Bo-Bo Knows to Vote Yes on 3

I admire people who rant tirelessly in support of the great issue of their lives and metabolize their sense of justice into activism. But as much as I would like to have a missionary's spunk, my heart beats to a less warlike rhythm. I see twelve sides --at a minimum--to every story. Choosing just one can be problematic.

On Tuesday, November 4, Massachusetts voters will have a chance to ban greyhound racing. A yes vote would make racing illegal as of January 2010.

Although the kindly and curious people who stop Bo and me in the street used to chat about Bo's top speed, these days they all ask me how I think they should vote on question 3. They're looking for a hell, yeah! A passionate cry! But what I tell them is this:

I think the tracks in Massachusetts are better than the horror shows that pass as racetracks in other countries, but I didn't like what I've seen given my experience with Bo. I'm voting yes.

Don't get me wrong: I understand that adopting one greyhound doesn't exactly make me an expert on this issue, so here are the links to the arguments from both sides:

YES--The argument for ending racing.
N0--The argument to keep it going.

That said, here are my Bo-infused reasons for voting yes on 3:

1. Scrawny Bo--When we adopted Bo, he weighed ten pounds less than his current svelte--but healthy--weight (the photo above shows Bo-Bo's fresh-from-the-track, xylophone ribs).

2. Wormy Bo--Bo came to us with a pooper full of worms.

3. Abandoned Bo--We adopted Bo through the Wonder Dogs adoption program at Wonderland Dog Park. The staff was very responsive to our requests for information, the program pays to spay and neuter adoptive animals, and the adoption director allowed us to visit the kennel to choose our Bo. They even helped us identify the dogs that were gentle enough I wouldn't have to worry about him around friends and family--particularly my then-3-year-old nephew Ryan. We narrowed the choice to an as-yet un-spayed female dog and the dog-who-would-be-Bo. When we couldn't decide, the program organizer had a solution: take the neutered dog for the weekend and see how it went. He sent us home with Bo, his papers, and instructions to call if we had a problem. No one from Wonder Dogs ever called to see how we were managing.

4. Nameless Bo--Bo's kennel name was Ricky, but he never once responded to it, yet he started responding to to "Bo" and "Bo-Bo" after living with us a week.


5. Stretchy Bo--At our house, Bo spends most of his day sprawled out to his full length across one of three of his ginormous pillows. In his more spaztastic moments, Bo will co-opt one of his many squeaky toys for a rousing game of pounce-and-toss. In the kennel, Bo lived in a crate lined with shredded newspaper. Though he could stand and lay down, a full sprawl was out of the question. He had no toys.

6. Skittish Bo--Bo shies away from strangers holding canes, crutches, surfboards, clipboards, or balloons. When I took him to a fun run at Wonderland last spring, he shook. I know that the shaking was probably about being in a building with hundreds of people around him at once, but the image of him with his head drooped in his alma mater is one I can't get out of my mind. During his race, Bo clocked in at 27 miles per hour out of the gate, but by the time he reached me, he had slowed to a trot and started whimpering. His eyes had the same haunted look he gets when I'm getting ready to leave. Hey, I know that there isn't exactly a one-to-one relationship between what it looks like a dog might be thinking and what he's actually thinking. But crying is crying.

The thrust of a commercial being aired by the opposition to question 3 focuses on the 1,000 Massachusetts residents who will lose their jobs if racing is banned. But if question 3 passes, these employees will have more than a year to choose an alternative path. Greyhounds never had the luxury of choice. On behalf of my favorite retired racer, I'm choosing yes on question three.

How will you vote?

Bo-Bo Knows How to Keep His Ass in a Chair

There's an old truism that successful writers know how to keep their asses in their chairs and write. I used to think this was pretty straightforward--the secret to writing as simple as finding the time to write. But there's a little more to it than that.

As I near the end of the rough draft of my novel, I'm finding that I paid so much attention to braiding the main storylines together that I failed to notice all the loose hairs I dropped along the way. I know that stray hairs are supposed to be tamed by the hairspray of revision, but you try ignoring a shrieking chorus of the what-about-mes and see how much progress you make! I would be galloping happily along and then--bam!--fallen tree. Sure, I could leap over it, but every time I tried that, the chorus only screeched all the louder: What about me?

