Bo-Bo Knows that Sometimes the Things We Want Most Scare Us Senseless

As previously mentioned, Bo-Bo is more of a whimperer than barker. And also as previously mentioned, Bo-Bo's hmm-hmm-hmm is often a signal that there's a canine someone lurking that Bo wants to say meet and greet. Bo's crying teamed with his pricked ears and prancing paws is what I've come to call Bo's I've-taken-a-vow-to-leave-no-bung-hole-unsniffed dance.

But about once a week, the ecstasy backfires.

Bo prances, prances, prances, but when he gets too close to the object of his affection, he decides, oh hell no! His spine impersonates an overgrown elbow macaroni, and he darts clear away. Sometimes into oncoming traffic.

There are times Bo's skittishness is warranted: when that dude in a wet suit decided two feet in front of Bo that right then would be a good time to swing his surfboard in a vaguely weapon-like fashion, when the man who looked so wholesome from across the street actually reeked of cigarettes and sized up Bo like he was a turkey in November, or when a button of a dog turned into a ferocious (but bitsy) beast who barked so hard he hopped backwards and bared his sharp (but pint-sized) teeth.

Most of the time, though, Bo cowers for no good reason.

What if Bo's apparent skittishness was really shyness? What if Bo finally worked up the nerve to talk to the brave and beautiful Cleopatra only to realize this Afghan Hound is so far out of his league Bo can't even remember what made him think this was a good idea a few seconds ago? What if he'd desperately like a turn with the red Frisbee that Meghan-the-cattle-dog carries in her mouth, only Bo can't figure out how to ask her to share? What if he sees a kid he'd love to fawn over but just can't get past that fearsome stroller the kid's trapped inside?

So often the things we want like hunger scare us into staying starved. Last week I set myself up as a literary Olympian, averaging roughly ten pages a day. I made peace with the "rough" in rough draft. In that mindset, I didn't have to remind myself that the journey toward a finished book started with finishing a first draft. I wrote without fretting, and I wrote a lot. I came off of that week with the end of the book clearly in sight. But embracing the "rough" in rough draft felt like an exercise in naivety when I considered the revision to come--jettisoning thousands (upon thousands) of extraneous words and condensing tens of thousands more. I may want a draft more than anything else in my world*, but I've slowed down because (let's not sugarcoat this, shall we?) I'm scared shitless about finishing. And really, I don't have to tackle the revision if I don't finish, right? Well, yeah, but living with unfinished business is so much worse than wrestling the mess. That hunger will start to feed on itself eventually.

When Bo cowers, I put one hand on his back and pet the other dog until Bo comes around. If the threat's human, I stand between Bo and the offending bi-ped until Bo creeps closer to check him out. The way Bo inches closer and closer still until his tail starts whipping around again is no different than the inching, inching, inching I have to do, first toward the draft, and then toward the revision.

Fear has its place (urging us to jump out of the way of oncoming buses, avoid darkly lit alleys, and keep medical appointments), but beyond physical fitness, fear isn't a call to retreat. When it comes to our psychological hungers, fear's a sign that we should press bravely on--no cowering or jumping into oncoming traffic.


*My wishlist for the world at large includes a McCain drubbing in November and a national education policy that recognizes that true intellect is a marriage of pedagogue and poetry, that scores of children get left behind when schools prioritize core academic skills at the expense of the arts.

Bo-Bo Knows That Way Lies Madness

Bo-Bo hasn't really been curling up at my feet this weekend. I blame a mean case of the writing blues. The particularly nefarious, unwarranted strain.

On Friday, I shared my madcap triumph from last week. I also shared the fact that I had set August 28 as my personal deadline for finishing the rough draft of my novel. Unless I have another week like last one, I'm not going to make it. And I don't have the kind of schedule this week that will allow for another week like last one.

The completest in me is bummed about this. At the end of May, I bought a pair of cowboys boots while Mike and I were visiting Nashville. They cost more than my wedding dress (which actually isn't as bad as it sounds because I'd be damned if I'd pay that much for a dress I got to wear for about two minutes). The point is, the money I shelled out for the boots was the most money I'd ever spent on a single article of clothing, so I made a deal with myself: the boots stayed packed away until I finished my rough draft.

So I was picturing strolling into class on August 28 with these handsome babies complementing my favorite bohemian skirt. And being that I spend a good part of my day cooking up fictions, in my mind this grand entrance involved climbing onto the classroom table and doing a little victory boogie. Or maybe a Texas two-step, in honor of the boots.

