Dogs have been going missing.
It’s on the news and in the newspapers. They tell us not to leave dogs unattended in back yards, to keep them inside if at all possible. If at all possible, they say.
But someone is stealing dogs. They say it is groups of people. They tell us that it is groups of people stealing dogs and then using them to train other meaner dogs to fight. They are being used in illegal underground dog fights.
That there are illegal underground dog fights in this small city on the coast is news to me. When I think of dog fights I, for some reason, think of Benicio Del Toro. I think of Benicio driving around our street in a car loaded with thugs.
He points a lazy finger at a house and his thugs unload from the vehicle and come back with a struggling dog. Benicio blows smoke into one of the thugs face. Benicio has a moustache and gold jewellery.
After thinking these things I worry that I am a racist. For about thirty minutes I worry that I am a racist. That I have racist tendencies. I worry that they are ingrained.
They tell us that the bodies of dogs, the torn bodies of unidentified canines, have been found in unusual places. That they have been turning up in dumpsters around the city.
They say that if you love your dog, that if your dog is an important part of your life, one of the family, you will not leave him unattended. The chief of police has appeared on television warning the owners of dogs everywhere that it is possible that their dog could be next. Organized Crime has no morals, he said, they aren’t above anything.
I worry about this. About living in a place where there are people who ‘aren’t above anything’. Walking to the library I wait for a car to pull up beside me. For thugs to unload. For a beatdown to be delivered. I will not take it like a man.
I don’t know how to take it like a man. I don’t even really know what it means.
At the library I can’t hire out a book because the computer says my address is in doubt. I tell the woman behind the counter that every time I come in my address is in doubt.
Why is my address always in doubt, I ask.
She tells me that computers are made by men and being made by men they are bound to make mistakes from time to time. She actually tells me this and even though I find this to be an odd thing for a librarian to tell me I smile and nod my head and manage to produce something that resembles a chuckle.
Later I will wonder if she was trying to tell me that computers contained an inherent weakness passed down from their human creators. I will think about this for too long. About machines making human mistakes.
Dogs have been going missing.
It’s on the news and in the newspapers. They tell us not to leave dogs unattended in back yards, to keep them inside if at all possible. If at all possible, they say.
But someone is stealing dogs. They say it is groups of people. They tell us that it is groups of people stealing dogs and then using them to train other meaner dogs to fight. They are being used in illegal underground dog fights.
That there are illegal underground dog fights in this small city on the coast is news to me. When I think of dog fights I, for some reason, think of Benicio Del Toro. I think of Benicio driving around our street in a car loaded with thugs.
He points a lazy finger at a house and his thugs unload from the vehicle and come back with a struggling dog. Benicio blows smoke into one of the thugs face. Benicio has a moustache and gold jewellery.
After thinking these things I worry that I am a racist. For about thirty minutes I worry that I am a racist. That I have racist tendencies. I worry that they are ingrained.
They tell us that the bodies of dogs, the torn bodies of unidentified canines, have been found in unusual places. That they have been turning up in dumpsters around the city.
They say that if you love your dog, that if your dog is an important part of your life, one of the family, you will not leave him unattended. The chief of police has appeared on television warning the owners of dogs everywhere that it is possible that their dog could be next. Organized Crime has no morals, he said, they aren’t above anything.
I worry about this. About living in a place where there are people who ‘aren’t above anything’. Walking to the library I wait for a car to pull up beside me. For thugs to unload. For a beatdown to be delivered. I will not take it like a man.
I don’t know how to take it like a man. I don’t even really know what it means.
At the library I can’t hire out a book because the computer says my address is in doubt. I tell the woman behind the counter that every time I come in my address is in doubt.
Why is my address always in doubt, I ask.
She tells me that computers are made by men and being made by men they are bound to make mistakes from time to time. She actually tells me this and even though I find this to be an odd thing for a librarian to tell me I smile and nod my head and manage to produce something that resembles a chuckle.
Later I will wonder if she was trying to tell me that computers contained an inherent weakness passed down from their human creators. I will think about this for too long. About machines making human mistakes.
I was highly medicated and my emotions seemed to come to me from a great distance. By the time they reached me they were so dulled down that they were barely what you could describe as emotions. They took so long to reach me I had time to study them as they drew closer.
This is something like sadness, I’d think, this is something close to joy.
I’d become preoccupied with things. I don’t mean to be vague, but that was part of the problem, the vagueness of what I was preoccupied with.
