Nightmare

Let me start by saying that I don’t believe in certain things.  I don’t believe in God.  I don’t believe in astrology.  And I don’t believe that dreams mean anything.  I think dreams are the brain’s way of cleaning house, sort of sweeping dust bunnies out from under the chairs in your mind.  At least I don’t believe the specific images you see in your dreams mean anything.  I should really clarify here–there may be a “God” (or Gods for all I know) and astrology may really work.  I just don’t believe in them, and don’t guide my life by either one.  As for dreams, the images themselves don’t matter, I think, but I think the brain organizes your anxieties into manageable bits and dumps them in your sleep. 

So, last night I had a nightmare, which I define as “a scary dream that wakes you up”.  I began to wonder where the word “nightmare” came from.  I mean, does it have something to do with a female horse?  Well no.  “Mare” is the Old English word for an incubus, a male demon which visits sleeping women for the purpose of having sex, but apparently sits on your chest for a while–not sure whether it does that first or later. 

 For the record, a female demon who visits sleeping men is called a succubus.  No crude jokes here, please. 

So, a little background on my nightmare of last night.  Many (many, many) years ago, my friend Art had his own plane, a two-seater single engine Cessna–I want to say it was a 172–and we used to go flying almost every weekend.  Sometimes we would “go somewhere”, but more often than not, we would simply fly around locally and touch down at little nondescript airports so he could add to his quota of landings and takeoffs. 

And he taught me to fly the plane.  We started with keeping the plane level in the air.  Which isn’t as easy as it might sound.  Given its druthers, the plane would really prefer to nosedive into the ground.  So you have to keep the nose up–but not too far up, or you’ll climb.  Then there is airspeed.  You have to maintain a certain amount of it or the plane will start to lose altitude anyway.  All that stuff about keeping it level won’t make much difference.  You’ll crash into the ground…but at least you’re level, right? 

Once I got those two parts down, then I had to pay attention to the course, like I had to watch where I was going.  What?  Now I have to do three things at once?  This is stretching the limit for a blond.  As if that weren’t enough, then I had to start looking out the windshield for other planes.  Mostly I kept on doing my three things and hoped that the other pilot was smart enough to avoid me. 

Then we moved on to takeoff.  Takeoffs are the most fun you can have in a small plane.  Your foot is smashed to the floor on the right rudder to counteract the torque of the propeller until the muscles in your leg start to quiver and you don’t think you can do it anymore.  The plane is gaining speed.  You learn to pull back at the right time–you can almost feel it–and voila!  The plane is airborne.  You can relax your leg, which is instant relief, but even that is overshadowed by the complete rush of the moment.  You are flying!

Obviously, the most important part of flying a plane is landing it.  And sadly, that was my worst performance.  I managed to do it successfully maybe twice, but most of the time we would approach the runway and Art would be screaming “Pull up!  Pull up!”  So my plan, if I ever am in control of a small plane by myself again (highly unlikely) is to head directly for the White House.  That way I can be guided to land by a bunch of F-16 pilots. 

In my nightmare, I’m in that little plane again, only I look over and no one else is in the other seat.  Worse, I can’t remember anything about how to control the plane.  I instantly woke up.  So what sort of anxiety was my brain trying to clear away?  I have no idea.  Personally, I think it was an incubus.

The Torture Memos

In today’s New York Times op-eds, both Frank Rich and Nicholas Kristoff address the torture issue.  Here’s a link to Frank Rich:  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/opinion/26rich.html?ref=opinion

In addition, Tobin Harshaw addresses it in his blog on the NYT, The Opinionator.  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/weekend-opinionator-a-tortuous-week/  The Opinionator samples opinions from other sources on the Web, so that you get a variety of opinions from both the left and right.  In the case of this particular topic, I don’t think “left” and “right” are the applicable terms.  Neither are “liberal” and “conservative”.  What you have are “anti-torture” and “pro-torture” factions. 

I am pretty much in shock about the whole thing.  I thought I was shocked by the revelations in Frank Rich’s piece concerning the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah (83 times in August 2002) and the memo authorizing it by Jay Bybee (then an assistant attorney general, now a federal judge), but some of the opinions sampled by Harshaw made me feel I was in the Twilight Zone.  As Jon Stewart said in the clip eehard posted this week http://eehard.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/we-dont-torture/, how many times do you think it takes for a water-boarding victim to say, “Hell, they aren’t really going to drown me”.

