Because I Don't Want to Be Any Trouble

I saw the Great Dane puppies again today.  They are 16 and 17 weeks respectively.  One is blue and one is spotted black, white and grey.  This is the second time I have seen them in a week because I have been for two walks this week. I don't know the last time that happened.

Both times I have gone walking in abject frustration and with simmering fury at my body and the way its limbic system has revolted against everything ever since I was a teenager, as if a whole swarm of bees or a sabre is constantly threatening to end my life there and then.  No wonder I developed chronic fatigue syndrome.

I went walking both times furying and frustrated at this reaction that occurs without my permission to things that aren't even there and didn't happen last decade or even the decade before last, let alone now.  Having said that, I'm pretty sure that I'm traumatised from having this stupid disease, and at finding myself back in this relapsed state after being quite convinced I was healed forever of CFS.  Won't make that mistake again.

I went walking without the heart rate monitor, which is the CFS version of riding the top of a train or snorting cocaine with a bunch of hookers, or going out drinking all night.  Walking without the heart rate monitor is walking on the CFS wild side.  On the other side of the wild side is perhaps some kind of post-exertional malaise but I don't even fucking care because I've been able to go walking twice in one week!

When I walked on Tuesday (or was it Wednesday? All the days blur one into another in my stupid life).  No, it was Wednesday, which means I have gone for two walks in two days.  I reckon the last time that happened Hawthorn wasn't the premier.  At least.  Maybe it was even a Geelong premiership year.  We play Geelong tomorrow night.  I'm not scared of playing Geelong any more, not like when they beat us 90 squillion times in a row.  Which doesn't mean they won't beat us, just that it doesn't feel like we're their bitch anymore.  I would say if anything that it's probably more like Geelong is our bitch, but I don't like saying that kind of fate-tempting stuff the day before we play them because really, either team could win tomorrow night and really, I don't like saying another team is our bitch because I'm not 15 and I'm actually quite zen about being beaten.

When I walked on Tuesday I saw these puppies for the first time and they were just so beautiful.  One of them looked quite like this:

Jonathan Willier (creative commons 2.0)

The other one looked a little like this, only bigger and with different spots.

Bryan Peters (creative commons 2.0)

Or a little like this, only smaller and with different spots:

Jay Iwasaki (creative commons 2.0)

The woman who is the dogs' pet told me that her previous Great Dane had died a year ago at the hefty age of 13.  That's ancient for a Great Dane, who tend to live only till they're about nine or so.

Whenever I think of Great Danes I think of the Little Golden Book I had as a child.  One of the pictures, by that illustrator that I loved most called Louise someone or other, was of a Great Dane sitting next to a baby.  Gentle giants they are considered, and the dogs' pet said so too, and I could see it in them both even at this young age.  They are obviously well looked-after and of the pedigree variety of Great Dane, and are going very well at their doggie obedience classes.  The spotty one especially was quite smoochy, and sat very nicely.  Today they only jumped up a little bit and stopped when their pet said to stop jumping.  If there is any dog you must teach to not jump it's a Great Dane.  Well, any dog really 'cause jumping is very uncool, but if you lapse on training a Great Dane not to jump you'll accidentally kill your Aunt Martha when they jump on her in greeting when they're three.

When I saw the two dogs coming towards me today I felt a fluttering in my stomach because dogs are pretty much maybe my favourite thing ever.  They calm the limbic frazzle.  I may possibly have squealed a little, I'm not sure, as I approached them but I likely used my puppy voice.  I apologised to the woman.  I said, "Agh, you're going to start cringing every time you see me coming. Here's that bloody woman again, stopping me from walking my dogs."

"No, no, it's fine," said the woman, and I didn't believe her because my confidence is a tattered blood-stained period rag.  "It's good for the dogs to meet people," she said.

I patted the dogs for a bit and then shared what I had just been pondering before I came upon the dogs and their pet.  I was walking down the recently newly-opened track, the bit I'd never walked down before a few months ago because by the time I came upon the scene it was closed because of damage from the 2009 fires.  Six years later there is hardly any evidence of the fire anymore, just little bits here and there if you care to look.  Like on the rather beautiful, straight ghost gum tree.  Large, so that I just had to touch him as I walked past, almost white.  One of his branches had a branch running off it that was black.  But the rest of him was burnless, his skin intact.

"I was just thinking," I said to the woman, "how nice it is walking down here.  It's such a lovely track and seeing it now it's regenerated is cool."  Or something like that.  I can't remember what I said because it was more than two minutes ago.

