DAVID LYNCH ABOUT HIS CREATIVE PROCESS and THE UNIFIED FIELD and ART HOUSE THEATER VERSUS SMALL AN TINY SCREENS

He loves bringing people into a different world.  He misses the quality of celluloid though obsessed with digital.  Loves a continuing story - such as a TV series.

I THINK I FOUND MY WAY : DAVID CROSBY

EXPECTING TO FLY : JAKOB DYLAN and REGINA SPEKTOR

SAVE ME FROM MYSELF by BRIAN HEAD WELCH : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

THIS IS A BEST SELLER ?  That's bad news for all of those who have dedicated themselves to writing a book with substance.

First there is the cover, in which Welch looks a bit like a tattooed Jesus himself - taken down from the cross. 

Full disclosure: I don't think I could identify a single Korn song, Heavy metal might be my least favorite genre of rock and roll, though I know the definition of what it is goes all over the place. I don't enjoy the dark side or violence - and that includes all those video and computer games that are war and destruction stories training humans to have a certain mentality. How can that training and glorification of  violence be separated from school shoot ups?

The subtitle is "How I found God (he means Jesus) Quit Korn,Kicked Drugs and Lived to Tell My Story" 

So, Welch was absolutely no doubt a total addict - speed /meth especially. His is a horror story also of violence in relationships begot by drugs or perhaps what is revealed as a total lack of inner awareness. The reportage is of Korn's success without any mention of their creative process. Highly successful, earning millions of dollars, the money and chaos indulged in allowed Welch to have a massive and steady supply of drugs.  Maybe he was too obliterated to know how it was they succeeded.

So you may be wondering, as I did, where the rubber meets the road.  Why do you suppose drug addiction and chaotic excess seems to be so much part of rock and roll, because - hear this IT WAS NOT ALWAYS and IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE.

Here is a scenario from my life worthy of my TALKING TO STRANGERS series, except it happened years ago, that might relate.

In my series about friendships with mentally ill people a while back, one of the people I mentioned, a woman in an unenviable marriage, who was not on drugs nor was her husband, did not take to my loving suggestion that she try therapy. She, as is apparently typical of people with Abused Woman Syndrome, found a way to blame me and take it out on me, even though I had nothing to do with her meeting the man she married, the decision to marry him, or the decision to stay with him but have an affair with a Bad Boy to keep on in the marriage. This was all her doing.

I had been the listener for many months - years - as she described in as much detail as possible - the tiny interactions with the Bad Boy that kept her hopes going that he was Mr. RIght. The whole ordeal had been hard on me too because I did care about her and no longer lived nearby so what I was hearing and seeing was via her reportage in long distance telephone calls. Then when I finally traveled and saw her and met the Bad Boy, I knew it was all wrong and I had to say something. 

So what happened was the friendship ended.  After several attempts on my part to both stand my ground and let her know I cared and wanted the friendship, her onslought of punishments for speaking my truth - the truth - went on and on.  I was bewildered at the turn of events.  

At that time of my life I was barely aware of mental health issues or Abused Woman Syndrome and as for drug addicts, I didn't keep friendships with any knowingly and was also barely aware of their machinations to get what they wanted out of people. 

One day I was sitting in a coffee house, a rather bare-bones place where there were no barristas and nothing fancy but there was an ongoing pot of your average drip coffee. When a group of AA Twelve Steppers came in and sat together having after-meeting talk, I couldn't help but listen in a bit and decided to run what I had experienced with this ex-friend past these AA people.

They told me that she had never been my friend, that she was a user (i.e. her only use for me was as an unpaid therapist substitute) who didn't care about me. They said that the Bad Boy was her drug. I felt hurt, though not by them.  I knew they were speaking their truth and were not trying to hurt me.  

What happened after this was that very slowly I started having contact in the very same coffee house with people who were addicts on stuff and off stuff. Over time I learned the hard way some of these people (on or off drugs) were also liars, cheats, and manipulators. I became convinced that it was this lack of integrity, this amorality, this narcissism, that was really behind an addict psychology.  (I want to clarify here that I'm talking addicts like Brian Head Welch, though an addict often starts as a casual and once-in-a-while imbiber or experimenter.)

I also learned this from the AA Twelve Steppers: People who are addicts, on substances, like Brian Head Welch, are obliterating experience, they are not growing, and when they get off their drugs, they are usually at the age emotionally and so on, that they were at before they started.  Which means that, if you were 16 when you started and stop at 36, well, non-addicts who are 36 don't get it right away that we're dealing with a 16 year old.  

Causing oneself pain while taking drugs and taking drugs to avoid paid is an unwinnable situation. 

Now, this may or may not be the case all the time, but I really do not know what comes first; Books like SAVE ME FROM MYSELF suggest that the drugs themselves are so strong, so conning, that its near impossible to talk back to them and say NO!  And since I have 0 experience with meth, or cocaine, have not taken knowingly and willingly any drug* that is not a prescription, I can't say I've got any experience to rely on as a reference. 