The pro-torture people always present their case in some sort of variation of this theme:  If you knew for a fact that you could save 100 American lives by engaging in one of these practices, would you do it?  Never mind, let’s say a million American lives.  That reminds me of the classic joke:  A man at a party asks a woman if she’ll sleep with him for a million dollars.  “You bet”, she says eagerly, “Just name the time and place.”  The man then says, “Well, in that case, would you sleep with me for ten dollars?”  The woman (offended) says, “Are you crazy?  What do you take me for?”  The man replies, “We’ve already established that.  Now we’re just negotiating the price.”

In Harshaw’s piece is a quote by Gerald Warner of the London Telegraph: 

“President Pantywaist Obama should have thought twice before sitting down to play poker with Dick Cheney. The former vice president believes documents have been selectively published and that releasing more will prove how effective the interrogation techniques were. Under Dubya’s administration, there was no further atrocity on American soil after 9/11.”

Harshaw drily notes that “President Pantywaist” may pass for civilized discussion in Britain.  But inherent in this quote is the assumption that torture is okay if it “works”.  Which is highly debatable.  That’s the part of the whole discussion that puts me into the Twilight Zone. 

The pro-torture crowd and the torture apologists want to make a big distinction between psychological and physical torture (waterboarding is both).  The idea is that fear, in and of itself, cannot cause physical pain or death.  I beg to differ.  It’s obvious to anybody with a brain that heart attacks and strokes occur every day in response to stress, and that can include fear or relatively minor physical activity like shoveling snow.  How about locking someone who’s afraid of bugs in a box with an insect.  Can you imagine fighting like hell to get away from it?  Perhaps they did physicals first, to make sure the victims were not at risk for heart attack or stroke.  That makes me feel ever so much better.  It reminds me of the bizarre practice of testing people on Death Row to make sure they are well enough to be put to death. 

I think the first question we should always ask ourselves is, would we do this ourselves?  If you can’t answer “yes” to that question, then you shouldn’t be willing to let someone else do it on your behalf, supposedly for your own good.  Do you feel safer because Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in a single month?  I have no doubt that some of the actions undertaken by our government have improved (though not guaranteed) our safety, but that isn’t one of them. 

In closing, the whole issue reminds me of the famous Milgram Experiment from 1961.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment  In this experiment, participants were instructed to teach word pairs to a “learner”.  If the “learner” answered incorrectly, the “teacher” administered an electric shock, beginning with 15 volts and increasing with each wrong answer, ending at 450 volts.  In reality, no shock was being delivered.  But at some point, the “learner” (who was in on the deal) would start screaming and pounding on the wall.  And yet, 65% of the “teachers” continued up to the full 450 volts.  Again, from Harshaw’s piece, 49% of Americans believe that torture against terrorists is justified (15% say often, 24% say sometimes), and those percentages are higher among those who claim to be politically independent.  Welcome to the Twilight Zone.

Edgar Sawtelle and The Call of the Wild

I finished The Story of Edgar Sawtelle eight days ago.  When I was done, I was…mad.  I was mad at the characters, mad at the writer.  You know how when you watch those teen slasher movies, and the couple are in this big lonely castle and they just HAVE to go investigate that strange noise in the basement?  And you, in the audience, are screaming, “NO!  Don’t go down there!  How stupid can you be?  Didn’t you see “Rocky Horror Picture Show”?”

Well, Edgar Sawtelle is a lot more subtle than that, but it seems like every time the characters have a choice to make between one course of action and another, they always choose the wrong one.  You can see it, but they can’t.  Remember the classic Greek tragedies?  It’s always either some character flaw (hubris comes to mind) or Fate, which takes them down a road they were destined to travel regardless.  Fate, by the way, is a much scarier concept than character flaws. 

It turns out that it was the writer’s plan to write a tragedy.  In fact, it is almost a retelling of a certain famous play I won’t name, although you can find out which with some diligent Internet searching.  I wouldn’t recommend it if you intend to read the book, since much of the joy in a book is the surprise.  I may in fact have already told you too much, since the characters and events in the book will remind you of something if you remember anything about high school or college literature.  Trust me, you did read this play.   