But as soon as I said it, this pondering, ruminative kind of statement, it fell to the ground straight after coming out of my mouth.  The woman agreed in a dull kind of way, and I just knew that she was gunning to get going again, to walk her dogs so she could get home and do the seven tasks, and make dinner, and get online and blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I felt, as I feel so often, that I really need to just restrict that kind of pondering, ruminating to writing, and to talking to Andrea and my mum, and to not hardly ever speak a ruminative word at any other time because I'm so tired of this feeling that I'm like the old lady in the street that you try and avoid because you know she's going to ramble and you don't have time for rambling.

As I left the woman in my wake I continued feeling bad things about inconsequential things.  I felt that familiar feeling that accompanies me almost constantly these days, of being half invisible, a pointless blot on the landscape, a useless thing.  And I felt it rise up in me, this extreme dislike for people I don't know who I'm interacting with in a public place, who seem more and more like fucking zombies when I do talk to them.  And then it reinforced the same feeling that is probably reinforcing everyone else and making a giant snowball that will roll down the hill and smash us all to pieces, that people are crappy and closed off and disinterested and not worth talking to anyway.  I don't truly believe in my heart that people are crap, but it feels like they think I am.

Actually, as I walked away, I felt like the next time I come to walk here I will make sure it is earlier or later so that I don't run into this woman again, even though I really, roolly, truly want to run into her dogs again.  But I feel like I will feel uncomfortable next time, as if I can sense off that she feels uncomfortable, that it will be a burden stopping and letting this inconsequential woman pat her dogs.

And the inner witness part of me talked back to me and it said, "No, no. This feeling is just your paranoia talking. That's not necessarily how it actually is."

But the feeling that she might think that way about me is enough to make me react, so that next time I will happily cut myself off and go walking at a different time just to avoid it.  Because I don't want to be any trouble.

I've referenced Glaxo Smith Kline on here more than once in derisive tones.  They are a placeholder for the revolting capitalist corporate greed that we are all tired of because now we've realised that it doesn't have to be like this, it just is like this in the story that we're also sick of and are wanting to change without knowing quite how.  However, despite Glaxo being as tossbaggy as any other corporation, I find myself taking one of their products, lamotrigine, which I have grudgingly begun taking because it's good for people with CFS (I took it years ago for years until I stopped and forgot all about it.  Why I stopped is a reason consigned to the great Londonish fog of memory).

Lamotrogine is also good for anxiety, depression, mood stabilisation and PTSD.  Wish me luck.

Because I don't want to keep feeling like I'm being any trouble.

Animal Connection

If you want to see something lovely, and sad, with a dose of synchronicity thrown in, go see Vicki.  If only more people revered animals in this way, there wouldn't be any in the shelter to start off with.

Zoe dog - her eyes remind me of Lester

Goodnight Puppy

Even when the end comes slowly, it still comes by surprise.

Even when you know that there's obviously something wrong - you can't be 14 1/2 doggy years and have lost a quarter of your body weight and have had a possible seizure in the last couple of years and there not be something wrong.  But still, you were okay.  You were old and slowed down, but you still loved to walk, to go in the car, to play with the ball, to cuddle.  Even though a week ago today I was sitting on the couch with you, howling because Helen Razer's cat was put to sleep, and wondering how long it was before it was your turn, I didn't think it would be before the week was out.

I mean,you'd played with the ball that day, right?  And the day after that and the day after that.  We had an episode this week of ball-playing.  And while it wasn't like the ball-playing of your youth, where your exuberance needed abating by a many-times-a-day habit of hitting the ball clear across the yard with a tennis racquet over and over again, you were still able this week to chase it, several times, down the side of a hill, and shriek-bark when you hid it somewhere and then struggled to retrieve it again.  You were still able to walk on Monday evening.

But then Thursday came and with it what we know now was another seizure.  But still, when I debated whether to go to my class on Friday, looking worriedly at your lowered countenance, I was still guessing that you'd attracted another infection, a secondary one from the licking that goes on when your body comes in contact with the wandering jew.  But then Friday night and you still weren't right.  You were spacey and vacant.  You didn't even want to eat the piece of butter chicken I offered you.  Definitely an alarm bell.  And so to the vet, and a 24-hour wait on blood tests hoping that it would be something that could be managed.