These brain banshees made the nails on a chalkboard sound like Mozart.

These were the moments I most wanted to check Facebook, play with Bo-Bo, study Greek, clean the toilet, torture myself with articles about Sarah Palin, and just generally invent hours of distraction under the guise of letting the fiction problem percolate at the back of my brain. But detours cause delays, and every day I'm still--still, STILL--working on this (expletive deleted) rough draft, I'm in grave danger of inappropriate laughter (yesterday, I laughed at a student when he told me how bummed he was that the only win his team logged during the entire football season was the result of a forfeit).

So for the sake of my sanity and social niceties, I kept my ass in the chair and forced my fingers to keep moving on the keys. And then the weirdest thing happened. Out of the corner of my eye, a character I hadn't realized was even in on the present dilemma showed up on the screen in my head and started hauling off that tree (oh, just stay with me a minute because telling you what he was actually doing would make very little sense given that you haven't read a lick of my book). I started to describe what the character was doing, and soon the tree was gone, and I was back to galloping.

In her novel, "The Fiction Class," Susan Breen says writing description is "like watching a Polaroid picture develop--first come the blurry shadows of the central forms, and then the details emerge slowly."

Yeah. What she said.

But I will add this. Our job as writers, then, is to keep our asses in our chairs long enough that our Polaroids make themselves known to us. Because once those Polaroids appear, you're not going to want to move your ass until your fingers have done their keyboarding thing.

Bo-Bo Knows Mom's Got Mixed Feelings About the End of Her Column

On October 22, the Boston Globe published my swan song. Since 2006, I have enjoyed writing a weekly column for The Boston Globe Sidekick section ("Campus Calendar" during the school year and "Road Trips" during the summer). This edition of "Campus Calendar" is my last.

As of Friday, October 23, Sidekick will be no more. In fact, many of my favorite parts of the paper will be no more. Or--more accurately--most of the non-hard news content will be crammed into a single section. While it sucks to get a column yanked away from me before I was ready to let it go (I liked collecting the extra paycheck and keeping a big toe in the newspaper world), I'm sadder about what this means for journalism.

I'll grant that the kind of journalism I liked best isn't exactly the kind of stuff that was ever going to shortlist me for big awards. Hell, the kind of journalism I like best wasn't ever going to shortlist me for any awards. And I'll admit that all my proudest journalism moments came from focusing on meatier issues:

• an investigative magazine article about the surge in homeless families in Massachusetts,
• a reporter-at-large profile of the Million Mom March for gun control in Washington D.C, and
• an interview with a local World War II prisoner-of-war who trusted me enough to break down as he told me his story.
  

In fact, I have a friend with a PhD in chemical engineering (the last I understood of his work, he was researching strategies for growing bananas infused with vaccines) who called my recent profile of bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult a "gimmick article" because of its "hanging with" premise--Picoult agreed to have a tarot reading done with a few million Boston-area public looking on via my article.

I say a good gimmick has its place. The standard profile asks a writer about the issue raised in the current book, offers information about the writer's local readings, and describes any interesting detours the writer took along the road to publication. The trouble? Most fans know all this. Enter gimmick journalism--give these fans a look at the question their favorite writer asks a tarot reader and take a snapshot of how she responds when the news isn't good, and the fan gets to glimpse one of the writer's previously hidden sides.

Will this kind of journalism win a Pulitzer? Hardly. But as I said before, it does it have it's place. Oh, yes, yes, and yes.

I know that the longer I go on here, the more it sounds like all this is just sour grapes. This couldn't be further from the truth. As a former journalist, I really liked keeping my skills honed and my bank account infused with extra green stuff. Yes, I'm sad to see this chapter close, but I embrace it as an opportunity to spend more hours on fiction.

And I'm finding that the universe agrees.

I'm within a week or two of finishing the rough draft of a novel about three misfit Elvis impersonators. When I walked into the Sidekick wrap party at Lucky's on Congress Street, where had the soon-to-be-ex Sidekick writers gathered? At the table under this Wertheimer photo of Elvis on a motorcycle. And within minutes of my arrival, the bee-bop band at the back was singing Frank Sinatra's That's Life. Salient lyrics?