I spent a lot of time laid flat out on my bed imagining a different kind of life. It was not an exciting life. It was just a life. One different than the one I had. In this new life I had a boring job I went to each day. In the afternoon I came home from work and complained about my job. My girlfriend listened sympathetically and then she complained about her job.
We took turns complaining about our jobs and then we watched TV until it was time to go to bed. On the weekends we went to bars with our friends and we got drunk and laughed and in the mornings we were hungover. It was a happy life, I think.
It seemed to be the kind of life I should have aimed for.
In my real life my girlfriend came home from work and asked me what I did all day to today. What did you do today, she asked.
I told her that I’d spent the day working on ‘my novel’. But the truth was I’d spent the day downloading movies and TV shows that I would never watch. It seemed important that I downloaded these things and that I filed them away. While my shows downloaded I’d go to the bedroom and think about my other life.
Sometimes waves of pleasure would flow through my skin and I’d smile with my eyes closed and be thankful that I was medicated.
It sometimes felt that I’d become lost in the world or that I had no place in it. Normally, this would depress me and I would seek out alcohol to numb myself. But now my not having a place in the world just seemed like a fact. It was a little piece of knowledge I’d been blessed with.
For a long time I was angry with the world. Or the world was angry with me. I couldn’t decide witch. I felt a great pressure to ‘be something’. To do things other people did.
During that time I tried to do the things other people did. But I was not good at doing those things. I worked in a hotel cleaning rooms that people with more money with me spent their holidays. I rarely had to talk to anyone and in a way I enjoyed cleaning up other peoples mess. It’s like meditation, I liked to say, cleaning rooms creates a great peaceful nothingness in my mind.
But after a few years they got sick of me coming to work hungover and I got fired and I moved back to my parents house and got drunk as often as possible.
My father told me I was a drunk, but it didn’t really matter to either of us because he was a drunk also.
In my head I was imagining a time in the not so distant future when I would be a great success and everyone who had ever doubted me would be taught a great and valuable lesson. But what that lesson would be was unclear to me at the time.
It was an uncertain time in my life. I tried things and failed at them and eventually I realized that some lives are bound up in failure.
While my girlfriend is at work I think about these things and about how I might try to explain it all to her, but whenever I try she gets this confused look on her face as though I might not be who she thought I was. That I might be someone else altogether, not exactly a stranger, but something close to that.
At night he thought about calling the police. During those lonely hours, drunk and alone, he thought about summoning the police to his apartment just for someone to talk to. He would make a scene. He would wait for their knock at the door and then he would scream at the top of his lungs, he would throw things, barricade himself in the bathroom.
Come and get me, he’d scream, come and get me you bastards.And when they finally had him face down on the floor, knees in his back, he would burst into to tears and sob uncontrollably and he would pretend that they were holding him. He would pretend they were trying to comfort him in some mysterious way .
Because he felt that he needed to be comforted. But there was no one to comfort him.
Sometimes he called his brother and tried to explain what was happening to him, but it was late and his brother had work in the morning.
You’re drunk, his brother said, pull yourself together.
It’s all coming to a head, he said.
What’re you talking about?
It’s all coming to an inevitable conclusion.
Jesus, his brother said, can’t you get a grip on yourself? Can’t you just be normal?
Okay, he said, okay.
You can’t keep calling like this. I have a job. I can’t take these calls anymore, do you understand that?
Yes, he said, okay.
I’m tired of your shit.
I know, he said, I’m tired too.
Well do something about it.
I’m trying, I’m doing my best.
You’re not, his brother told him, if this is your best you should be concerned.
And then he hung up and thought about the police charging in and spraying him in the face with pepper spray and beating him with batons and about how good that would feel. How that seemed like the answer to everything.
She leaves the baby, the new born, in a dumpster in a park not far from where she lives. She places the baby on top of the empty bottles and cans and rotting food and she does it gently, she does it with great care.
The baby is looking at her with it’s cloudy blue eyes and, for a moment, she thinks of the story of Moses. About how Moses’ mother had placed him in a wicker basket and set him adrift on a great river. She remembers a childrens book she once read in Sunday School. The drawings of little Moses sailing down a fierce river, a crocodile floating beside him, mouth open.
For a second she hesitates. The baby opens it’s mouth, closes it, opens it again, purses it’s little pink lips. And then she is walking and as she is walking she feels a whole new life opening up in front of her. A whole other life. Each step a burden gradually lifting.