But it couldn't, she said.  Things had caught up with you.  You were anaemic to the extent that if a blood transfusion would have given you anything more than a few days, you would have been eligible for it with a couple of marker points to spare.  That was why you'd stopped eating, because it was a choice of eating or breathing, and breathing was starting to prove hard enough.

You were a tough old bugger, though.  Your body had adapted itself to a situation that the vet guessed had been going on for some time.  But then it just couldn't adapt anymore, finally.  As will happen for us all.  But still, still a shock.  Still a big gaping hole where you were.

I slept a vigil on the couch on Saturday night, while you slept on the floor beside me.  Knowing what the morning was going to bring.  Dreading it in a way that you can only dread something that you've been ... well, dreading for years.  Staying in the moment.  Wanting to just be in all the moments that I could with you until then.  And so we shared the night.  When you weren't pacing, that is.  Which was pretty much from 2 am to when you tired at around 8 am.  This sort of behaviour has been going on for quite some time, although you really ramped it up in the last couple of days.  You've been causing a great deal of sleep loss in recent months, and I think now maybe the brain tumour the vet suspects was causing the seizures and the anaemia had something to do with that.  Like an old man with dementia, come 2 am you'd get up and you'd start wandering, not realising that that is the time for sleeping.  I'm sorry for the times when my bad sleep-deprived mood got the better of me.  Of course, now you are gone, the thought that I would do that seems horrifying.  But life is messy, isn't it, and we get sick and struggle and stress, and our eyes cloud over and we find it hard to live every day loving what is in front of us. 

But I'm sorry about getting pissed off at you.  You couldn't help it.  You wouldn't do anything voluntarily to upset me, being of a species that is on a higher evolutionary plane than mine.

I watched you on Saturday night and into Sunday morning.  You were pacing like you were searching for your lost energy.  You were a little confused.  But you could be consoled and pacified by a relentless round of patting.  You would let me pat your chest for a while, and then turn around and let me scratch your back.  On and on, through the night.

I dozed off and on.  At one point I woke up and you were right there, right in my face.  Looking, searching.  You always were a smart doggy.  It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in my life.  Thank you for that.

When you finally left us at 10.40 on Sunday morning, there were five people crowded into the vet's surgery.  That shows what sort of a dog you were.  You had a sort of quiet dignity about you, as if you were thinking about things.  You were always top dog no matter what group of dogs you were in.  The sort of innate authority that would be nice to be seen in our new Prime Minister.  You were a dog who changed us.  You did.  Like your granddaddy said, you were the one who taught us the lessons.

Oh, fuck, this hurts an awful lot.  But still, it was worth it.  And it was easy to let you go in the end because it's not like it is when you're a bounding energetic dog of four, or eight, or ten, full of vigour, where the thought of having you put to sleep is ridiculous.  The only thing that could override the dread of seeing you slip away was the desire to end your suffering.

It was easy to let you go.  It's proving a little more difficult to keep you let go.

Truly ruly, Mr Naughty, while I dozed on Saturday night, wishing for an end to this so that I could sleep, so that it would be over, but wanting it never to end, I was thinking about how I felt about us, Once in a Lifetime Dog.  And I thought that though I can't know for certain, I've got an idea that the pleasure and the love were shared equally between us.  But the honour ~ that has been all mine.

Goodnight my Puppy.  Thanks for walking the road with me for 13 1/2 years.

Spirulina for Contact Dermatitis in Dogs

This post can now be found online at Weekend Notes.

Some Things Are Worth Barking At, Some Not

I thought I was in the Matrix for a split second earlier. Lester and I got out for a walk after this afternoon's rain, into clean-smelling air. He was sniffing good smells and licking the grass at the same time. I hope this is because he likes the taste of water droplets on grass rather than the more sinister idea that he likes licking the urine of the dogs he's just been smelling. Who can say, with a dog's taste? They're a tad different to mine. He stopped to take big, long draughts of rainwater, fresh from the sky in the gutters. Whenever he wanted he stopped and had a wee on something green. I tell ya, it's a free dog's life.

Before we left for our walk, the stupid dribbling black chihuahua with a bell around its neck came into our yard. It is fascinated by and terrified of Lester. It stares at him, runs when he goes near it, and runs from the sound of my voice. The chinhuaha's pet, an elderly Asian lady with no English, followed the sound of the bell into our yard and after a whistle the dog came trotting. She put it in a small child's stroller.

Lester and I began walking down the driveway and she followed. "Isn't it beautiful now it's sunny!" I called out. She didn't have a clue what I was saying but words are not necessary when you're making small talk, I find. She nodded and smiled.