"That's life
I tell ya, I can't deny it,
I thought of quitting baby,
But my heart just ain't gonna buy it.
And if I didn't think it was worth one single try,
I'd jump right on a big bird and then I'd fly

I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate,
A poet, a pawn and a king.
I've been up and down and over and out
And I know one thing:
Each time I find myself laying flat on my face,
I just pick myself up and get back in the race."

I'm not the biggest fan of hoo-doo voo-doo, but even a person more cynical than me would have to take this cosmic coupling as a sign.

What really bothers me about losing the column is this: The Boston Globe decided to combine Sidekick, Living/Arts, Food, Style, Weekend, and A&E into one daily tabloid section called G. While the mock up looks beautiful, and I have to give the Globe props for trying to maintain coverage in all these areas at a time when fiscal realities are more like nightmares, it bothers me that smooshing all this content into one space emerged as the best option. If a readership can be mapped to sections of the paper, hard news is the brain, business is the bottom line, and sports is the heart (particularly in this town), but the sections they're cramming together into G? These are the soul. Stuffing them into one box is like:

• slashing art funding in schools;
• a generation who can buy a single song on itunes and is never enriched to find that the song they hated when they first bought the CD has become the favorite;
• watching a movie before reading the book;
• watching a movie and never reading the book;
• never learning that the Beef-it's-what-for-dinner music is actually the "Hoedown" section of Aaron Copland's "Rodeo."
  

You get my point.

My husband recently bought a new piece of software that allows him to compose music and record a playback without having to record individual musical parts manually. Mostly that means he writes music with his instruments, translates it into line notation, and then has the computer play the finished score for him. He's been playing around with exercises that embrace his heavy metal teen years. I particularly like grooving to a song he calls "Pigs on Parade" (it's supposed to be a Nine Inch Nails homage), and I would share it here if I wasn't absolutely technologically useless. Suffice it to say it both rocks and rolls. Hard.

So Mike decides to share his little ditty with a few key people. The response? Accolades from the likes of me and a few others, a whole lot of crickets, and one particularly chilling response from a coworker:

Why would you do that?

Mike tried to explain about the creative urge.

Oh no, the coworker said. I'm am NOT a creative person.

Yikes.

We're all creative by nature, aren't we? I don't mean everyone's a musician or a writer, a painter or theoretical physicist. But when we decide to improvise our way to a scrumptious meal, invent plans C through Z when plans A & B fail, or dream up a perfect solution to mollify an angry client, we're being creative. We forget that at our great peril.

The value of the arts is not just about the poems or paintings or stories or novels or sculptures or plays or operas. It's about what these poems and paintings and stories and novels and sculptures and plays and operas make us think. So notice the arts around you while they're still around to be noticed. You'll be a little splash of technicolor in an increasingly black and white world.

Bo-Bo Knows the Idiocy of Fashion

Bo-Bo is all about functional fashion. His year-round fur aside, he was perfectly happy with a simple collar in classic black (I was the sucker that upgraded him to a more handsome design). He doesn't care that when the winter hits he'll be wrapped up in a coat that makes him look like a stained glass window (it was the only one that would fit him). And even though Petco tries to tempt him with the latest and greatest in doggie chews, Bo always comes back to his as-of-late-disemboweled monkey we gave him on day one. He's quite sentimental that way.

Bo-Bo knows the idiocy of fashion, which makes him smarter than half the women in the world. Hear me out! Somebody--designers or magazine editors or some combination of both--decides what's in for the season and lemmings with more money than sense go out and buy it. I have a fashion-conscious friend who's always trying to tell me that certain things I like aren't "in."

Well, screw that! If I like something, I'm wearing it. You think I'm gonna retire all my peasants skirts when they finally go "out." Not even hardly. And really, just because somebody says it's fashionable to wear big shirts with a belt around them doesn't mean it looks anything but idiotic. No white after labor day? Fascism! Boots in the fall and winter only? Tell that to the cowboy boot wearing population!

Need further proof fashion is insane? Ever try walking the beach in those ankle socks eveybody's wearing now? They slip off of your ankle (because by design there's NOTHING to hold them there) and migrate to just beneath your heel. Because walking on the beach is SO much better when you're walking on a wad of cotton.

