M.E. Breen

Writing outside is always ten times less successful than I want it to be. Because of the sun and my sunglasses I can’t really see the computer screen, and the breeze is blowing my hair in my eyes and etc etc. Nevertheless! Here I am on my front steps, drinking a neon orange mimosa, celebrating. It’s 3:39 pm, not really the mimosa hour, and I shocked myself by opening a bottle of champagne with no one else around, though it is very cheap champagne, a champagne-ish sparkling beverage, wedged in the fridge door behind the bad olives and the good hot sauce for months, maybe years.  But there are lots of things to celebrate today, and if you can’t celebrate on your own with your computer, what’s to be done with you?

First, I made a hard decision and put it in writing. It felt a little like putting one of my cats in a cat-sized boat and letting it drift out to sea. Ok, not that bad, but anyway, it’s done. Second, the beach crows are in love. I checked the Sibley’s Guide and their chest and tail feathers suggest they are ravens, not crows, but I can never remember to call them ravens. Sometimes they are freaky in their brashness and intelligence, but they aren’t dour or sinister. They act more like professional snowboarders than anything, calling to each other in crow slang and plummeting off cliff tops and, now, flirting like mad. I saw two of them sitting side by side on a branch this morning, each with one end of the same stick in his? her? beak. It was like the crow version of the spaghetti scene in The Lady and the Tramp.

I think I just want to sit out here in the bad-for-writing sun and babble because I’m tired of feeling there must be a better use of my time than whatever it is I’m doing. I’m between 98 and 100 percent certain there is no Guide to Surviving the Recession that advocates drinking mimosas alone on a Thursday afternoon, which I guess is exactly why I’m doing it. It’s not as though I’ve been doing all the things those guides do advocate. I haven’t been perfecting three different versions of my resume or networking or buying 9 Lives cat food instead of Wysong. (The cats don’t even like Wysong, for the record. They love byproducts most of all.)

The great lesson I have drawn from being out of work is that the free time I have in such abundance rarely feels free, and guilt infects everything. Except my mimosa!

A friend of my mom’s sent her some old photos of our family, including the perilously-possessed house I grew up in in Berkeley. It was so beautiful — I’m sure it still is — and looking at the picture I had an old-fashioned thought, or I suppose an enduring thought that expressed itself in old-fashioned language: How we have come down in the world.  In many ways this thought isn’t even true. Living above, or even totally outside, one’s means and then having to live according to one’s means isn’t coming down so much as correcting. I was a child when all that happened, so for me the change was really a move from insouciance to, er, souciance, a move I’m repeating now. As I’ve probably said before, a predictable paycheck lends an aura of predictability to everything else, and its absence casts everything in doubt. Never have I felt more vulnerable to crime, disease, gross accidents of fate. Never have I worried more about the people I love.

On the way to the front steps where I’m sitting now I passed the mailbox, and inside the mailbox I found a letter of solicitation from my university. The particular solicitor is a woman I knew and liked in college, and seeing her name, which is her married name, and receiving this proof of her . . . how do I put it? Her free time? Her disposable interests? Her fundamental security? makes me feel weird.  I can’t shake the image of my life as a giant map, an old-timey pirate-looking map, with bold ink islands and dashes leading to a big X. The hazards are marked: triangles for impassable mountains, wavelets for impassable seas, crosshatching to show the impassable thicket. The path to the buried treasure is clear, but my map is covered with smudges where I stopped and looked around and didn’t know what to do.

I got down on my belly and crawled through the thicket. I’m in there now, in a clearing, with my fizzing orange drink.

A new neighbor moved into the apartment downstairs. She’s been here a week and already I love her.  She looks a little taken aback by the great beams of love I send in her direction whenever we run into each other in the garden. Maybe her instincts about this kind of thing are good and she knows I love her not for what she is, but for what she is not. She is not the old neighbors.

I won’t enumerate their faults. Bad form! They are gone! My memories of them are like the wool dog blanket they left in the yard, slowly disintegrating in the winter rain.

Like everyone else in this neighborhood, the new neighbor has a dog, a giant puppy named Bella. She’s four months old and nearly as big as Truckstop, who regards her with the sedate disapproval of a dowager at a dance.