We walked to the new IGA just around the corner and bought dog food and yoghurt, Lindt 85% chocolate and a litre of milk. The woman gave me $1.05 change which I carried in my hand, having no pockets in my trackies and having already strapped my heavier-than-before backpack onto my back. We walked past the life-size bronze sculptures of Aussie Rules local icons Dougie Hawkins and Teddy Whitten that stand outside the local pub. Lester barked at them as he always does, whether on foot or in car. The other week he nipped at Dougie's foot but he declined to do that this time. Earlier he had barked at a white plastic bag that had flapped itself up against the chain link fence of the local primary school. Lester barks at the giant white horse outside the Whitehorse City Council in Nunawading. Cows in paddocks are an extra special exotic barking delicacy. I think he thinks they are giant dogs.

After we passed Dougie and Ted we rounded the corner of the housing commission flats and I flung the $1 coin and 5 cent piece into a gap in the fence where three or four palings had come loose, along with a prayer that some little kid who was young enough to get a thrill out of finding a gold coin on the ground would find it in his playtime.

We passed an elderly Asian man with a jeep and two sandy coloured chihuahas. He was putting junk mail from the jeep into the letterboxes of the commission flats. Neither dog had a bell; one barked at Lester as we passed. Lester was too busy sniffing and the chihuahuas too small to disdain a response.

We continued walking, round the shabby streets of my neighbourhood back to home. On Darnley Street, smart people had planted different sorts of succulents in their front yard, plants that thrive on the drought conditions that are Australian living. Such strange, odd and curious shapes. I am liking them more and more.

We continued on and walked past the street that runs parallel to mine. There was the elderly Asian lady with her stroller again, with the dribbling black chihuahua in it. We waved as we passed each other.

The next street was mine. As we turned right to go into it, an elderly Asian man was crossing the road. He had a jeep full of junk mail and a sandy coloured chihuahua. For a millionth of a second I felt my brain stop and get ready to glitch out on the influx. But it was a different man. The single dog proved it, Mr Anderson.

We rounded the corner into our street. When we looked back, the chihuahua was standing at the foot of our street, staring down at Lester. It barked. Lester was too busy licking water droplets off the grass to bother responding.

In rather more attractive surrounds, Lester at the Olinda Arboretum

Death-Row Dogs

Apart from the people he scares when he shrieks at their dogs when we drive past them on the street, my doggy is a well-liked and well-behaved boy. (Well, notwithstanding the Indian guys in the house on my block who are scared of him but want to like him, if only they could overcome their fear). At doggy changeover the other night, Mark and I were saying that Lester has had the most wonderful sort of a life.

Still, I think it's the life that any doggy should have.

Lester was a pound dog. When we went to the Keysborough Animal Shelter to get a pooch, he was one of the dogs we were shown. Had been on death row twice but the vet had seen potential in him and taken him off again in hope.

He'd been at the shelter for three months by the time we saw him in 2000. We took him out of his concrete pen and into the grassy closed off area reserved for getting to know a dog a bit better. Took him off his leash and oooh, yeah. Had a bit of nuts about him, that's for sure.

He was a bit of a risk, I guess. And we were warned; he had a fair bit of energy. I had chronic fatigue syndrome. He was maybe not the best sort of dog for people who'd never had one before, they suggested. But that was okay. We were dog lovers, had both had dogs all our lives. We could take him on. We had a tennis raquet and a big backyard when walks were not possible. It was doable.

He wasn't trained, no. Not in anything. Not in how to be in a car, so Mark had to sit in the back with him on the way home. Not in how to sit. Not in how to not eat Mark's dinner. Not in how to walk on a leash. Not in how to not eat Mark's shoe, nor to not shit inside. Not in how the wrongness of removing a pillow from inside, taking it outside and ripping it up so that the shredded feathers inside cascaded all over the backyard.

"We've got the wrong dog" I groaned at the end of the weekend.

But that's the last time I ever said that. All he needed was some training, some loving, some walking. He was very teachable. And he's had a very good doggy life since then.

I cry every time the Pal dog food ad comes on. The dog in the concrete shelter looking woefully at the people who wouldn't buy him. There is something wrong, I suppose, that I tear up more quickly at abandoned and unhoused dogs than I do at stories involving humans.

They're just so unconditional, dogs, that's all. There's a purity about them that is hidden in humans.

