of barks and turds

Music: Martyn Bates & Troum: To A Child Dancing in the Wind (2006)

I had already given myself over to imperfection long ago, but walking into the house I knew the newly vacuumed carpet offered up a turd because of the slight waft of a certain, well-known olfactory signature. After a long day of engaging the collective mind (and after a happy hour in which a colleague at a different school exclaimed how she longed for that kind of engagement in her workplace), I opened the door to home longing for an impossible clean. It's the same longing that I prepare for when I travel, cleaning the house rigorously before I fly off, so that when I come home there is some semblance of the hotel I was in.

In the back of my mind I knew the sink over there, in the kitchen, was piled with dirty dishes, but I knew I couldn't see them unless I went left into the kitchen, and I could avoid that path and walk straight up to the bedroom on the right for a change of clothes. Between me and the comfort of pajamas, still, was evidence of my failure to potty train a creature a fraction of my weight (in pounds and bad ideas). A singular crescent of brown-dried excrement in an otherwise almost-magazine-worthy living space (the magazine would be an alternative rag, of course, not Elle Decour) would be a reminder, as all excreta are, of the necessity of tolerance, or responsibility. "I'll get it later," I thought to myself, as I tore off my bowtie and launched upstairs to escape the hidden but uncomfortable truth-fashion of swamp-butt.

(Swamp-butt is a local coinage for the damp trousers that are an inevitable consequence of the Texas climate in August and September. It's a kind of open secret that if you are living here you will sweat, and the sweat will be wicked, and that your wicking is probably on display but everyone pretends not to notice its sight or smell. Austin is a metaphor for sweat.)

Yes, there is a dog turd in the living room, but as any dog owner (or owned) person knows, poop comes with the territory; being the recipient of unconditional love has its price. And if I had a guest in my tow, this might be embarrassing, but dry and comfortable clothes take priority in the audience of the Self, tired and waiting it out for bed---because, really, who goes to bed by nine? (Oh, right: my mother). To coin a phrase: the turd, like heaven, can wait.

As it has for some hours, until I started thinking about allegories for a reluctant adulthood, and the memory I had repressed---that there was a turd in the living room---came to mind, and I started writing this. A confession: two paragraphs ago I secured a paper towel and removed and dispatched of this reminder of mortality [note: originally the word I wrote here was "morality," and there are no mistakes in the interior]. Now I sit on the patio, smoking "just a cigar," and the dog sits at my back on the bench. When we first met and I agreed to take him in, I would become enraged at the sight of his many "gifts," which he deposits sneakily, like some foul counter-Santa, but after some years I've developed a strange ambivalence, a strange ambivalence charitably read as tolerance, but perhaps better labeled as laziness. Sometimes---ok, many times---I reason that if I let the dejeta ripen, it will harden, and make it easier to remove.

But, he is a dog, after all. A dog that was abused in some former life; I've only been able fashion some glimmer of his former life (and we humans want our history). It involves, I think, life spent in a crate and a man who did unpleasant things with a belt. It's an educated guess (I've done pet rescue for almost a decade). When I pull out a belt in some disrobing ritual, he cowers. If only he could talk.

But he does not talk. He barks. Sometimes, he barks a lot (ergo, the nick-name, "Sir-Barks-A-Lot"). And as best as I can discern, these barks translate thusly: "Look at me! I can bark! And I can bark now without some man lashing me with a belt!"

Sometimes he will set off barking, and the barking begets the impulse to bark anon (and on and on), and we will be in the patio, and he will want to be let inside, and he will run laps around the living room barking at no thing in particular; he's just barking to bark, because he can, because the barks beget barks, because the barks almost seem to be in response to a previous bark, and because I'll let him, closing the door, thinking of the Rolling Stones (Get Yer Ya Yas Out). And wishing I could do that too.

It's the difference, really, between the Beatles and the Stones. One lives comfortably as the next-door neighbor. The other, in the street, loud and living and taking punk to the bank (or the cops). Love-ins? No. Stand-outs. Ruff ruff. Street shouting man. And all that jazz.

But what would the neighbors think? We share walls. I cannot bark. So, you know, I sing and whistle, musiking noise and crafting a melody.

An emerging scholar today spoke of interruption, that the subjectivity of the maternal was crafted by (or brought into being by) the impossible refusal of the parent who hears a cry. Levinas, presumably. (Not "the call," mind you, but "the cry," the hailing that demands an unthinking reply of recognition.) Phatic responsivity, if you will. The maternal cannot refuse the demand, when the maternal is located beyond the self-consciousness of volition, to some hard-wired place, presumably.

How frightening to think of Selfhood in such a way, and yet, how liberating and in some sense true. Barking to bark, for bark's sake. And then, of course, there's poop on the living room carpet. Excess, deposited. Deal with it. Deal it. Deal. That's what dogs do (in both senses). And that's what people do---at least, that's what they do when acting out in groups.

Of groups and poop: a certain willed blindness, for the intoxication of knowing what to do. A clean house bereft of the evidence of pets is a house that is not lived-in, only staged.

The garden out here droops as I contemplate sleeping and walking into a house that reminds me of struggle, and not only my own. As I picked up the poop I was reminded of my fortune, that the discomfort of my living is that of poop on a carpet, and that I'm not worrying about bombshells landing in the pepper plants. It is a luxury that worrying over a rescued dog is my chief discomfort. I guess that I'm grateful that I'm not in Syria.