But in spite of making me mad, the book is a jewel.  It’s well written, and what made me connect to it was the dogs.  The dogs are basically equal characters in the book, and it reminded me of why we humans are so connected to dogs.  In particular there is the family’s one and only “house dog”,  Almondine.  Almondine is the first one to discover that Edgar can’t talk.  She hears a difference in his breathing when he is a baby and alerts Edgar’s mother.  (Edgar is trying to cry, but can’t make a sound.)  From that moment on, she knows that it is her job to protect him, and she is happy to have a job. 

Skip forward to when Almondine is 14 and arthritic.  Edgar has to flee his home (makes the wrong choice, is urged by his mother, has a character flaw, Fate has intervened…you choose)  and doesn’t take his best friend and guardian with him.  Not that she would have survived his punishing travels.  But there is nothing in the book more poignant than Almondine, having searched high and low for him–on the bed, under the bed, behind the refrigerator–and having asked all the objects on their farm where he is, deciding that she must roam a bit herself and ask new objects where he is.  The ones on their farm either don’t know, or aren’t saying. 

The end of the book is…volcanic.  Let’s just say, that for reasons I won’t explain, it made me want to reread Jack London’s The Call of the Wild.  I had to find that in the “junior fiction” section of the library.  I doubt that’s what what Jack London had in mind when he wrote it.  However, I first read the book when I was 11 years old.   Now, re-reading it, I wonder how I could stand it at that age.   It’s brutal.

I’ve read several books in the days since I finished The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, but it haunts me still.

The Battle of the Sexes

Now there is an outdated phrase if there ever was one.  It brings to mind visions of Billy Jean King playing that tennis match against Bobby Riggs in the ’70’s.  But kind of like a wildfire in a peat bog, it may seem to have gone out, but it’s just smoldering underground, ready to burst into flames again with the right fuel. 

Not that it’s ever far from my mind, but the issue was really brought home to me today when I read Judith Warner’s blog in the NY Times, entitled “Dude, You’ve Got Problems”.  http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/who-are-you-calling-gay/?ref=opinion

She begins by telling the story of an 11 year-old boy from Massachusetts who came home and hanged himself after persistently being called “gay”  at school.  What Warner points out is that these bullies don’t really mean “gay”…what they mean is “you act like a girl”.  So I started thinking about what it means to act like a girl. 

I’m guessing it means some of these things:  Crying.  Not liking, or not being good at sports.  Liking poetry and flowers.  I’m trying to figure out how that can be a bad thing if you’re a boy, and a good thing if you’re a girl.  It’s either a good thing, or a bad thing. 

I previously mentioned that all the men I’ve ever been interested in are big sports fans.  I have a theory about that…which is that they have to do something with all that excess testosterone.  Football in particular I think is an exercise in vicariously beating the shit out of somebody, which is normally prohibited in everyday life.  But I failed to mention that all the men I’ve ever been interested in are also not that one-sided.  They like art, literature, theater, good food, the symphony, not necessarily all of them but some of them.  I wonder how many of them were able to express that as kids.  However they did it, I salute them for being able to express it as adults.  That’s probably what I really like…the intelligence and the courage not to be locked into a box. 

But girl-hating is alive and well.  It isn’t as popular as it used to be, so it’s gone underground like that peat bog fire I mentioned.  I rarely encounter it, and partly I think that’s because I’m not looking for it.  If you look for girl-hating, like racism, you will always find it.  I don’t conduct myself in a way that would make it rear its ugly head.   But there are still men out there who put women into one of two categories:  bitch, or slut.  If you aren’t one, you are the other, but it’s possible to be both.  I am neither.

I know hundreds of men vaguely, due to my work, but only one I would say is the epitome of the kind of man I despise.  This man is married, and from what I can tell, it’s one of those situations where the wife is “in charge”.  So all his interactions with women outside his marriage are full of resentment and revenge.  I haven’t seen this in person, but I know someone who plays golf with this man–not by choice, it’s a business thing–and he asked me one day if I had ever seen–we will call him Mark–when he’d been drinking.  Apparently, Mark’s treatment of women ranges from leering and ass-grabbing to outright abuse and humiliation.  It’s always someone he perceives as subordinate to him, like a waitress. 