And no, it didn't bother me at all that my preference for walking the beach in crew socks led to a sock line during the height of sandal season. Oh, the horror! Believe me, the kind of people who care about my sock line aren't the kind of people I want to bother with. Bo-Bo--who once gnawed off the booties I put on him in a lame attempt to protect the pads of his feet from rock salt--agrees.

Bo-Bo Knows Recovery

The squirts. The runs. The trots. The shits. Whatever your favorite euphemism for diarrhea, Bo-Bo has it. Every hour since midnight. Sure, new parents get kept up half the night, but at least they don't have to take their babies outside and whine at them to just poop already.

We called the vet. The tech at reception told us to collect a sample. We told the tech said sample was liquid. Very liquid. Tech assured us even a smear would do. We collected a sample. Scratch that. I collected a sample. Bo yelped as he went, as if to say, "the burning, oh the burning!"

I took the sample to the vet. Ever drive in a car with a plastic bag smeared with poo? Don't. The tech tested the smear for, I don't know exactly, but it came up negative. I drove Bo home. Bo's pooping went from chocolate fountain to just plain fountain. Shitting water is never a good sign. Neither is barfing bright yellow. I called the tech; the tech called Bo and me straight back into the office.

Injection of antibiotic. Pills. Food so expensive I took out a second mortgage. Fluids administered by IV. Did you know pooches get their fluids dumped under the skin? The effect is remarkably Quasimodo. Tech swore the fluids would be absorbed in an hour. And, although Bo was not to eat again until tomorrow, he needed more antibiotic tonight. Because there's nothing so fun as shoving a pill down a starving pooch's throat.

Bo retaliated by crapping in the house while I tutored. I'm pretty sure it was the aforementioned shits that caused this, though there's an off chance Bo's little gift might have been a critical response to the little song I sang to him while we waited in the vet's office (to the tune of the Oscar Meyer wiener theme song):

My Bo-Bo has a first name
It's B-O-dash-B-O
My Bo-Bo has a second name
It's G-O-T-2-go

He'd like to stay out all the day
And if you asked me why I'd say
Cause Bo-Bo has the shits today
And that is really not O-K.

In my defense, I got nothing but interrupted sleep last night. And when you think about it, who's fault was that?

Bo-Bo Knows Barks are Worse Than Bites

If Bo-Bo were a kid, he'd be the boy raking in candy from strangers. He'd be the first to jump into the pick-up for a ride the rest of the way to school, the one who dives right into the skeevy van for an up-close look at those puppies the nice man promised were there.

Bo-Bo has done busted his radar for stranger danger. In Bo's addled brain, every dog we meet while walking's a potential friend, and never mind the owner straining to keep her 140-pound bear of a dog from launching at us; never mind that this little pug's doing his best impersonation of a snarling beastie. Bo-Bo loves--or at least wants the chance to love--everybody! His greet-the-world-with-open-paws approach is decidedly not cool when we're up against the kind of dog whose prime directive is collecting a piece of anything that crosses his path, but it does have its advantages against the loudmouths on our walking route. Oliver the howling, barking, demon Beagle, I'm looking at you!

Every day we walk by Oliver's house, Oliver summons a deep, hellish, howling bark. He jams his head betweent the posts of the fence when he can, but mostly he follows us, hollering and lunging, with nothing but a bit of white picket between him and Bo-Bo...and me. Now I'll admit it: I jump every time Oliver's hound-o-hell greeting shakes me from my thinks, but Bo just galumphs along, mouth open in his can-you-believe-I-get-to-walk smile. Oh, his ears may perk up, and on days when Oliver's voice is particularly strong, Bo may take a quick stutter step into the street. But mostly Bo-Bo registers Oliver's complaint with the classic ignore-him-and-he'll-go-away stance.

Bo's take on life is devilishly simple, right? Just ignore everything that doesn't matter and bop along with your day. Tell me, how is it that a dog who can't figure out when there's food in his dish can be so very wise?

What if I dealt with those dogs barking in my brain the same way Bo deals with the Beazulbulb Beagle that snarls at him ? What if I just ignored the fear growling around the back of my brain and--now here's a novel thought--wrote the damn end of my book already?