As for the conversion to Jesus, I wish Welch luck on that one, as addictions go its probably one of the least harmful. A small last portion of the book is filled with the usual you hear from the recently converted or brain-washed, bla bla bla.

So 'save yourself' some time and after reading this review, don't waste your time with this best-seller. You have better things to do.

* Years ago I did try grass a few times.  I'm in favor of medical marijuana but hate the smell of weed - especially skunk  - which is always drifting over my neighborhood and can incite asthma. I cannot live in a house with people who smoke weed.  

C 2022 Christine Trzyna

TAKE FIVE : DAVE BRUBECK

1964   Paul Desmond - alto sax, Joe Morello - drums, Eugene Wright - bass, Dave Brubeck - piano

ERIC EDSON LECTURE ON SCREENWRITING STORY STRUCTURE and THE RITUAL OF STORY

Am not involved in screenwriting but this lecture is worth the listen for any writer.  Every genre has its conventions - limitations - such as how much time a person who is reading or watching is going to spend.  Eric Edson's lecture makes me wish I were back in college.

I disobey the idea that a blog post should only take a minute to read.

Visual storytelling (film) is different than novels...  Emotion and Character through BEHAVIOR.  Plot and character is the same in film.  No narrator telling us what's going on.

Hero and adversary creates conflict.  Only 14 categories provide characters of either helping or hindering a hero from getting to their goal.

VAL KILMER on SPIRITUAL SEARCHING from his memoir I'M YOUR HUCKLEBERRY

Excerpt:  page 42 

At a ridiculously early age, I was spiritually ambitious, devising five-year plans to achieve self-realization and change my life forever.  I'm convinced that every plan worked even as every plan failed,  I carried heavy books in my outings into nature. When they became too heavy to lug any longer I left them at my favorite sights, imagining that a fellow wanderer would find enlightenment at the very spot where I had laid my burden down...   -Val Kilmer

CAVES: EXPERIENCE THIRTY : CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

Many a writer wishes they could go stay in a cave and write - no interruptions - alone time - and cannot be found.  Have you ever had the experience of the feeling that no one can find you - to call upon you - to obligate you?  

Describe your own personal cave fantasy.  What creature comforts, if any, would you take in with you?  How's the lighting?  How long do you stay in there?  Keep going -

C 2018-2022  Christine Trzyna 

All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use this post in not for profit situations. Please credit me. Send me love.  It's karma.

SUAVECITO : MALO

WAITING FOR THE BODY PICK UP

Having found her body around 5:30, I called the nearest city shelter, around 6. The shelter is part of the system in which I had adopted her and licensed her and been forced to give her yet another rabies vaccination against my better judgement, but in order to legally keep her. It was a number I had for some time. A neighbor had told me that I could take her there to the shelter but as it turned out, the place that offered 24 hour phone service had a recording that they were not open so it was after hours. Maybe this is still Covid crap. 

One of the women in the back house told me I should to go to the corner store for a bag of ice and we would put my dog's body on this ice. She talked using a picnic cooler. All I could think of was my dog bleeding out into a borrowed picnic cooler and her body being frozen solid instead of going through rigor mortis.

I said I was sure there was a 24 hour number to call and got on the Internet. It turned out that body pick up is the Department of Sanitation. We scheduled a pick up but were told that there was a 24 hour window and I should put her body in a plastic bag and then in a box, and PUT HER ON THE CURB.  i.e. like garbage.  However, I recalled someone telling me long ago about their dog being taken away by a man who had shown compassion by this service.

If I had decided to give my beloved dog the death shot, her body to the crematorium would have been paid for and handled by the vet.  Without a yard to bury her in - one more illegal thing in the county anyway - I had to have her body removed. It was too late for anything else and I had no choice.

There was a chance in hell I was going to put her on the curb like garbage, unattended. and contemplated being out there all night to keep away raccoons, wandering big dogs, maybe coyotes, and worse, insects who wanted to chomp. 

Please God, let her body go unviolated.

So back to the bath tub.

The woman from the back house got on the phone and asked if reasonably it would be morning and they said yes.

After my dog had laid on her bed dead in the tub for about an hour or so, I took a picture of her, just for me. I looked at it later and apparently was shaking too bad to take a good picture. I know this may be morbid but I thought about humans who used to do this "last picture" as a last memory, which was private, and how awful it had been years ago when the National Enquirer violated Elvis's privacy in death by running a photo of him in his coffin.

I decided to go ahead and have some tea and make myself a quick dinner. It was luke warm black tea and not great tuna and macaroni and cheese, but I thought I would do next what I had to do, if I took care of myself by eating.

Although there had been dogs - other people's dogs - in my childhood, I had never dealt with a dead dog before. My first pet, a goldfish, found dead, got flushed down the toilet, and my hamster I put in a cigar box along with some flowers and gave a Hindu cremation in the lot behind my childhood home.