So while I don’t look for it, let’s say that I’m alert to it.  Men and women are different.  We’re made differently, and we think differently.  But we aren’t different species.  The boundaries between us are not always that great.  At the very least, we should teach little boys that being like a girl is not the worst thing that could ever happen to you.

Cute and Fuzzy

By popular request, this week’s edition of Fakename’s Animal Planet focuses on animals of the cute and fuzzy persuasion.  Fakesister volunteered this picture I took some years ago of her horse “Spot”.  His real name is “Wild Wager”, so if he were a racehorse, you might not want to pick him.  Especially since he can be so easily distracted by carrots and granola bars.  In this photo, you can see by his eyes that he’s a little unnerved by me standing beneath him (What is she doing!!!?), but not enough to drop the carrot. 

Of course, nothing beats cute and fuzzy like baby animals.  My favorite wild animal is the elephant.

But there are also these baby tigers: 

Then there are Meerkats.  The real Animal Planet has a series called Meerkat Manor, about the lives of a group of Meerkats.  It’s surprisingly dramatic, and their behavior is almost human.  Well, except maybe for the part about eating the babies of rival females.  Still, you have to respect any animal that eats scorpions. 

However today’s post is dedicated to Fakedog, who is just trying to survive living in the same household as The Beast.  Neither of us are very fuzzy, but we are kind of cute. 

Cancer In Real Life

Out of respect for my friend, whom we’ll call “Jane”, I’ve refrained from discussing this issue up until now, but I have to beg forgiveness because I can’t deal with it any more without unburdening myself.  I’m ashamed of myself for being so weak. 

Jane was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1998, and went all out with every known treatment.  She had a mastectomy.  She went through radiation and chemo, and then took hormone therapy (Tamoxifen) for five years, until 2003.   She doesn’t remember what stage the tumor was, which defines what kind and how much treatment you get, and in the end it doesn’t matter.  Many women choose to take the route of the most aggressive treatment possible, even if it isn’t necessary, because of what I’ve previously called the “spider in the hair” phenomenon.  Get it off me.  Ick. 

Fast forward to 2006.  Jane was by my side when I woke up from surgery and was told by the surgeon that the suspicious area in my breast was indeed cancer.  Thank God for Jane.  She directed me to this surgeon in the first place.  Told me what medical oncologist to see and what radiation oncologist to ask for.  Prepared me for what to expect.  Jokingly, I used to call her my Spirit Guide, partly because she’s a very New Age kind of person.

Oddly, at the very same time this happened to me and I was quite preoccupied with Me, Jane got an upper respiratory illness…a cold or the flu or something, and they sent her for a chest X-ray, which as she later said “lit up like a Christmas tree”.  There were abnormal spots on the bones of her ribs.  She made an appointment with the medical oncologist to discuss it, but as I recall, it was before that appointment that she developed excruciating pain in her face, along with paralysis, and had to go to the ER.  She managed to get herself there, but I took her to have the MRI she had the next day or so, turnabout being fair play. 

The result:  Her breast cancer had metastasized to the bone.  Not to be brutal, but when that happens, it will kill you unless something else kills you first.  Since then, she’s had several bouts with chemo, traveled to Boston for a second opinion about her treatment, continued to work, and maintained  a positive attitude that verges on sainthood.

But late last year, she fell and broke her hip.  She had surgery and was doing well, and was back at home.  On Friday, I learned that Thursday of last week, she fell again at home.  This time she broke her leg, a spiral fracture of the femur, she tells me.  She had another surgery, and is now in a rehab hospital for an unknown length of time.  And her life as she knew it is toast.  She’s been fortunate to work for a government agency, with excellent benefits and a program where other people can “donate” their unused sick and annual leave to her, but by the end of this month, she will run out.  So she’s applying for disability, something she had hoped to avoid. 

You may think that I’m only thinking of myself–that I fear something similar will happen to me, since cancer metastasis is unpredictable.  That watching this happen to her scares me.  You would be totally wrong.  I have a very advanced case of denial.  It was hard enough for me to believe I had cancer in the first place.  I’m even better at denying I will ever be in Jane’s shoes.  But it’s more than that.  I know it could happen, but I don’t choose to live that way.  You could wake up every morning being afraid to go out of the house because you could be hit by a bus.  Or not.  I choose “or not”. 