Still, I think humans, in our individual concrete shelters of our own selves, are just as lovable to God as dogs are to us. Despite our horrid evil shitnesses. Despite the evil that is committed by evil people on other evil people. Despite the bloody mess that is the world as we know it.

The human race is designed and destined for green fields. I do so believe that. In ages to come. Not just for the people who get it right, who are white, male and Christian. I do not think God will stop until the last person has allowed him to love them into life. The cross whispers that in this age. Perhaps it will scream it in the next.

Next time I get a dog, I think I might get me two :)

Cartrophen

Update:  There are many people who come to my blog via the search "Cartrophen for humans."  Known as sodium pentosan polysulfate, it is currently in use for cystitis, but in 2010 was proved beneficial in a clinical trial to improve knee cartilage in humans.

Any arthritic dog owners out there (arthritic dogs, not arthritic owners :) who are considering a round of Catrophen injections, I give a hearty aye of endorsement.

(The vet informed me last night that for some unforseen reason Cartrophen is not available to humans - which is a shame, because it helps, very much).

Bit of a time commitment, being four weeks in a row, but it is totally worth it. Lester's groaning has reduced about 80 per cent :)

Dogalog of Dogs and Logs

This is Wysiwyg. He is Kel's doggy and ain't he just so cute! This bone is just a leedle bit too big for this doggy and he did not want a bar of it :)

Now, it might just be me but I swear when I look at his little nose, it looks like it has a picture of a cat on it! Can you see it? Please tell me you can see it :)

This is Lester. He's pretty cute too. Here he stands in the leaf mulch and ferns of Kalorama Park where we recharged our batts today after my art therapy session. There is nothing for it but to describe the smell of Kalorama Park as something if not erotic, at least of the same tonal value. It is humus at its best, and if that is what we come from it then that's fine with me. The combination of bottom notes of deep dank earth and rotting leaves with top notes of leaves and fresh air is heady perfume indeed.



Here are some logs. One of these logs on the path is in its natural habitat. The others have been planed and sawed or whatever you do to them for them to become these posts, which were particularly helpful in stopping me from falling over. Thank you, logs of all varieties.

Here is the dog. Can you see him? See Lester jump. Jump over log. We went a bit off the beaten track. He got a bit puppylike jumping logs. Certainly not behaviour of a dog who is going to be 70 years old, that's for sure. But I think he was enjoying the unfurling too :)



Here is the dog log. I am so glad I took that track that is beginning to be reclaimed by the ferns to come upon this handsome beastie :) I hope whatever the accident was that claimed his ear, that he has recovered now!

Contemplative shit

It's an interesting sort of a health milestone to see how much easier it is these days to wake at 6am because your dog needs to go outside, to step in dog diarrhea as you go, and then to clean up said dog diarrhea with a plastic spatula into a plastic bag after around five hours' sleep. I scrubbed the rug with bicarb soda and vinegar, and poured bicarb all over to get rid of the smell that had inserted itself as firmly as a child's finger into my nose for the forseeable future. I would have been cactus trying to do anything at 6am on five hours' sleep when I was ill. It seems like one of those mini miracles only I can really appreciate now that I can :)

It was enough that I could do that and then go outside with a cup of tea and joy over the sky with streaky clouds and light interplays before the light grey clouds rolled in. I sat and watched the pair of pigeons scrabbling on the garage roof, the same ones who walk on their stalks over the roof across my head when I'm waking up in the mornings. I love the brown crisscrosses on their necks. If it was possible for pigeons to hold pens, they could play very small games of noughts and crosses on each other.

It was enough to sit outside and rub my (washed) foot over the shiny brown back of my dog. To sit in the peace and smell the relatively fresh air, even though only 10 kilometres away from the centre of a small city.

I joyed over all of those things and thought about how far vision goes. What do things really look like if we could see them at their essence? Would we be inclined to fall down and worship blades of grass, pigeon necks, each other? I suspect we would. I am all for more and more of this kind of seeing, as long as it doesn't lead me down the crazy path of bursting into tears on the train because of the play of light on a woman's neck, or into rapturous delirium about the colour of the trail of branches hanging down over the high brick wall of a fence.

Because then I might get locked up :)

I think, however, those early morning joyings may be about the extent of it for me today. Which is unfortunate, because my holidays are coming roaring to a close and I wanted to take myself off today on some sort of an artist date, the first one in weeks and maybe even months. But it's all I can do to stay upright now, unfortunately, the joy of the early morning having been dispelled somewhat by my return to bed for three hours' sleep which has left me feeling worse than I did before I went back to bed.