When I went back in to see my dog in the tub on her bed,  I noticed that her tail, that had been curved along her backside when I found her, was now sticking strait out and back. I have since been a bit obsessed with figuring about when she died and if the notion that I should go home early and see her was psychic. I saw that a few tiny flees were decamping. I had bathed her in a new shampoo with aloe and chamomile the morning of the day before the day she died. So her fairly clean and groomed body was completing the process of rigor mortis and cooling on its own.  Fleas abandon a body that is not warm.  I brushed them away from her hair and have no idea where they went.

I had on hand this large empty white cardboard file box for some time, which I thought I was going to use when I went through smaller boxes of paperwork. I realized it had been sitting there to be used as a cardboard casket.  

I walked to the closest store, where I told strangers in line my dog had just died, and bought what I thought was a five dollar bag of white plastic bags and later realized I had paid $8 for. Plastic; it has its uses. I chose the garbage compactor type, which turned out to be the best choice due to its blocky size. At least it was white and thick enough to not rip or tear and did not look like the black you throw yard refuse and leaves in. It was also thin enough to see that she was in there. I wondered if her spirit was around to see me come into the house, bend to find her, touch her, to carry her on her bed to the tub, and now - 

Although she probably could have lain exposed longer, I became more concerned that flies might find her. There had been some in the house over the last few days. While bending over the tub, I was able to pull one plastic bag up and another down over her, not smothering or harshly tight on her body and bed, not that she needed air to breath, but her body did. With her tail adding a new dimension as it now seemed even more stiffly away from her body, this package all fit perfectly in the big white cardboard file box, which now rested on the bathroom floor.

I got out a green marker and I wrote her name in big letters on the top of the box and drew a heart. I wrote the number for pick up. I wrote her birth and death date, and  "A loved and loving maltese-poodle."

I never opened the lid to look in after that. Closed casket. Privacy in death?

I tried to sleep but it was impossible. My heart raced. I worried more about insects crawling in from the floors. I told myself I dare not sleep in, or the pick up would pass us by.  I wrote e-mails to some friends, full of anguish. At maybe 3 or 4 in the morning I 'slept' for an hour.  At quarter to six as the dawn rose, I took a chair outside and then brought my little girl out. Two trees out there that have been suffering from drought, shaded over, lots of insects in the morning soil, at least there was a cement area to set her down on. I started crying to myself again.  

Some dog walkers were going by.  I tried to warn them that I had a dead dog in a box.

All a couple people wanted to know was "What time are they coming to pick her up?"  I said, "Probably sometime this morning but they have till 6 tonight. It's OK, I've waited longer for car repairs."

"I can't just leave her out here."

"No you can't."

I tried to read. I ran in for some instant hot coffee and got a warmer jacket. I felt a little drizzle or wet dew coming down off the tree leaves and put plastic over the top of the box.  Don't rain just yet.

Sitting with a body in death is what people used to do, before funeral homes had come and go visitation hours. I hate funerals and the whole funeral home scene. I've read "An American Way of Death."  I think the funeral business is a greedy one, the cost of funerals and burials out of reason. 

I remembered this news. When Mick Jagger's long term companion, L'Wren Scott, commit suicide, a woman who was six-foot-three barefoot, 'hung' from a doorknob with a scarf, her friend the actress Ellen Barkin came and sat with her body, and though of course I never met or knew either person, and had not known anything about her or that she was Jagger's long term companion, I felt profound respect for Ellen Barkin. She had not avoided that scene.  What a friend she had been to L'Wren.

Not that my dog's death had anything in common with L'Wren's.

My neighbor with his dog, my dog's buddy, walked by and his dog, from a few feet away, looked towards the box, and took a deep obvious inhale. Did she smell only death or know my particular dog was dead in there? What had happened overnight under that plastic?  One article I read on the net suggested that within hours a dog waiting for pick up could stink up an entire house. I smelled nothing lingering in the air of the bathroom, nor outside. It had been fairly cool and was that morning.

At nine thirty I finally saw a man in a green truck, an old man who I imagine had a part time gig doing this, and when I saw him I burst out in tears.  "I found her dead when I got home," I sobbed. I knew this old guy was small but tough. He's the one who gets calls about dogs who got killed by cars, some who have no ID, and has to look at that mess. "I'm sorry," I said, "You must have the worst job in the world, having to pick up dead dogs."  

"It can be difficult at times," he said. Then he looked at my box, and all I had written, and I saw it, he knew my dog was a loved one. He stopped for a moment, a seconds long affirmation, and then he picked her up and took her to the truck. What I had written on her cardboard casket had humanized her, I think.  And then as this was my last good-by, I thanked him. Then a new thought came to me, that on the other end, maybe someone else with gloves would have to take her out.  And maybe then the respect for my beloved animal friend would be over.

I started thinking about cremation of humans, how the cheapest services picked a dead person up quickly and they were on fire within hours. You had to pay more to have a dead human lay somewhere for three days, which many a tradition believes is how long the human soul lurks around, sometimes not knowing they are dead. Soon my dog would be a puff of smoke over in Long Beach maybe and probably on a pile of dead animals. 

I knew I should sleep but I couldn't.

I did dishes. I thought about returning unused dog food to the store and giving the rest away.