So the real problem is that there is no manual for dealing with a friend dying.  She says she likes my demeanor.  I don’t hover and baby her.  If she feels bad, I’m likely to cover her with a blanket and say nothing.   I know that’s important.  Like me, she’s terribly independent.  I hope that continues to work.  But it takes an emotional toll on me to maintain that neutral attitude, when what I want to do is break down in tears and say, “Don’t go”.  But no matter what, I will find a way to keep doing it.  I’ll have to find someone else to comfort me.  It isn’t her job.  She’s busy enough.

Guns At Work

Many companies, if not most companies, including my own, have a prohibition against possession of firearms by employees on company property. 

But in 2008, the Florida Legislature in its infinite wisdom passed a law called the Preservation and Protection of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms in Motor Vehicles Act, commonly known as the Guns At Work law.  In a nutshell, the law states that persons with a concealed weapons permit may keep weapons in their vehicles while at work.

The law was heavily pushed by the NRA, specifically by Marion Hammer, who is a Florida lobbyist and past president (and first female president) of the NRA.  Opposed were the Florida Chamber of Commerce, the Florida Retail Federation, Disney, and Wal-Mart, all of whom are powerful interests.   That being the case, I’m surprised the law passed.  It’s also a sign that hell has frozen over when I’m on the same side as Wal-Mart.  Actually, I have mixed feelings about the law.  But frankly speaking, as an employer, I don’t ever want to be concerned that I may piss off some employee who goes to his car at lunch and pulls out a weapon.  I already go out of my way to be respectful, even if I have bad news (like “You’re fired”) but that’s good practice anyway. 

On Monday, I learned the following information about an employee who had been with us for less than a month:  he was feeling discriminated against; he’d been admitted for inpatient psychiatric treatment twice last year; and he had a handgun in his truck.  Which he pulled out and displayed to a security guard at my workplace.  It wasn’t so much that he had the gun, it was the context.  My boss, who operates in another city but was in town, said, “He has to go” and volunteered to handle it so as to take the focus off me and my second-in-command person, who was the true target of this person’s paranoia. 

I insisted on calling the police to be present.  My boss said he didn’t think that was necessary.  I insisted some more, and whined, so he finally agreed to humor me.  From the minute I called the police, it was clear that they took the situation very seriously, perhaps in part because the security guard was so specific about the weapon…I was able to tell them it was a Taurus .357 Magnum.  So this was not a fantasy, we think he may have a gun.  It was, he has a gun and this is what kind. 

Two officers showed up, one of whom was wearing his bulletproof vest outside his shirt.  That is a very fearsome and intimidating sight. 

My boss planned to tell the employee that since he was in his 90-day probationary period, it just wasn’t working out.  I lobbied for telling him we knew he had a gun, but I was overruled both by the boss and by the police.  Much of what I know now I learned since this incident, and the main thing is that the operative word in the law is “concealed”.  Assuming he had a concealed weapons permit, it is a violation of the law to take it out of concealment for any reason except to use it, and that has to be guided by strict definitions of self-defense. 

In any case, my boss delivered the news with no mention of the gun.  The employee handed his keys to me.  Then he asked me to go with him to a storeroom where he had some personal items.  The police said, “No.  She can’t go.  We’ll go.”  My boss went too.  Once in the storeroom, the employee pulled a knife from his pocket which he intended to use to cut some twist ties, but who knew that?  That by itself tells me what poor judgement the guy had.  Had it been me, faced with two armed police officers, I would have asked permission to pull my driver’s license out of my wallet.

Apparently the reaction was swift.  My boss said the next thing he knew, one of the officers pushed him out of the way and said “Stay behind me.”  The two officers arranged themselves in an L-shaped formation, to prevent crossfire, and my boss said he heard a sound he’ll probably be hearing in his dreams for some time to come–the sound of both officers simultaneously unsnapping their holsters. 

In the end, the guy left peacefully and everyone was safe.  But it could have been otherwise. 