Still, feeling crap aside, this is the third time this year I have been up to see the beginnings of the day, its aching newness. I kinda like it ... as far as a night owl can, anyway :)

This is how it starts. You hear the kitteh a few days ago. It is meowing outside one of your lounge room windows. It is meowing at whatever is under the house. When you go outside, and lie on the ground, feeling all of your years, you see a pair of eyes shining back at you once your eyes adjust to the dark ... no, two sets of eyes. Are these the parents of the kitteh? One of them is black. You wonder if it's the same one you see running across your yard several times a week.

But this little tacker, you haven't seen before. You're not much of a guesser of kitteh ages, having only ever owned one cat in your adult life. Your family had cats when you were younger, but you can't remember much about them. The most you remember is being forced to cohabit with a snobby snotty half-Persian who you did not like because she would not purr and snuggle and do puss-like things with you the way the other kittehs you had when you were a child did. But you would hazard this little puss is about 12 weeks old. Maybe even younger. It's a pritteh kitteh. Grey and white fur with blue eyes. Maybe it belongs to the houseful of kittehs that live about 5 doors down, and it's now forgotten its way home. You and Lester met the Mummy of those kittehs a week or so ago. She ran towards Lester flat stick and whatcked him across the nose with her paw as he approached. Just so he knew not to mess with her kittens, which were all lolling around the front yard, about six of them. He didn't learn anything from it, unfortunately. Indeed, last time you drove past the house he barked very loudly. Just so she knows he didn't take her attack on board.

Maybe this kitteh belongs there. You dont know. But it's the second day it's been hanging around. And so you feel sorry for it, you know? You leave it a couple of small pieces of shredded cheese on the front step. Not particurly good for cats, you know. So half an hour later you open the cupboard, open the tin of sardines, and put some of them in a plastic container and leave them out near the opening where you last saw the kitteh crawl out from under the house. They are gone the next time you look 10 minutes later.

Kitteh runs away every time you call it. It is curious though, and peeks inside when you leave the door open, walks right in for a few seconds but then bolts when it sees you lying on the couch. But again, an hour later, it does it again. You can see it wants to come to you but it can't override its instincts. Maybe you shouldn't feed the kitteh anymore. Maybe tonight was just to give it some chow in case it hasn't eaten for a few days and is hungry. Because you don't want to encourage it, even though you really want to encourage it. Because there is no problem indulging in this sort of behaviour when Lester is at Mark's, but Lester will at some point return.

Funny, you've been entertaining the notion over the past few months of getting a cat. You just haven't been able to work out a death-proof method to ascertain whether the meeting would be a mutually life enhancing one. How do you determine whether your dog would not eat your kitteh? Would not mistake it for an overgrown hairy mouse? Because God knows, when you had a mouse infestation when you lived in Footscray, he went nuts. Came into his own. You didn't believe he could move so fast, but some long dormant instincts of some doggish ancestry came to the fore and he hunted those poor mice down. Masterfully. But you don't like to think of those memories. It was gross.

So yes. Maybe that first meal needs to be how it stops.

Shame, though. It's real cute :)

Memory, dogs, sculptures and chainsaws

Ever since I was ill with chronic fatigue syndrome, my memory hasn't been so good. Now, my memory has never been all that great, and I suppose five years of smoking 10 bongs a week may have contributed to its worsening. But it's been markedly worse since the whole CFS deal. This doesn't make much sense when you call what I had chronic fatigue syndrome (that is the stupidest, most insulting name ever invented). If you call it myalgic encephalomyelitis, however, it sounds much more likely that a condition involving years of brain inflammation, and neurological messings, will have contributed somehow to this problem. Or maybe I'm just getting older :)

This ponderance about short-term memory makes me think. (Which is good, as long as I realise I'm going to forget that I did, heh :) In some ways, a not-so-great short term memory is a good thing for someone who still harbours hopes that she will actually write and complete something at some point in her life that is not a blog post (nothing personal, darlings :) I remember reading a quote somewhere about writers and compost, about how all the stuff that moves out of our direct memory goes down into that compost and becomes writing fertilizer. My inner Grandma really likes that - what a practical way of recycling my thoughts into something creative :) Coolies :)