I took the numbered tag she had worn for a decade, put it on a string, and put it around my neck.

I did the dishes.

Without changing clothes or washing my hair, I headed out on foot, aware I was bedraggled. Maybe I could walk some of the angst off. Oh no, I would never be pulling her down the bumpy street in her carrier or have her leash in my hand with her on the other end.  I would never have reason to sit in the grass at a park to be beside her sleeping. I thought I wanted to go get drunk.  I rarely drink but in this case maybe drunk would be better. 

A friend had given me a gift certificate at Christmas for a certain restaurant that features a micro brewery.  I had used part of it months ago but the fact is, I hate beer.  The beef burger slider I had was real good and I'd had a glass of wine but it was dull wine, not the type that leaps with life and makes one giddy. 

I had met a lot of people with my dog. You could say we were known. I walked along wondering who I might see, who I might tell.  It turned out quite a few.  Many had a dog death in their own history, most knew to say they were sorry, some actually looked sad or distressed for me.

I got to the restaurant thinking their happy hour started at one, but it turned out to be at two. So I walked around and into some stores, knowing I wasn't going to buy anything, basically loitering.  I picked up free magazines and papers and skimmed them.  When I saw someone coming with their dog, I told them mine had died the day before. I judged their old dogs as more lively than mine had been at the same age.

When I got back to the restaurant at two the waitress came up to me and handed me a $20 bill. She said, "Someone who was dining here overheard you, and said to order whatever you want."

"Really?  How sweet!  Are they here now?"

"No they left. They also asked me if you were a regular here, are you?"

"No, I have a friend who gave me a gift certificate at Christmas and I've only been here once before. She is real picky about food and prides herself on knowing restaurants."  (I blabbed my friend's name.)

"So you follow her lead?"

"Yes."

"I told them you were just real stressed out because your dog had just died."  

(Maybe they had overheard me ask her an hour earlier if they still had happy hour and that I wanted a drink?")

I ordered chili, a hot dog, fries, and though there were tempting alcohol creations on the menu, a glass of that dead house wine, which, with my lack of sleep, probably served as to push me closer to it. It was all good, but the stranger's unexpected generosity did not prevent me from being in shock at the total bill with tip. $7 for a plain hot dog?  Noone had asked me if I might like some onions or relish? How could I spend like this?  What was left was about $6, I guess that paid for the plastic bags I bought.  OK.  Alright.  Play it forward.

I sat far from groups of diners and was mostly ignored by the waitress and her helpers.  No napkins either.  But that was OK, because I was thinking of my dog, still shedding tears, and talking to myself or her as well. People reminded me she had been on death row and I had given her a decade more of life. 

I once heard talking to oneself is a writerly trait.

I heard my old friend Wes in my head, joking around.

Me: "I've been talking to myself."

Wes: "Must be a good conversation." Eyes twinkle.

There was one thing that made me smile and feel calmer as I sat out there in the morning cool with the tiny droplets of rain and the dismal sky and my dog in her white cardboard casket, sheeted with white plastic.  And that was thinking of my friend, M. who had died years ago, during the first strange and scary rage of AIDS.

This was in the early stages of the epidemic when the disease was a mystery and before there were drug cocktails.  The LA Weekly had a front page article at some point that was extensive about the latest theories which included transmission from monkeys to men. 

M. had come to Los Angeles as a teenager, alone in this world. Things happened.

I had not terribly mourned his passing, nor was I without feeling. As it turned out, he hadn't complained enough for me to understand that he had been homeless and sick for a while. I find it somehow easier when a death is expected and I had been along on that ride with him, though there were some others too who stood by him. He had been unaware, until he was diagnosed, and had not been diagnosed until he experienced a drastic weight loss. When he died, science had gotten to the point where they knew he had a very early, very slow moving version of HIV, that had taken a decade at least to show up, while at that point some mutations could kill in six months.

Recently, I dined with the very same friend who had gifted me the Christmas gift certificate for the micro-brewery. She is not vaccinated for Covid and we had not seen each other in at least three years.

We met outdoors at the best Mexican restaurant in our vicinity, in her opinion, also expensive. Lately I suspect she got an inheritance.

I found myself telling her about M and not in the most eloquent way. I stopped and started and wound around the point, loosing my thoughts between eating a little this and a little that. I'd told her the story that basically ended with M. having proven to be the very model of forgiveness, though he was not at all religious.

She said, "Well good for him!"

I said, "I could not have."

She said that M.'s story, of his mother and a sister taking a charity up on two tickets to LA to see him as he lay dying, and then using their time here to sight-see and even go disco dancing, and then absconding to leave him there to die without them at Christmas, was something that was in a film she had seen. 

He had not wanted me to visit because I was taking classes and people were coughing in my classes. After a bout in intensive care and isolation room hospitalization in which I, as a visitor, had to mask-up so as to not infect him, he was down to 12 T cells and anyone with a cold could have hastened his death.

However, after hearing his mom and sister had gone, I insisted that I would come for Christmas, and had made the lasagna that he said he wanted to eat to take with me. Instead I got a call early in the morning that he had died in the middle of the night.