What. What the? Bad boy, Bo! Bad...? 3r8q dfd*&&*(fdafdj90

Bo-Bo here. Had to take over. Couldn't stand it. If my racing homeys talked about running as much as mommy talks about writing they'd have been shot. Well, maybe not shot, but same same. You gets my meaning. Racers race. Writers write. You gots five scenes to the end? Writes them, okay? I didn't win seven races by jumping out of the box and examining the track ahead. I ran like a mother lover. Once I even cutted off the big dog. You gots to take risks, okay? So get onto that stupid clicky thing that like so much and run your damn race already, okay?

Oh and while I'm here, I wanted to tells you that little rhyme you have when you're eating something yummers and I ain't getting any? You know: Nothing for you, Disco Stu? I know you're proud of it, but it ain't cool.

So anyways, type alright. One, two, three: theeeeeeeerrrrrrreeeee gooooooooeeeeess cliiiiiiiiickyyyyyy! Get it? There goes clicky instead of there goes swifty. Aw, forget it. Just writes already, OK? Just not so much you skimp on my walkseses.

Bo-Bo Knows Bad Poetry

So many of you know that when a special occasion intersects with a certain brand of Cathy punchiness, you're apt to get a limerick in your (birthday, retirement, thank-you) card. This may seem like harmless goofy fun, but it's actually a sickness. I offer my March 7 "Bo-Bo Knows Weird Al Yankovic" post as exhibit one.

When Mike and I went to a wedding last month, we sent Bo to doggy jail. Oh, it's not much of a prison. The space is a big warehouse. There are no cages. Potential guests are screened to make sure mostly sane pooches like Bo don't have to deal with crazy, violent, idiotic dogs (so chiuahuas, Jack Russel terriers, and that demon Beagle who lives three doors down need not apply). This outfit is probably about as close to doggy nirvana as Bo's gonna get.

That is, until we have the colossal gall to abandon him there.

To retaliate, Bo does what any self-respecting, submissive sissy must do in this situation: he curls up in a ball for two days and doesn't pay any attention to us. His antics inspired the latest Cathy Canine romp to the tune of one of my favorite Elvis rockabilly songs, "Blue Moon of Kentucky." I'm imbedding the music video below for those who aren't familiar with the tune; Bo's lyrics follow.

Bo-Bo of Our Condo
(With apologies to Bill Monroe)

Bo-Bo! Bo-Bo! Bo-Bo pouts the day away.
Bo-Bo pouts all through the day;
'cause he thinks that'll make us stay
Bo-Bo pouts through the day!

I said Bo-Bo of our condo keeps on pouting.
Pouts on because we left him overnight.
I said Bo-Bo of our condo keeps on pouting.
Pouts on until his mama makes things right.

On a lonely Friday!
Mom went away!
Slipped through the door!
Orphaned forever more.*

Bo-Bo of our condo keeps on pouting.
Pouts on because we left him overnight.
Bo-Bo of our condo keeps on pouting.
Pouts on until his mama makes things right.

If the preceding doesn't convince you that my phonetic tinkering's a sickness, know this: I've moved on to bigger phonetic challenges. Behold my first (and likely my last) villanelle (this is the poetry form made famous with "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas) :

The Critic

On days like this the sky's a burden, too.
Air pushes, pushes down until I'm small.
I choose to hold it up for me, for you.

It's not clear why they call this feeling blue.
My busy, cluttered mind slows to a crawl.
On days like this the sky's a burden, too.

The doubt that was a seed took root and grew
into a beast that hides all but his growl.
I choose to hold him off for me, for you.

My thoughts turn to a mottled, ugly stew;
the beast and reason ready for a brawl.
On days like this the sky's a burden, too.

The critic arms himself and starts to spew.**
Protect the dreams you don't want him to maul.
I choose to hold him off for me, for you.

And though I know the beastly barks aren't true,
they clog like dirt in motors and I stall.
On days like this the sky's a burden, too.
I choose to hold it up for me, for you.

Bo just grunted and rolled onto his side. That's Bo-nglish for "why don't you call this post Bo-Bo Knows Bad Poetry's No Way To Finish A Novel." I whole-heartedly agree. So I'll close with my Bo-inspired Haiku:

Bad poems are a
painful procrastination;
someone stop me now.

* The first draft of this line read "Mom's a dirty whore." I've decided the revision's more in keeping with Bo's character.

** This rhyme caused my husband physical pain.

***Alternate title: "Take THAT Writer's Block!"