At first I thought my neighbor had some sort of television addiction. (I guess I’m the sort of person who spends her time worrying about other people’s addictions. I know I’m the sort of person who worries about whether other people are composting a sufficient percentage of their household waste. So go my dreams of glamor and nonchalance.)

Anyway, after a day or two I figured out my neighbor works nights, and when she goes to work she leaves the TV on for the dog, as well as a nightlight, as well as having her friend drop by to make sure everything is ok. And here I am sitting with a draft freezing my knees because Truckstop has fallen asleep in front of the space heater. I know if I move it closer to me she’ll wake up and give me her look of quiet sorrow and walk into the cold bedroom to be alone.

So where am I going with all this about the absurdity of dog love? Two places, I think. Both have to do with decision making, which is something I seem to keep coming back to. Getting a dog can feel like a decision or not. Before I got Truckstop I made a pros and cons list, but the list was both naive and dishonest. “Expensive??” I wrote under cons. “Friend for the cats!” I wrote under pros.

Adopting Truckstop felt as inevitable, as surprising and mysterious, as falling in love with the right person or writing the right book. I think these things don’t have to do with what you decide, but with what you want. What I wanted when I rescued my dog was to be rescued myself, but you can’t command rescue any more than you can command love or inspiration. I don’t mean that I was in danger or despair, only that my life wasn’t living up to my expectations for it, and that the particular, shall we say, machinery of failure, was invisible to me. I thought I wanted things to be different, but what I really wanted was for things to be more. More fun, more sweetness, more idiocy, more exigency, more rules, more risk, more affection. More outside life, less inside life. Dogs bring all those things. I was right to get her. The cats have forgiven me.

Then there is the other kind of pet-related decision making, the small, everyday kind that can feel by turns steadying and oppressive. Do I have enough of the things you need? Can I feed you and treat your ailments? Where will we walk? How much have you eaten today? Will smoked kippers give you a stomachache? Can I let you off your leash?

I like these questions, even when the answer turns out to be No and I have to hustle up to the 7-Eleven in the rain for emergency canned rations, because they are easier to answer than the questions I turn on myself: Am I happy? Am I honest? Am I generous? Am I successful? Am I doing any good?

Truckstop is like a daily puzzle I am always able to solve. Some solutions may be more elegant than others, but rarely does she leave me in doubt for long. I wonder if that’s why it’s so painful when a pet dies — or, I should say, why it can be painful out of measure. The thing that made most sense in your life is swept into the thing that makes least sense. Taking care of an animal requires kindness and routines and almost no imagination. When the animal is gone, there is nothing to replace the body, the body that was the center of everything.

I have been truanting the studio! I have an excuse. My dog has giardia, a condition tiresome, gross, expensive, and pitiful. In addition to taking her on the many necessary walks and buying her the necessary powder (really a powder, like from an apothecary), I seem to think she’ll be less uncomfortable if I stare at her. I tore myself away for a few hours today to write in the lake room. The sky through the skylight is getting dark. I’m listening to Wu tang on my headphones off someone’s shared iTunes library. I’m sitting in the red and purple pleather recliner I bought off craigslist for twenty dollars. One of a kind! You bet!

Anyway, here’s a story. On the way to the grocery store from the dog beach this afternoon I spotted a dog running next to the highway. This isn’t the most terrifying vision of a highway, but it’s not great. Two fast lanes run each direction, flanking an appealingly garbage-strew median of ice plants. My own dog, back when I still thought she was going to be like her predecessor, Angel-dog, wound up on this median strip, under circumstances too humiliating to relate. Anyway, my dog was fine then, and this dog ended up fine, too, though the rescue involved me swerving onto the shoulder and crawling toward it with a horse biscuit in my hand. I think I looked like Golom.

The dog wasn’t interested in the horse biscuit, but I liked it that the guy who works at the stables off the highway brought it over to help. The guy called the dog while I kept running into the middle of the road and waving my arms like a deranged conductor to make people slow down. My move: raise hands overhead, lower hands slowly to the ground, like I’m pressing the air from a giant air mattress. Repeat. Much honking. But also thumbs up from a big rig driver.

Eventually more help arrived in the form of a professional dog walker who coaxed the dog to safety by laying a trail of Goldfish crackers to the cab of his truck. It was like Hansel and Gretel. The owner even appeared at the very end, all contrite for having married that wicked step-mother.