But suddenly as I sat with my dog's coffin waiting for the body pick up man. I was thinking of M., him smiling, looking healthy and in a light tweedy summer suit. I said to whomever was listening, "M, would you take care of my dog on the other side?  I think you would do a good job of it."  And I had an image of my dog smiling too. I only worried that when I got there he might not want to give her back. The idea of M taking care of my dog cheered me immensely.  I thought it could be a good win-win situation. 

I'm having difficulty adjusting.  I'm on a computer and I think "She must be sleeping, she's so quiet." And then I think, "No, she's dead."  Or I find myself thinking "I better go home and feed her," and I realize no need to. I realize that for a decade she was always on my mind and that I did live my life around her, and she lived her life around me.

And that buddy dog who sniffed towards her as she lay there in that box waiting for the body pick up has been coming around, looking for treats, sitting in the space where they would both sit, waiting a while.

C 2022 Christine Trzyna

MY GIRL - THE TEMPTATIONS

For my girl, my doggy, one of the songs I would sing a couple stanzas to her.

STIFF AS A BOARD - LIGHT AS A FEATHER

STIFF AS A BOARD - LIGHT AS A FEATHER

Up in the middle of the night. 

I came home yesterday to find my dog, a wonderful person, dead in her bed.  Based on some research I did afterwards, I'm bothered that I may have had an urge to go home early and see her, take her somewhere, and that she may have died just about that time.  A sense of guilt that maybe she had known and was waiting for me to do just that and I failed. Though it appeared to me that rigor mortis had set in, I didn't try to lift her from the bed. I suppose I was in shock.  

That she died on one of her beds, made it all easier for me in the end. Her tail was still down around her backside and her eyes were closed.  An hour or so later, I lifted her and thought she felt much more heavy than she felt living, bed and all, I put her in the tub, with fears of her bleeding out.  Her tail jutted out stiffly too by then and a few fleas were abandoning her, so that indicates that her body had not cooled completely when I found her. I read later that I should have used gloves. 

Maybe she got a private moment to die. Maybe this could have happened when I had her out somewhere. 

As I'd touched her hair on her head and stroked her side, maybe still warm but maybe that was the room, I'd heard a little bit of air escape her lungs.  It was a last breath out, not in. 

DAILY PAWS : SIGNS A DOG IS DYING  This is a good article, but perhaps it should be called Signs a Dog is Aging and Getting Closer to Dying.

I believe she died while sleeping, of heart failure, and that she spewed sputum as the process.  As for sleeping, that was something she had been doing more of. I would joke with her that she was getting lazy and had to get up for the day, yet I also read to not wake a dog who was sleeping. Usually the smell of wet food would get her up. Lately I'd been thinking I might come home and find her sick or in significant pain or in trouble and face an emergency, of having to put her down. I had hoped that she would die in her sleep, that it would not be me forever struggling with the when to give her the shot of death, even as I have long believed that humans should have the Right to Die especially as we have been humiliated with the inhuman horrors and invasive nature of medical 'treatment' and unnatural death. 

I started meeting people who told me that it had been the worst, though they had wanted to be there for that moment with their dogs. One friend is upset and guilty because his fourteen year old five pounder had seized for hours, but stopped when they got to the vets. He went ahead with the shot of death anyway. " I could tell he was afraid and he knew what was next and I betrayed him."  (It was because of this five pounder who could bark at me forever, until I was invited inside, that I met this friend in the first place.  When I dog-sat him, he would make his presences known, waking me up just by staring at me, and I would scoop him and have him sleep next to me.)

More than one person had told me they could never get another dog because it was all too hard when one died.

My dog was quite old and had outlived the expectation of her years. The times seven does not work exactly, but ancient. Seven times thirteen plus four. About 96 human years.

She was feeble. I was looking into ordering a hip support for her, had just last week spent some time on-line looking at various contraptions from the extremely expensive to the inexpensive, had notes about how to measure her. I'd been giving her more soft foods. She once pulled me down the street but now lagged behind me so I slowed to meet her step and took her out without a leash pulling on her neck, let her catch up with me, walked twenty feet away because I learned that was the best range for a dog's vision. I had made soft pull long leashes that allowed more flexibility. She had been going blind. I knew a surgery could fix the cataract but also didn't know if she should be put to sleep for any surgery.

We had stayed home over the three day holiday but I had taken her to a park where we sat under the trees and she slept on the grass earlier in the week, and twice the week before that. She walked, she slept, and then I put her in her carrier and wheeled her when it was clear she was fatigued. The ride was bumpy. Yet, she did want to go with me. She was up for treats.  Sometimes she would look towards me as she realized we were at a grassy park and smile like she had for so many years.

I had started putting a small water bowl under the bed nearer her, a couple years ago so she wouldn't have to go the whole way into the kitchen if all she wanted was water.