I kept my apartment on the coast but we mostly lived at Sarah’s apartment in the city. We could hardly afford to live, let alone pay the rent, and our bodies became wasted and weak. University was something we stopped thinking about two or three weeks after meeting. We stopped going. We were sick all the time, had developed colds, runny noses and dry coughs.
All we did was drink and write and read and have sex. Somewhere, in the back of mind, in the anxious tugging in the center of my chest and the nervous shake of my hands, I knew it couldn’t go on like this for too long. We were living off our combined student benefits and my fortnightly allowance. We spent too much money on cheap alcohol. We ate rice and toast and Mexican beans.
Occasionally, I would wonder what it was I was up to, what I was thinking, what I was trying to prove and to whom. I would ask myself if I had read too much Bukowski and if I was actually considering this as a permanent way of life, something I would look back on in forty years and be proud of. Was it possible to live like this for forty years?
Could I be one of those men? I had seen them, the ones who looked so old and so small they appeared pickled, as though the booze had done something to their skin, as though it had shrunk them, whipped the meat off their bones. They all wore similar clothes over skeleton frames. They all wore hats. They stank of piss and shit and death.
I would sometimes talk to Sarah about these things. I would sometimes bring these things up when we were hungover, our lips stained red with cheap cask wine. ’What are we doing?’ I’d ask her.
‘What?’
‘What are we doing? We really don’t need to be living like this…’
‘Like what?’
‘Like winos.’
And she laughed and said, ‘do we have anything better to do?’
Her skin was pale and tight around her bones. She had lost weight, we both had, but it was worse for her because she was small to begin with. Her breasts had shrunk. Her hips hurt me when we made love. Bruised my flesh.
‘I don’t think this is what we imagined we would be doing.’
‘What did you imagine?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe we should try doing something else.’
‘And what would we be trying?’
‘I don’t know. Couple things. Things couples do.’
And she would laugh, Sarah would, as though I was talking about something ridiculous. It scared me that she laughed like that. I would look at her and wonder what I was doing here, or at least why I had allowed things to get this far, why I hadn’t reigned us in when it appeared to be getting a little out of hand.
I allowed things to get to this point - the point where our skin was pale and bruised so easily and had lost its elasticity, if i gripped her arm my fingers would leave indents like her flesh was made of dough - because I was curious to know what it felt like. I wanted to know what it was like to drink cask wine every day and to live in a shitty apartment in a shitty part of town.
It scared me that she would laugh because I knew she was laughing at me. Laughing because I had gone to private schools, that I’d only been with one girl before her, because my parents had money and could save me at any moment. But mainly it scared me because she knew I was curious, knew that I wanted to experience these things, that I had been attracted to her because she lived like this, because I was going to write about it one day, that it was some kind of experiment, that she was research. It scared me because all of this was true and because I loved her, curious or not, but I hadn’t done anything to make things better and I never would.
I get lost sometimes. In booze and other things. I wake up in places I shouldn’t be and sneak out in the morning.
In the backseat of a cab I forget. I take deep breaths and forget things.
I say, I blacked out last night. I can’t remember a thing.
I dream about losing things. About searching for things I’ve lost.
About never finding them.
I look beneath things, pull things apart.
And then I wake up with the feeling I need to keep searching.
So I’m always searching for things, always looking, always hiding.
It’s the same thing. Searching. Hiding.
Last night I dreamt a man that could climb walls folded a child into his body like origami. Only I heard bones cracking.
And I woke up with that man crawling across the cieling, towards me.
So, things happen. You feel depressed, you get drunk, you delete your blog. And in the morning you can’t believe how stupid you are, how stupid you can be, what you’ve done. Your embarrassed.
You think - why would you do something like that?
And the answer is maybe you were feeling a little frustrated with your writing, with the way you were writing, and it always seemed like you were writing the same thing over and over and over, and it was meaning less and less. And your drunk mind thought that if you deleted your blog and you started another blog, the problem would be solved. You would be a different writer than the one you were before. You would write about different things.
You would feel better about yourself. About everything in general. A huge burden would be lifted.
Only a huge burden was not lifted. You had the same burden plus the burden of having deleted something you may have grown to count on day to day. So now you have two burdens.
So you start a knew blog, and this blog is focused on other things, and you think I could of have had two writing blogs, that the first blog did not need to be condemned to the abyss. And then you bring the old blog back to life, breath air into it, in the hope that once breathing it will be the same, that it will not have changed, that it will not have come back different, something less, something dark lurking in the shadows, something dangerous.