Yesterday I took myself off for an artist date. I have begun reading Julia Cameron's successor to The Artist's Way. It's called Walking in this World. I really enjoy her style. One of the things I am agreeing to do while reading this book is to have a weekly artist date. An hour-long date alone, to do things that are festive or that feed my creativity. Because sheesh, the well has been feeling bone dry of recent weeks; it needs refilling. These artist dates are something I struggle with massively. I feel so resistant towards them, which is such a strange thing. Why feel resistant at something that feeds me, that drips down into my days ahead, that renews my focus? I was thinking maybe it was just me that had such major problems with this set playtime, but there must have been a lot of feedback for Julia to write about these dates that their importance should not be denied even though the resistance flourishes. "Resist your resistance," she advises. The ways I will try to sabotage my own creativity never cease to amaze me. What is it? Is it a fear of creativity's power? Or is it, as Cameron suggests, that not facing our creativity means that we don't have to face ourselves? Perhaps that is all it comes down to, and perhaps that is why there must be some sort of ebb and flow in a creative life. I have been facing so much of my own stuff of recent times, there must be days and weeks where the inward gaze stops, or I shall go mad. Or perhaps not even so much the inward gaze - how do you live a life without being aware of what is going on inside you? That's abdication - but more the inward discovery, the realisation of certain unattractive proclivities you have. That is a wonderful thing to have happen, but it is exhausting, and I think there has to be wisdom in the looking and the timing. Like I mentioned at Kent's place yesterday, the ways the Great Creator unravels our stuff is an art form in itself. It's just exhausting, that's all. There needs to be breaks inbetween for rejuvenation.

And so yesterday I took myself off to Gasworks Art Park, after being reminded of it on the telly the other night. This place has been converted from an old gasworks site into a bit of a creative hub. The old buildings have been recreated into about 12 different studios that sit around the outside. Nice red brick buildings they are. Kind of look like stables. On the inside of the site is an off-leash dog park. This place combines two of my favourite things, creativity and dogs, and the combination - even without any directly observed creativity, except the sounds of some sort of chainsaw or such tool from the sculptor's studio - was enough to put a bit of a spring in my step. Creativity fosters creativity the way yeast fosters yeast or hate fosters hate. What organic creatures we are.

I was thinking whilst driving to the park (thank you, Graeme, for changing my tyre) about an idea for a new blog I've got swirling around. Thought I could loosely document different dog-friendly places I visit around Melbourne. The name came to me, seemingly out of the blue: Not Without Lester. Yeah, that sounds alright. Might try that.

Got to the park and began walking and came upon the sculpture that graces the eastern side of the park. Lester barked at it, as he usually does, but it was pretty much bluster, as it often is. Took some happy snaps of the sculpture, thinking that it would be nice for my new blog. Then looked at the name. The sculpture is called Not Without Chomley.

Obviously I remembered that somehow, from last year when I visited this park and read the scupture's name then, while Lester barked at it. But I'd forgotten it, at least in my conscious memory.

Which is kinda cool, I guess. I ... what was I saying?

Happy birthday, dawg

Happy birthday to Abbess Petunia, aka Tune, who has as her pet Christine from Abbey of the Arts.

Tune sure knows how to sleep with all of her being. Those animals - they just know how to be themselves, don't they?

Imagine a world of people who were all fully themselves (it's a promise). If it were possible, we would all be tempted to bow down and worship each other.

A visit from the great sky monster

Last night, Lester stood barking out the open door, into the dark at nothing, seemingly. So I told him off. Turns out he was saying his piece to the great sky monster before it came too close. Then it came closer, rushing through the city in a great swathe that stretched from the north all the way down to the Bay (I checked. I love the Bureau of Meteorology website ;)

The great bucketfuls were so loud on my flat roof that I couldn't hear the radio playing and couldn't walk anywhere without a shivering dog at my feet. As the rain fell, the intense pressure I'd been feeling in my body began to ease. It was like an outward manifestation of the inward relaxation that had happened when I had sat down earlier at my computer to write I knew not what, and the words came, and they relaxed me, and I felt his pleasure. And I swapped, for the 388 millionth time, expectations for expectancy and relaxed into the moment to find God there. Again. Enough.

The rain stopped and the great sky monster brought out his party tricks, throwing his beautiful bolts through the sky, lighting up into the black that wonderful sensuous blue. Sending his great shards of crackling sound through the air. Releasing further the pressure in my body that had threatened to pop it earlier in the afternoon. It's something to do with barometric pressure. Ever since I have been sick, it's been really bad. Some days it can send me to the couch in a raging frenzy of anxiety and tension, sending all my internal dials buzzing backwards and forwards. When I'm already unwell, it's just too much. And so the relief when the storm hit was palpable. With the change in the air, the balloon deflated back down to garden variety crappy, feelings I was able to put aside in such rarified air that can only come with a storm, the sun, a waterfall, or standing on the side of a mountain.