I don't know if we do right by our dogs. I even question mandatory spaying and neutering. I'm not sure all breeders are horrible people. I'm horrified with what some people do to dogs and with dogs. I have reason to think that before me she was in a backyard breeding program. To be specific I think some Mexican-Americans with a back yard had bred her and sold off her puppies. I think there was a woman and children there, so probably a man too. I know the condition she came into the shelter with. Hair that was full of long rasta dreadlock type knots that pulled her skin, worms, and someone who refused to give their name or pay twenty dollars who the intake worker wrote in as "probable owner." The shelter had groomed her, cleaned her teeth, vaccinated her, and given her ten days instead of five to be adopted. A vet had written that she was a "sweet animal." She was also beautiful but near five years old. In a 'senior dog' kennel at the time, she had been bypassed.

She was going to be put down that morning when I walked in and inquired about her, if her owner had come and gotten her, if someone had adopted her.  (And at the time I did not know that five days was the limit before the death shot.)

Morning of, I had fed her, walked with her a little.  I had her up on my belly and stroked the length of her body and told her she was mummie's girl and so pretty. I had petted her, her side and her fluffy head, and told her I loved her three separate times as i got ready and as she lay in her bed ready to sleep, before I left at quarter to ten.

Could I have comforted her? Stopped it? Would she have heard me or understood if I talked her into or out of death? Or went on about how it was OK and she had been wonderful and how much I loved her?

When I found her dead, I stroked her side and she wasn't cold exactly, her ear flopped, she was solid and heavy, and her tail was still down near her butt. There was clear foamy sputum - a lot of it -  but her eyes were closed, her position a little straight, yet still a posture that would indicate restful sleep until the moment. Her posture could have also indicated a spell of trying to breath. Could she have slept through it?

I do wonder if dogs have dog angels or ancestors or old friends or old lovers or children or grand-children or great-grandchildren who come to take them to their next phase.

About a month or so ago I house-and-dog sat and my dog and my friend's dog at one point appeared to be unified in looking up at something or someone invisible to the human eye. I felt there was a spirit in the house who was paying attention to them, maybe even giving them some instructions. I hoped it had nothing to do with me. They were unified and next to each other looking.

I knew I could not have her forever.  I hoped she would die before I did. I feel pretty sure I cannot have another dog, that she was my one and only, at least not anytime in the realizable future.  And my life was better with her. She enhanced my life. People can talk all they want about how now I have more freedom now, such as to travel, when I thought about how I might travel with her. 

It was always good to have her along. Most often better too. There were places I went where I would have felt strange, even less safe, to be there without her, rather than alone. Because of her I met and talked to many a stranger, and mostly it was dog talk or small talk, but I was in place rather than out of it.

In these recent weeks I often wondered if it was best to leave her be yet when I took her to a park or out doing shoppimg, she did venture to go sniffing, she did watch birds - or saw movement.  I think of one time when she was younger and got fixated on an oblivious squirrel and she began to pump her jaw in anticipation and saliva ran. One time she broke her leash when she bolted after one and was suddenly a park away, a man yelling at me to leash my dog, me holding the broken leash up in one hand and yelling "Grab her." Her running after one ball after another, holding the ball in her mouth and running towards me, time and time again, dropping the ball near but not in my hands.  She was graceful and athletic.  She earned the arthritis and hip displacia.

It was kind of like maybe she thought she should sleep the day away and yet once there on the grass under the trees, she was glad she had come. Kind of like how we sometimes feel when we go along with a friend because they want someone with them, yet the destination of their choice turns out to be fun. I had considered buying her special boots to steady her traction.

I'd promised to be her forever home and that promise was kept in that I never gave her up or up on her. As for 'home'  I'm not sure I have ever actually had one or live in one; I suppose it depends on what comfort you feel living where you do. We have lived in one too many compromised situations: rotten greedy landlords, the kind of persons who you hope get run over by a steamroller (just flattened like in the cartoons) and some lousy neighbors too, the kind of people who you hope won't knock on your door, even a stalker-type who stole from the porch and looked into windows.

There has been some discussion about why dogs are better than people. A dog is rarely a son-of-a-bitch.

Though she had slept with me every night for years, in the last year or so I had feared she might fall out of the bed or step out of it while I slept, and had put her to bed in her own on the floor. I reasoned that dogs like their den and that she might like to be under the bed.

I often looked at her in her bed,  looked to see if she was awake and hanging out or sleeping, gave her a rub, let her know I was around, talked to her. I loved to come home and see her waiting for me which she often, though not always did, by a gate between rooms with sight of the front door.  

"Where's my little girl?"  

Why do you call me a little girl mummy, when I am a mother, grandmother, great-grandmother?

Of course, by smell she knew I was around. 

She had three beds and two were usually clean and available so she could find her comfort spots.  One more cushiony, one more flat to the floor, one with a higher head rest but also a center pillow that moved around a lot.  She died on the hot pink one that was cushiony and had been a gift.  I'd throw a blanket in and she'd enjoy fixing her bed a bit. The day before she died she had at one point tried to make her bed more comfortable. I heard some vigorous pawing going on.

I did my best for her. Someone else might have done more. 

With me she was never abused.

I got lucky with her in so many ways.

