In Which Four Years

NOTE: Please excuse the exceptionally rambling nature of this post. I don't have it in me to do any kind of editing at the moment. I hope you'll read it in the open-hearted spirit in which I publish it.

Four years ago yesterday, January 25 2007, my friend Alex died at the age of twenty-three years, fourteen days.  He had been fighting Ewing's sarcoma for two years, and most recently been battling the graft-versus-host disease that had been plaguing him ever since his bone marrow transplant.  I saw him for a kind of birthday party, but the following two weeks were mostly just for him and family, and I was informed of his passing over the phone. 

His birthday party was not the most fun party I've ever been to.  He could hardly speak, but had refused much of the methadone he was being given as a pain killer so that he could be at least partly lucid for the party.  Most of the party consisted of him being approached by one or more people, croaking out something in a voice like sandpaper and then, miraculously, managing to muster a smile.  Or something that looked like a smile—that was able to communicate, "smile." 

In Which Death Is Forever Clouded and Unknowable, But Provides Good Stories

Lately I have been slowly but steadily reading a book entitled Machine of Death.  It is a collection of stories inspired by this episode of Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics, which is one of my favorite things the Internet, and even the world, has to offer.  Basically, each of the stories takes place in a different alternate universe with one thing in common: there is a machine that, with a simple blood test, can tell you how you are going to die.  The machine is always correct, but it's also frustratingly vague; "PEANUTS" can mean you will die of a peanut allergy, or are sideswiped by a peanut truck, or are crushed to death by Charlie Brown's balloon at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.  And it certainly doesn't tell you when.  Most of the stories are dystopian; a world in which everyone can know some of the facts about how they will die, with no means of avoiding it and no known means of delaying it is a world with some serious problems to deal with.  I am loving this book, carrying it with me wherever I go.  It is thoughtful, diverse, and generally well-put-together, but I realized today exactly why the stories appeal to me: I am living in a world with an actual Machine of Death.  Well, sort of. 

In Which We Assert Our Dominion Out of Fear

There is a fish hanging on the wall in my current apartment.  It used to be hang in my childhood bedroom, and it stared there for many years, until I brought downtown a month ago, finally confident in my ability to not destroy it.  It is a sixteen-inch-long brook trout, which I caught in September 1989, when I was six.  It is the largest freshwater fish I have ever caught, and there is only one bigger fish of any kind I ever got: a three-foot sea bass that I caught one of the two times I ever went deep sea fishing. 

I have always had a somewhat tentative relationship to fishing.  I am not fishing for sustenance, but I do like to eat a trout if I catch one.  On the other hand, I didn't eat the trout that I eventually had stuffed and mounted as a trophy.  On the other hand, is there something necessarily wrong with engaging in a relaxing, enjoyable sport and then being proud of an accomplishment?  Maybe so, if that sport involves the unnecessary taking of a life. 

In Which Kisses Have Many Forms and Meanings

When I first brought Rosie home, I unpacked all of her stuff and filled her water dish with water and we looked at each other nervously.  I don't think I was thinking about her anxiety at the time, I was too busy being completely certain that I was going to ruin this little creature's life to think too much about how she must have been feeling about the situation.  In retrospect, looking at the pictures from that first day I can see all the fear in Rosie's eyes.  She'd just taken a long car trip with a bunch of strangers to a strange place, and she wasn't sure where she stood.  I was her fourth owner that I know of within the previous three or four months, and I'm not sure how long she was living on the street before she was found.

After she frantically sniffed around my apartment and I eventually pulled her out from under the be with the judicious use of treats, I decided to climb onto my bed, which was also my couch, and watch some TV. Lo and behold, the first thing she did was jump onto the bed, climb between my legs, lick her lips nervously, and finally curl herself up into a tight ball against me.  Luckily, I had a camera ready:

In Which We Provide a Better Life, and Are Given One In Turn

Today I walked by a pet store, the kind that sells actual pets, as opposed to just pet supplies. This particular pet store is a fancy-pants Upper East Side store, so they come with a high price tag and all sorts of guarantees that the dogs are not from puppy mills but are, in fact, well bred and highly socialized pups from reputable breeders. I spent a lot of time staring at one display in particular that featured a small Havanese and a small Chihuahua puppy, who were having some fun bouncing around each other as they ate their kibble. 

When I first got Rosie, she was approximately a year old, and she definitely still had a lot of puppy in her, but she had also already had a year of life that was largely unknown to me.  Maddy came with still greater mysteries, being of an even less determinate age, but undoubtedly at least two years old.  And Maddy also has physical mysteries of her past—a piece of her ear that is missing, and a little red scar on the top of her nose that has since disappeared—evidence of a life in which she felt the need to scrap and wrangle for her life.