The Tyranny of the Tail

expect no rational sequence here

I.
A few days ago I read this essay on the limits of story by Parul Sehgal in the New Yorker. I like the challenges she often presents in her essays—a mix of musing on life, books, and current philosophies—but this one really got stuck in my drain to a paralyzing degree.

Suddenly, my idea of reviving my Substack prior to my next book release (fall 2024, who knows, maybe) seemed silly.

Then the idea of finishing my next book (now, in 2024, at all) seemed silly.

Then the concept of seeing friends or calling them to catch up seemed silly, too.

All a bunch of narrative, packaged up by all of us, with some of us (me) better at wrapping that package up neatly, wittily, poignantly, than others. I think about how marketing isn’t story. And about how I know how to do both, more or less, for good or ill. How both of them can be a wedge between people and the truth, or worse yet, a lie.

Then I remember that I haven’t slept properly in over two weeks, as my dog Jelly’s anal glands ruptured and he’s been wearing a cone, whining, and requiring a steady influx of medications, compresses, baths, and flashlights held up to his heinie at all hours of the day and night.

Maybe I shouldn’t be making decisions about this. Or anything.

II.
When Adrian is at the end of his rope emotionally, he does one of two things:

• Goes through the McDonald’s drive-thru and gets a Big Mac meal deal

• Buys a bunch of movie theater candy and sits on the sofa eating it

At the moment, Jelly is drugged into a restless sleep on the living room floor, wearing a special cone that’s less rigid than the medical one the vet gave us last week. Adrian is sitting on the sofa with me, reading the latest Leigh Bardugo and eating a packet of Mambas, shirtless. I am so tired that my bones ache. All I’ve done the last few days is Google medication interactions for dogs (prednisone and carprofen, trazodone and famotidine) and stick spoons of cream cheese or peanut butter (where said pills hide) in Jelly’s face.

III.
Our kid is going to art school. This feels like a miracle and also like a totally expected, fitting, inevitable move on their part. Somehow. For over two decades, our child has been the center of our lives, Adrian and me. But in a few weeks, we’ll move Matilly into a campus apartment and let the adventure go on without us directing it. Well, mostly. We’ll still be in the same city.

I have lists of things and ideas and plans I need to attend to before that day. Still more—the concept of how to make a life with my partner that isn’t built around our kid. But right now, all I can do is think about how the center of my life for the past weeks has been my dog’s butt. And how there’s a crust of peanut butter stuck to his cone that I should probably wash off.

IV.
I was listening to a podcast and the people on it were talking about prioritizing things that help them feel alive. Which sounds really good. Except I think that sometimes when the word “prioritizing” precedes anything, it can make the following thing into a kind of bummer.

I took some ibuprofen to help my bones not ache (didn’t help, shocker) and thought about what makes me feel alive. Parul Sehgal might thrill to know that my feel-alive list includes nothing plot-driven nor swashbuckling for dramatic effect, far from a snappy list of gerunds—no fencing or salsa dancing or running with the bulls happening here.

What makes me feel alive: the moment when I’m going to meet someone for drinks or dinner or coffee and I’m rushing toward the venue, thinking about all we’ll talk about and eat and drink.

Plus, if I’m holding Adrian’s hand as we skip toward the host station, all the better.

Or having a stranger tell me on a walk that my dog is cute and she loves his little face and then I learn from this stranger a tiny little factlet about some other thing I can’t predict—that’s not even the alive part. It’s the time after that where I tell someone about the encounter, the factlet, that makes me feel good.

It’s a story that’s not a story, but I get to tell it all the same. Like a poem that revolves around one moment, one image.

Like all the poems I used to write.

V.
Jelly stirs and starts whimpering. I put on a baseball cap and invite him out for walk.

Maybe he needs to poop, I think.

Pooping helps the anal glands express themselves, I think.

Truly, all any of us really need is to express ourselves, I think.

But Jelly didn’t need to poop. Still in “The Cone Zone”—our kid’s term for when he’s got to wear his floppy, butthole-blocking appliance—all he wanted was a change of scenery in the hopes he could find a way to lick his own heinie. Which he tried (and failed) to do many times in the street. So I dragged him back in and gave him another pill covered in cream cheese and told Adrian what the type and dosage was because our lives revolve around Jelly’s butt problems and remedies until at least Monday morning, when he has his next appointment to get to the bottom (ha, good one) of the issue.

“You look nice in that hat,” Adrian says, when I rejoin him on the sofa. “I love you.”

“I’m so tired I might start hallucinating.”

“Why don’t you get back in bed?” he asks.

“I can’t,” I say. “I’m writing something.”

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