Do we know if dogs have memories rather than just instincts?  

One of my friends says "They never forget."

She never forgot she had been abandoned before. She never forgot that she liked children and would let them pet her. She never forgot that someone had hurt her clipping her nails. 

Most people were nice, or nuetral, yet we had encountered some bitches, one who went in and complained to management at a grocer and had management calling me out on a loud speaker over it, and the bitch threatening to call the cops. My dog had only been outside, tied on a long leash away from the doors there, a few minutes. She informed me that it was not legal to tie a dog up.  (She was wrong.  The tie up laws are about those dogs who are for hours or forever chained, even in their own yards.) While dog theft is always possible where criminals live, and there are so many people who steal not only dogs but laptops, hotspots, your hat, so many things stolen from me over the years - even a bag of groceries I left on a community shuttle and intellectual properties and my image, taken without permission. I, at the time, was not willing to challenge a store's rules about dogs who come in with owners having to be service animals.  (Now I go into a grocer and I see people with dogs all over the store.)

I recall how I managed to verbally insult this woman back when I got outside and found her standing there, saying "She is my dog. You go ahead and call the cops and see how this comes down. You're a business-minding trouble - making bitch, you're probably mentally ill, and I can bet you do not even have a dog yourself. Get the hell away from us."  (Don't get me started on left-to-the-left and right-to-the-right nut cases.)

Then I went back into the store and complained to the manager and called corporate.

This is not all defense this is the truth:

My dog was kept clean and groomed by me. I had stopped taking her to one dog park because there was so much filth there that I'd have to bathe her each and every time we got home. It wasn't just time consuming. It was a trade off between her getting some exercise and over-bathing and compromising her skin. Also I had seen one owner allow their dog to attack another, draw blood, and walk away there.

She got exercise, some years more often than other years. In the years in which she walked well and pulled me or kept pace, we sometimes walked miles, down sidewalks. She lived a citified life with me, then a bit more suburban one. She seemed to prefer pavements over grass, because she could go faster. But in recent times I sometimes carried her to grass, because I thought this was easier on her hips.

I varied her diet, she never over-ate, she had a steady weight. Give me credit for not making her fat and hurting her joints that way. She was taking natural medicine treats for arthritis and joints and to keep her senior bladder well.  I never used the doggie medical mj I bought, wish I had, but felt unsure. 

Her hair continued to grow at fast pace, though she had some balding spots. 

Only twice in many years was she mysteriously ill for a couple days where she would not eat. Only a few times did she throw up. Only a couple times did she do a poop that made me wonder, since she had been regularly pooing when we went out. One time she did so when a man we did not like came over. Had she stored all that, just to make a point?

The morning of, a male dog about her size sniffed her and she sniffed him and I told the owner of that dog, as I had been telling others, that she was going to be fifteen. I wonder as she and this male dog communicate?  Did she know or did the other dog know she was dying?

Sometimes I would hold her up in a mirror and say "Whose that doggie with mummy?  Is that you?" 

They say a dog is too dumb to know.  They say a dog is not as smart as a chimp because a chimp can direct.  They say the smartest dogs are as smart as a three year old human.

One time a plumber was coming and because she liked to get underfoot, I tied her to the refrigerator door. He came and went and I ran out to do an errand.  When I got back there she was. She looked in my eyes, smiled, and then looked towards the fridge door.  Three times.  That's directing,  I followed her movement and saw that she needed to be untied, that she was directing me to the tie up.

It was clear that she never had toys or training, other than being housebroken, wherever she had before.  She had no interest in anything rubber or chewy, ringy-dingy or squeeky. A one dollar cloth yellow dog with bulgy eyes was the only toy she would run and save from the vacuum cleaner.  At one point she had a little basket and she would show me how she put the cloth dog and balls in the basket. She also liked to prove she had been playing with toys while I was gone by showing me when I entered, but I knew the toy had been right there in the same spot all day.  I thought this was like working only when the boss was around.  (A bit of "The Secret Life of Pets.)

One time I stayed at a friend's to care for his dogs and had her with me.  We stayed in a bedroom with floor length mirrors. I saw that she was facing the mirror and staring into it for hours. Did she look in to her own eyes in the mirror and know that she was seeing herself? I tend to think something was going on in her head about this. But maybe she just thought she and another dog were having a stare down.

Her eyesight had dimmed and so had her hearing, though I don't know how much.  She seemed to show up for treats. She knew where the doggie door was - most of the time - and where the water bowls were. We previously had lived without one and I took her out four times a day, when I got up early in the morning, before I left the house, as soon as I got home, and before retiring for the evening.  But she was able to use the doggie door to go out as needed, and I thought that was a good thing, since maybe as she aged she wouldn't have to hold it so.

I bathed her twice in a week with a new aloe and oatmeal shampoo, had just cut out some tangles in her hair that were mysteriously formed and trimmed her dewclaws and bathed her Wednesday morning - the day before. The morning of, she had hopped up the steps on the way back from our brief walk in the cool air and was interested in eating.

But it was her day of death.  And I suppose busy people always die on days when they have more to do and plans.

