicing arrest and search procedures on his stuffed animals, fantasizing and preparing to grow up and be a police officer.

I'd love to watch him sitting on the floor in his sweatsuits and socks, chatting with truckers on his CB radio.

I'd love to watch him drawing rudimentary and strange comic books about a balding businessman whose dog talks and whose car is constantly in for service.

I'd love to watch him dressed in truly bizaree costumes, rehearsing "Monty Python" inspired sketches-- being filmed by his father as he paraded around the neighborhood dressed as an elderly woman, a police constable riding a girl's bicycle, a Christmas caroler, a grapefruit tester, and a nun.

I'd love to watch him test out new vocabulary words on unsuspecting mothers in the supermarket, and his own mother-- everywhere.

I'd love to watch him.

If, of course, I could stand it.