Oddly enough, the same day this happened, Timothy Egan of the NY Times posted an entry on his blog called The Guns of Spring. http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/the-guns-of-spring/?ref=opinion  Here’s a quote: 

“If it was peanut butter or pistachio nuts taking down people by the dozens every week, we’d be all over it. Witness the recent recalls. But Glocks and AKs — can’t touch ‘em. So we’re awash in guns: 280 million.”  I don’t know the answer.  There is something to the NRA slogan, “If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.”  And yet, Egan notes that he lost a nephew to gun violence and can’t help but take it personally.  This week, it became personal to me.

Time for An Episode of…

…Mutual of Fakename’s Wild Kingdom (formerly known as Fakename’s Animal Planet).  Normally, there would be a longer period of time between episodes of nature-watching, but this week we make a special exception for eehard.  First, he disparaged our last choice of featured animal–the cute little fruit bat from the Phillipines–then he compared our program to Wild Kingdom, with which we have never been affiliated.  http://eehard.wordpress.com/2009/04/03/puerh-part-1/  Also, we take no responsibility for the content of our programming, which does not necessarily reflect the views of our owners.  Or something like that.  Just consider everything disclaimed. 

The title of today’s program is, “If You Think the Bat Was Bad, Watch This”.  Today’s featured animal is the Tasmanian Devil, which, contrary to popular belief, is not just a cartoon character.  It’s a real animal, found only on the island of Tasmania.  If you don’t know where that is, go look it up.  Fakename does not do geography lessons in addition to her other duties.

These adorable creatures are about the size of a small dog:  males weigh an average of 18 pounds, while females weigh an average of 13 pounds.  They are very fierce, have an ungodly screech, and give off an odor when excited just like skunks.  In short, this is not an animal you’d like to meet up with in a dark alley.  While they do hunt live prey (including domestic animals like sheep) they mostly satisfy themselves with carrion.  It turns out that farmers like them, because when a Devil eats an animal, it eats everything…fur, teeth, and bones included.  Very tidy of them.  This cuts down on insects which could threaten livestock.  This proves that even the most unlovable of animals has a place on our planet–except, in my opinion, for mosquitos and fleas. 

Now for the really scary part.  In 1995, a new disease sprung up among Tasmanian Devils, which was named “Devil Facial Tumor Disease”, or DFTD.  Warning:  the following picture is not for the faint-hearted. 

These tumors often occur in or near the mouth and eventually cause the animal to die of starvation.  No one knows why it began, and there is no cure.  At present all they do is try to remove affected individuals from the wild population to prevent the spread of the disease, because here is the really, really scary part:  it’s considered cancer, but it’s contagious.  The only other known example is CTVT–Canine Transmissible Venereal Tumor. 

Personally I wish they would come up with another word to describe it other than cancer.  In my opinion, if it’s contagious, it isn’t cancer.  A suprising number of idiots in the world still believe that human cancer is contagious, and even those who would intellectually deny they believe it still shun people with cancer as if they did.  I guess it’s a good thing many people have never heard of DFTD, or for that matter, Tasmanian Devils, because they would be using the disease as proof their irrational fears have a basis in reality. 

In closing, Fakename hopes that they will at least come up with a treatment to save the species and alleviate these animals’ suffering.  Hoping for a cure is not realistic, since that hasn’t worked out so well for humans.

Reading With Fakename: Update

On March 21st I hatched this ambitious plan to read six books in a week, which would beat my record of four the week before.  I failed.  It took me two weeks and a day–today–to finish them all.  So here are mini-book reports on them all. 

First, the new William Tapply.  It was so memorable I had to look at the author’s website to remember the title of the book (which was, by the way, Hell Bent).  http://www.williamgtapply.com/  And don’t ask me what happened in the book.  No really–it isn’t that it was that bad, but Tapply suffers a bit when compared with Walter Mosley.  At least when you read them in close proximity to one another;  sorry, Bill. 

Moving right along to Mosley, I was very disappointed in Gone Fishin’.  It was crude, but then again, it was one of his earlier books.  So was Black Betty, which was much better but at the end even I became confused about who was whose child and who killed who and why.  In his later books featuring Easy Rawlins, Easy becomes a much more complex character, and Mosley’s style is much refined.  It’s both simpler and more subtle, indicating to me that Mosley matured as both a writer and a man, which is something you would hope for in a man after 20 years or more. 

Jonathan Kellerman’s book Bones turned out to be one of his best. 