I had to get some work done. I had long lists of things that needed edited, that needed researched, that needed printed out and scanned.  Excuses.

Long ago when I was a teenager, one of my classmates invited me to a sleep over party at her house. They played a game called Stiff As A Board - Light As A Feather.

I lay down on the floor between them and four girls extended their two hands, with two fingers each, under my back, not too far under.  They chanted Stiff as a Board, Light as a Feather, three times, and then lifted me up. For a moment I felt utterly weightless and in the air.  Was this just diverting a hundred twenty pounds or so by four?  Was it about BELIEF?  Confidence?  Was it hypnosis? Other than laying there, how did I cooperate? 

I would like to think that as my dog lay there stiff as a board, she experienced the light as a feather, that her spirit did go out of the body that was failing her,  that it was her time, that she did not fail me or I her, and that there is a place for doggies like her, and that is again with me. 

C 2022 Christine Trzyna

RED GIOIA ON THE BIZ

CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP - REDUX of "INTENT" and "INSTRUCTIONS

 CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP 

(Redux from August 2018, the beginning of the workshop)

INTRODUCTION

The next ten*** questions or prompts I'll be posting over the next few months as part of this WRITING WORKSHOP are intended to spark your FREE WRITING creativity. 

WHAT IS FREE-WRITING?  Usually this term refers to the FREEDOM to WRITE spontaneously and with the editor shut off in your head.  I believe in this process.

You use your pen - preferable one that flows easily with ink - though I know some of you have never even learned to write cursively or are used to typing on a keyboard or computer.  Whatever is comfortable to you.  But here's the thing about using a flowing pen.  It's best if you barely lift it off the paper.  Just keep going and flowing with the ink. 

The proofreader in you is in the distant future.  So is the analysis that goes on in your head that questions every word as you tend to do when writing papers in college.  It is not genre specific. The results don't have to be useful. You can get off topic. It's OK if you "go against" the assignment.  You don't have to keep your work though I think it's a good idea to read it over or put it away for three months and then read it over again.  You may reread it then and think it was a nice experience but pitch it or decide you're a genius after all!

When I ran a WRITERS ROUND TABLE years ago - before I went to college and studied creative writing - all our exercises were free-writing ones and that turned out to be mostly fun, though sometimes writers ventured into dark areas too.  In groups you must have comfort and be nonjudgmental.  You are not concerned about rules, results, where it's going, a grade, or how to please your professor - or me.

If you are new to this you may want to use an egg timer or stop watch or cell phone timer.  Start with 9 minutes, go to 15, eventually you may be able to free write for hours.  I know I can.  And as a result YOU WILL NOT EXPERIENCE BLOCK because you will learn that you can truly write about ANYTHING ANYWHERE.  (One ex student of mine told me he wrote while laid up with a broken body after an accident.  He turned it into a screenplay and sold it.)  Ultimately, once you are IN FLOW - a state you will experience as different than ordinary life - longer periods of writing time are not only entirely possible but inevitable.

I'm self taught in flow.  I know it came through first being an artist/painter/designer and all those hours I focused on canvas or paper and forgot where I was or what time it was.  Sometimes I think I experience the present as well as the past or future when I work.  Since I wasn't taught how to in a classroom, I know you can teach yourself too.

 Author Stephen King says that writing is HYPNOSIS and having experienced HYPNOSIS I agree.  In FLOW your brain is definitely functioning differently.  Flow happens in all the arts - music (I'm one to think that back in the day Led Zeppelin was in flow in concert.) - painting - crocheting - it seems to me to be tied into the use of the body, particularly the hands but also DANCE.  I suspect that using your LEFT HAND may increase your RIGHT BRAIN abilities.  One thing that happens to me when I'm crocheting is that my thoughts are operating on more than one level at a time; I'm paying attention to what my hands are creating, but sometimes memories bubble up or I have intuitions or some mundane ideas.

Avoid interruptions such as cell phone calls and notifications.  Find a lovely spot, a distant corner in the library, or a circle of friends.  You can share - or not.

If you go through a time of your life in which you are too busy, physically tired, fighting illness, working two jobs, tearing around with the children, this can effect flow. Never the less, once you've learned how to reactivating the state will be easier to get back into after some time away. 

At various book signings and readings and classes I've attended, students often ask the writer about their habits to get a book done.  I've heard every sort of advice, including regular schedules, talking the work aloud while showering,  writing while the children sleep, and writing so many words - a page or word count - every day, which sounds like labor to me. But whatever time you have to write is enhanced by FLOW.

Christine Trzyna
C 2018-2021  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use this post in not for profit situations. Please credit me. Send me love.  It's karma.

*** More exercises have been posted.

CRYSTAL BLUE PERSUASION : TOMMY JAMES and the SHONDELLS

Today I celebrate a decade of love with my doggie, as this is the anniversary of her adoption day.

VAL KILMER QUOTE

"God wants us to walk but the devil sends a limo"

Not sure if he made this one up or not... it's in his memoir I'm Your Huckleberry