I felt sorry for the dog, not just for getting lost, but for getting found. Maybe he had a good reason for running away. I would undertake the same Conductor Golom rescue again, don’t get me wrong, but it must be frustrating to be a dog in San Francisco sometimes. No one has any faith in you. No one thinks you have a legitimate doggy life. You’re taken out and walked about and taken home again and fed something free-range, but what about your professional goals? What about your dream of following that old hot dog smell all the way down the road? Maybe that dog would have done a fine job avoiding traffic if I hadn’t interfered. Maybe he wanted to be like the dogs in Russia who ride the subway to the best begging spots.

I’m being silly, but I do wonder why I think everything needs to be rescued all the time. Sometimes I think it’s my own rescue I’m enacting over and over, as though I think wandering is always the same thing as being lost, as though I think it’s always a disaster if you don’t know precisely where you are going.

Maybe that’s why I love the Faerie Queene and Inferno and Robinson Crusoe and all the wandering in Grimm’s woods The narrative is going somewhere, the story has limits, the book is only so many pages long, so I know the wandering won’t take me off the map, but at the same time I get to travel along and see what happens without my intervention. I’d like to see my own story unfold without Lady Rescue Ready leaping from the car at every turn. But even that, that fantasy of watching, is a fantasy of control.  We can never know the minor from the major themes, the red-herrings from the true signs, the middle from the end.

“Those who accuse men of always gaping after future things, and teach us to lay hold of present goods and settle ourselves in them, since we have no grip on what is to come (indeed a good deal less than we have on what is past), put their finger on the commonest of human errors — if they dare to call an error something to which Nature herself leads us in serving the continuation of her work, and which, more zealous for our action than for our knowledge, she imprints in us like many other false notions. We are never at home, we are always beyond. Fear, desire, hope, project us toward the future and steal from us the feeling and consideration of what is, to busy us with what will be, even when we shall no longer be. A soul anxious about the future is most vulnerable [Seneca].”

From Montaigne, “Our feelings reach out beyond us,” trans. Donald Frame

(Title is from another essay, “That to philosophize is to learn to die”)

I’ve been thinking a lot about work and identity lately. Or, to return to an earlier theme, not thinking about work and identity, but noticing the effects of not having the one on the other, much as I notice the progress of the amaryllis bulb in its stony bath on my windowsill. What I mean is I don’t watch the amaryllis growing, and often I forget about it, but when I do see it I feel immersed in its little history right away.

Being out of work makes the days dreamy and slow and unfamiliar and full of wonder and threat.  It’s like snorkeling. You’ve been underwater before with a tube and a mask. You know what to expect, but you don’t know what you’ll see. You come back to the same place again and again, hoping each time it will be different, but not too different. You want to see the usual fish and then some rare and wonderful fish you’ve never seen before. You don’t want a long, gray, toothy fish not listed on the laminated guide to appear beneath you. But it might. You are in the ocean, after all. You cannot feel at home in so much water, or have any sense of mastery over its possibilities.

Having a job, by contrast, is like bobbing on the surface of the water in a boat. The boat might be sturdy or leaky or engine-powered or oar-powered, but it is still recognizably a boat. It has a particular shape and design and named parts: hull, ribs, stern, bow, mast, quarterdeck. Yardarm! Clumsy cleat! (My copy of Moby Dick has dozens of illustrations by Barry Moser. UC Berkeley Press. I highly recommend it.)

Even when I pack a lunch and drive across the city and park four blocks away and hump my computer bag and my purse and my porto-coffee cup and that other bag I always seem to be carrying with who knows what in it,  always a different version of the same bag, a Trader Joe’s bag or a WWF bag with a panda on it or that shrieking bird from the Nature Conservancy or a lion or a poppy or a flowering Art Nouveau vine, even with all those bags and the three flights to my studio and the desk and the kneeling desk chair, even with all that, when I arrive I am not at work. Working hard at what I love,  I am not at work.  I am not in the boat. I will not be kicked overboard if I don’t show up tomorrow. I am the only Human Resource. I mean nothing to the State. I like the adventure and I want it to go on being the same but different, and definitely not worse, and I also know I cannot stay in the water forever.

Here are the first four stanzas of the poem “Diving into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich:

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it’s a piece of maritine floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.