Finally, I read the two books by Michael Shaara:  For Love of the Game and The Herald.  The former book was found among his papers and published after his death in 1988.  It was perfectly charming, and contains a nail-biting account of pitching the perfect baseball game.  I was screaming (well, silently) for the hero to stop pitching before he had a heart attack or dislocated his arm.  Much like The Broken Place, I kept having this sense of impending doom about the outcome of the book, but I was again pleasantly surprised.  On a poignant note, a sticker inside the front said the book had been donated to the Tallahassee library by the author’s widow. 

The Herald was published in 1981, and while it kept my attention, it felt surprisingly dated.  We’ve been so inundated by doomsday books and movies that it’s hard not to become jaded by it. 

So it’s onward now.  Friday I picked up only two new books:  one is a tiny little book called The Marriage of True Minds which promises to be funny.  The main character “becomes engaged in illegal guerilla warfare for the sake of animals wild and domestic”.  And ends up having to be defended by his lawyer ex-wife. 

The second book, which counts as two since it’s 562 pages long, is The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.  The plot seems complicated, involving a mute boy who flees into the wilderness of Wisconsin with three dogs after the death of his father, which he suspects was murder.  What’s interesting about this is that the writer’s name is David Wroblewski and he grew up in Wisconsin, and his picture on the book cover makes him look African-American.  If that’s true, that makes him one of three African-Americans ever to grow up in Wisconsin.  (Minnesota has four; Iowa has seven.)  The web has not been helpful, other than to tell me it was a pick for Oprah’s book club, and that the book was on the NY Times bestseller list for 13 weeks.  I’m intrigued, which is mostly the point of reading.

Smart Dogs

I pretty much think “smart dogs” is an oxymoron, like the two most famous ones George Carlin made popular:  “military intelligence” and “jumbo shrimp”.  Don’t get me wrong.  I have three dogs and I love them all, but there are other qualities I love them for.   What those are, I have yet to figure out, but intelligence is not one of them.  Let me tell you how smart my dogs are:  if they were people, they would still be sending money to Bernie Madoff, c/o Federal Penitentiary, USA.  Especially if he had ever patted them on the head once and said, “Good doggie”.

It amazes me that dog owners want to brag about how smart their dogs are.  I mean, the dog does something completely doggish, like stand at the door and bark to go out, and the owners are ready to enroll him in Yale.  It never ceases to amaze me how much people are invested in the intelligence of their dogs, like it’s a reflection on them.  Tying your worth to the intelligence of your dog makes the same kind of sense Grandpa uses to convince himself his manliness is restored by buying a candy-apple red sports car. 

People mistakenly think dogs are smarter than cats, because dogs, allegedly, can be trained.  So let me get this straight.  Why is it such a big accomplishment for a dog to sit on command?  The only thing dogs like better than sitting is lying down.  I picture the cat watching this display of dog “intelligence” and saying to itself, “Would you look at that fool.  He still thinks he’s going to get a treat for that, even though the last time that happened was Tuesday, November 3rd, 1996.”

In the dog v. cat intelligence contest, I submit the following example.  I first caught on to who was smartest when this happened:  in one of the places I used to live, I had a sunroom (aka, “Florida room”, in these parts) where I kept the water bowl that was shared by the dogs and the cats.  When the bowl ran out of water, I would take it to the sink to fill it up.  All the dogs would follow me and stand around panting and salivating, sometimes jumping up to put their front paws on the edge of the sink.  Meanwhile, the cats parked themselves in the Florida room in the exact spot they knew the bowl would be returning to.  I rest my case. 

Just this week I dropped a microscopic piece of chicken on the floor, which was instantly snarfed up by my dog The Beast.  He spent the next hour scouring every corner of the house, growling the whole time at the other two dogs to stay away from the chicken that absolutely must be there somewhere. 

There actually are some “smart” dogs, which I wouldn’t have believed if I hadn’t actually had one in the past, but even that was relative.  There was a certain absence of creativity in his approach to problem-solving.  His idea of solving a problem was to eat it.  Thankfully, I don’t measure my own intelligence by that of my dogs, which is very fortunate given the dogs I have now.  If I were only as smart as they were, I’d have to sign myself up for Barack Obama’s bowling team.