High and Tight
I'm on team low and slow
Well I'm accustomed to a smooth ride
Or maybe I'm a dog who's lost its bite
I don't expect to be treated like a fool no more
I don't expect to sleep through the night
Some people say a lie's a lie's a lie
But I say why
Why deny the obvious child?
Paul Simon 1990
The mid 50s battle cry for me has been more of a hum. I’ve never been competitive really, just with myself. And that’s exhausting. I’m well aware and gleeful to be off the track, back on the bench. Better yet in the press box with the AC on watching someone else run the laps and “kill it”. I had a brief moment of thinking I’d “keep it hot/tight/high” or something in my 40s but that seems like eons ago. So, I’ll be here, rooting for you to hand off the baton and beat yourself silly with sweat and bravado to get another award or ten grand.
I could use the ten grand but I’d probably just use it for some junky van to haul around stray dogs to the shore and maybe buy an inflatable pool and some shorts with an elastic waistband. I’ve had moments in my life where I had considerable (for me) money and I just bought dilapidated houses and lost a lot of money in real estate crashes. I still buy the 10 year old van with one owner and tip too much. I’m not to be trusted with FU Money. I’d donate it all by month’s end.
Anyway, in my days when I’m not disinfecting patios or using a curry comb to de shed a one eyed cattle dog, I write. Like a lot of writers I write for free on projects that I may or may not ever complete or release, but for money to buy kibble and pay for the scrap yard we all live in (me and the 12 abandoned dogs in Mexico ) I write for money. Press releases, bios, website “About” pages—Copywriting. Ads, Headlines, Slogans, Taglines, articles. In the olden days I worked at an ad agency in NYC. I was in my mid 20s with a corner office in Midtown and I thought I had landed on the moon. I was just a cog in a very big wheel but I thought I mattered. I got some other gigs as a travel writer for some national magazines and it lit my ambition (and hubris) on fire. Literally was nothing I couldn’t do. *Which translated to literally nothing you could tell me that I’d listen to.
I piled awards and association titles and covers and double spreads in glossy portfolios to protect the sheets so I could look back on things and know how whatever I was. I hadn’t anticipated that at 56, I couldn’t give a hooty hoot nor would I want to carry these things around anymore. I’ve recently put many of them into my Caveman Shredder aka The Bonfire. I like to tell A Story but I’m VERY tired of telling My Story. I’m an observer in life and I like to create things out of a situation but there’s no part of me that wants to dig into the Memory Box and see what I ‘usedtado’.
I stopped writing and New Yorking and went to Atlanta and opened a restaurant or two during all of my 30s and then burnt to a crisp, I retreated in my 40s to a mountain town in rural Georgia to do chicken farmy organic things. Another decade passed and I sold everything and drove around in my van and went to Mexico and got into a car crash and have been stuck in some dusty town no one has ever heard of for 2 years. There’s a bunch of orphaned, alone, three legged, one eyed dogs here and it’s hot and there’s no services and no vet and no food and no shopping.
Somewhere in my mind, I was RELIEVED to be without choice. Angry that I got dropped off in a place with no pizza or cheese shops but relieved I think because I didn’t have to “discover” any hidden gems, decide where to next, there’s no striving here. Sometimes you have to surrender. There’s nothing I CAN DO really. Spend several thousand dollars to relocate me and all these dogs somewhere which is easier said than done even if I had the cash, so I just shut the fuck up about it already.
I can make no decisions. They’ve all been made already. If you want to eat, you go there, if you want to get dressed? You put that on. I no longer have a vehicle and so here I am. I cannot leave with all of these dogs just standing around in the street, so I’m here with them and they are safe and I am safe and nothing is fabulous and there is no place to have dinner and I haven’t made any friends because I don’t have kids and I don’t go to church. I’ve lived alone my entire life. I’m okay with it. I had a sorta live in boyfriend for a few years at one point but that was mostly because I was too busy being a chef and a dynamo to move him out. I’m neither chef nor dynamo now and I’m okay with that too. Most of the men here are predictably toothless, fat, married or all three. I don’t care about that right now so i’m okay with that too.
Admittedly there are days when I say, hello, self? What exactly are we doing right now? How long are you going to be in this purgatory? Hmmm? I’m mostly cobbling together enough funds to feed 12 dogs in the house and dozens more puppies on the street, the fields, the beach. Urging people to come to my spay clinic on my patio once a month and STOP backyard breeding their “pedigree” dogs when there are hundreds needing homes outside. Adopt one of MINE!
I’m ignored mostly. The first two years I got twisted about it. How DARE they not listen to my reasoning and stop this needless breeding and discarding of animals. And the simple answer is, “Cuz, different.”
And that’s just the end of the plot arc. Cuz they need money, cuz puppies make more and they can sell, cuz dumb, cuz lazy, cuz Mexico can do better but sometimes it doesn’t.
Asi es. That’s just the way it is. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last couple of years, it is that. Asi es. The old man at the carne asada cart tells me all of the things his grandkids don’t listen to. I’m all for it because I didn’t have a dad or a grandpa who told me anything and I think I’ve been stopped in my ambitious drive all over North America tracks to heal my inner child. I don’t care how much I used to make fun of that Inner Child psych slogan. It’s really all we have to do in life. So if this old Mexican carne guy is my shaman, I’m showing up for it.
Despite only a 10 year age difference, I know the carne asada guy is much wiser than me. He’s lived in this kooky pueblo for 40 years. He knows where all the bodies are buried. Literally. And my dogs likely are digging up the bones.
If I don’t go by their shop for a couple days he teases me and says, “have you been inside crying?” and it’s a running joke about how I think and worry too much and I think the world is ending because there are stray dogs everywhere (not to be confused with the severed heads mounted on cars in other Mexican towns with cartel violence) No llores! (stop crying!) he laughs. And I laugh. He has other Dad jokes and ends our chat with “And now I go back to work, because if no work today? Tomorrow we don’t eat.” (Voy a trabajar, si no? No come manana.)
So as I sit down on this wobbly plastic chair and roll up my grown up sleeves and pour over an insanely self congratulatory run on sentenced bio some gal wrote about herself with an attached 5 page resume I chuckle. She wants to be nominated and WIN one of those regional town paper 40 under 40 hotshot awards. I am going to write her the best 300 words I can to make a bullet train to the fame game because that’s what she’s gunning for and I want her to win. If she wins that and gets more press then more people will come to her restaurant and then more content will be generated about her and that equals money and all the things that matter in your 30s. Just as long as I don’t have to do it, I’m your biggest cheerleader. Go, you. ++++++
Thanks for reading. If you’d like to know more about the dog rescue go to linktr.ee/lolasdogrescue