Dogs

One thing that I've gotten to see a lot of in New York is the interaction between two passing dogs. Sometimes they barely notice each other. Sometimes they engage in a little casual flirtation, the equivalent of a few snappy one-liners murmured over a glass of scotch (rocks) and a cosmo at a bar. Sometimes they clown around like drunk frat brothers.

And sometimes there's this hilarious disparity between the reactions of each dog. Like one will be practically wrenching its owner's arm out of its socket, front legs flailing in the air, every molecule of every cell drawn to the other dog like an iron filing to a junkyard magnet, but the other dog could not give a fuck. The one canine is practically hanging itself on its leash trying to make some kind of contact and the other one is busy checking out a particularly interesting patch of sidewalk. There seems to be no rhyme or reason or way of predicting when this will happen. Big dogs flip out for little dogs, attractive dogs lose it for uggos, tiny rat-dogs try to pick fights with Great Danes.

Someone smarter than me might draw a clever analogy between this behavior and the dance of the human sexes in New York. But fuck that, I'm tired and really, could that be any more obvious? Dogs are funny and stupid, end of story.

I Should Mention

I will write only when I have something that I want to say. That might be a few times a week, or (if I'm feeling smart) several times a day. This is more for me than for you. Sorry. This is a diary, except that I'm keeping it on a chalkboard in a classroom instead of in a locked cloth-bound book tucked into a nightstand drawer. This is, in other words, a Livejournal (how angsty of me! how web 1.0! how late 90s! how etc etc).

I don't know if anyone who wrote on Livejournal knew who Freud was, beyond the guy who chomped on phallic symbols all day. But I think they wrote to keep themselves sane, in a manner of speaking. Or at least grounded. They wrote to remind themselves of who they were. (Why am I writing about the Livejournal community as if I'm an anthropologist describing the rituals of a long-dead precursor to Homo sapiens?) I think they wrote because they wanted to spend some time describing their lives on their own terms, rather than through the eyes of the people around them.

Cause it seems like - if you're not careful - you really do start to see yourself as you fear others see you. Especially in a place like New York, where everyone you pass on the street is prosecutor, judge, and jury in the case of You vs. Relevancy. So maybe the purpose of this dreadfully uncool soul-baring/thought-articulating/mind-censusing writing is to remind myself that I have my own personality, independent and probably completely unrelated to what passers-by think of me. And I guess the fact that I want to do this at all means that, deep down, I still consider my thoughts worthwhile to at least one person (myself).

So that's a good sign.