Poor Lester didn't fare so well. I got up with renewed energy and began cooking myself dinner at 9.30 pm. Lester, however, cowed by the overhead shenanigans of the great sky monster, cowered at my feet, all 40 kilos of him, trying to stuff himself into the open cupboard in some kind of frantic effort to get away from it all.

I mourned with him for a while. Poor darling, he does have such a hard time of it. But selfishly, I hope that when the next great storm hits he is at his Dad's place so that I can rejoice with myself rejoicing, instead of mourning with a dog who just doesn't understand that the great sky monster is just having a bit of fun and ain't gonna do him no wrong.

The storm passed, as they always do. I felt cosy, all of a sudden, cooking myself up some good nosh, feeling the exhilaration of feeling slightly unwell. In comparison to how I felt earlier, it felt like magic. Always our moments are defined by the ones that have gone before. Light and dark mixed together, redeeming each other.

The radio was able to be heard once again after the sky monster moved on. Phillip Adams got talking on Late Night Live about his usual interesting subjects and I felt that cosy, comforting, inside feeling of the cooler months. Phillip discussed melancholia, and the place of sadness in our lives, and whether we are too quick to medicalise melancholia, that there is a place in the world for all sorts, that go-getting extroversion might be the only way to be in a culture that expects 24/7 productivity, but that we are much, much more than our small, small culture.

Nothing like a bit of philosophical pondering to redeem a day that was totally shot to hell several hours earlier. Yesterday ran the gamut of emotions, more than usual. I may be a positive melancholic, I have decided, after listening to LNL. I don't know if there is such a thing. I do know that there is certainly a place for it in our world, the world that God inhabits, in dark and alien places. Sometimes, when I ponder that, I get so Zen and calm I couldn't reach out and touch the edges of the moment even if I tried.

Apparently my arboreal fancies have gone too far. Earlier tonight my dog mistook me for a tree. At the dog park, I sat on the ground, while Lester went about his doggy business. Then he came and sat next to me, him and another couple of dogs. And then my trusty canine companion lifted his hind leg and began urinating on my knee.

He stopped when I began squealing in protest.

Perhaps it was a momentary glitch in the doggy mind matrix. He was interacting with another dog at the time ... well, as far as Lester interacts with other dogs; social interaction for him really is all about domination. But perhaps he was so caught up in what he was doing that, mindful of needing to do wee number 47, he forgot for a second that he wasn't standing next to the gum tree further over in the park, but was in fact standing next to the person who is supposed to be higher up in the doggy pack than he is but who is thinking maybe she ought to start doing a bit more pack hierarchy reinforcing.

Perhaps he was doggishly staking his claim - this is my mum, leave her alone (he is rather jealous, I have to say. He doesn't like me talking to other dogs. He comes rushing over when he sees me indulging in such treason, so I have to get my cuddles surreptitiously).

Five minutes later, after the laughter had stopped and I was busy being kissed by Oscar the Husky with the sexy blue eyes (he's rather the ladies' man), I felt another warm trickle on my leg. This time it was the Golden Retriever, expelling his hot, smelly waste on top of Lester's previous efforts.

Totally disgusted, and tired of playing a fire hydrant, I stood up to receive the profuse apologies of the Golden Retriever's two-legged pet who rushed over, regretting this never-before-displayed bad behaviour of his canine. I assured him that his dog was only following suit from my own. We then turned to watch my dog trying to hump his dog any which way he could, despite growls and raised hackles.

The Golden Retriever's pet remarked that Lester was rather like a footballer in his behaviour. I'm inclined to agree with him. He hasn't lived up to his Mr Naughty moniker for years, always such a beautifully well-behaved boy, except for displays of testosterone to other dogs. Not since the first few days when we rescued him from the pound, and he went crazy in his exuberant release from prison - ripping up a pillow and flinging its innards all over the yard until it looked like it had been snowing. Eating Mark's dinner. Chewing up his shoe. Pooing inside. Ever since those early days of doggy badness, he's been a lovely boy. Tonight, he somewhat redressed the balance :)

This is not a valid reason for not going to work:

"Yeah, hi, Pat. This is Sue. I can't come in today because there's thunderstorms forecast and it's raining and it's making my dog shake so I have to stay home with him."

But it should be :)