Clearly, missing my deadline is for the best, because really, how would I even manage climbing onto a table in a skirt without flashing half the class and the students in the Emerson dorms next door? At this point I'll confirm that your suspicions about my fictional life being way more exciting than my day-to-day, real life are 100 percent accurate. Well, maybe 90 percent accurate. I once convinced a wee Scotsman to twirl around a bar with me, traveled to Vegas to research the skin trade, and braved my sister's wrath when I not only taught my 4-year-old nephew, Ryan, the word scrotum, but traumatized him with the intel that he had one, too (this after he pointed to Bo-Bo's recently-neutered floppiness and informed me that Bo had a poopy).

But back to the blues. Because of recent mania-level outputs this weekend's page total has fallen a little short: I only wrote 10 new novel pages.

Only? ONLY?!! There was a time when my weekly writing goal was 10 pages a week (2 pages every weekday). Measuring my progress against my 62-pages-in-six-days mania is like a marathon runner deciding that the only worthwhile training schedule is 26.2 miles a day. That way lies madness, indeed.

Especially when you look at the rest of my writing weekend. I wrote not one but two blog entries. And perhaps the most wonderful writing weirdness in a long time: a short story poured out long hand. I'd almost forgotten what it felt like to sit down, write for a while, and stand up with a first draft down.

So my failure to repeat my (ridiculously Olympian) goals this weekend is nothing of the kind, just as missing my (completely arbitrary) August 28 goal isn't really a failure. For a little while, I'll be switching back to a more manageable two-to three hours a day schedule (I'm not a full-time writer, after all) and see where that takes me. The way I figure it, getting to class on Thursday knowing that I have as few chapters to write as Bo has paws on his body is cause to go ahead and dance on that table...even if I have to do so without the boots.

Bo-Bo Knows That Sometimes He Takes a Backseat to Forces he Doesn't Understand

It was a rare moment of calm. The ball was holstered. The kids temporarily paused in their never-ending marathon tracked in a loop from the living room, down the hall, and around the kitchen of our 1100-square-foot-ish condo. Bo-Bo chose this as the moment to merge from the den where he'd retreated after the kids started whooping somewhere around lap 213. The way he figured, it was finally time to return to the excessive fawning he enjoyed as guests arrived. He figured wrong.

People use the phrase, "it's a dog's life" to describe a lifestyle that falls somewhere on the spectrum between lazy and nirvana. Clearly the person who coined that phrase never watched the worried dance of a dog's eyebrows, never saw the bowed head of a dog who knows his place in the alpha-to-zeta pecking order is nowhere near alpha. The way I figure it, a dog's life is plagued by nearly constant worry. Bo can't talk, but I've been watching his body language carefully, and I've figured out that the top three thoughts rattling around that canine brain of his are:

1. Food now?
2. Walk now? and
3. What about me?
   

I say Bo can't talk, but that isn't because he's not trying. Barking? No. Bo only barks when I'm being lazy about getting him out to pee or he thinks we forgot to feed him because he wasn't actually present when we put the fool into the bowl—this particular canine code red requires a physical show and tell: we trek into the kitchen, rattle the doggy dish, and tell him, "it's in the bowl, stupid." No, barking is too normal for this one, but Bo-Bo's a champion whimperer. He whimpers when there's a person he wants to greet, a dog he'd like to lick inappropriately, a balloon he'd desperately like to run away from (this week he's been particularly traumatized by a parrot-shaped Mylar balloon tied to the sign of the ice cream parlor at the end of our street). He cries when we leave and when we're standing outside the door fumbling with our keys. And lately he's started to hmm-hmm-hmm when I take the turn for our 25-minute walking loop instead of continuing straight along the 60-minute loop he loves so. This has been happening a lot lately because Bo-Bo's mommy (that would be me) has been prioritizing writing her novel over just about all things—her health, Bo's sanity, housework, prompt personal hygiene, paying bills, sleep, and any work that doesn't have an immediately looming deadline.

Don't get me wrong. Bo's been nothing but supportive. So long as his bladder isn't ripe, he's at my feet, whether I'm at my desktop computer in my office, curled up with my laptop on the bed, or commandeering the kitchen table. But there's something in the way he watches me that screams, what the hairy heck is it you're doing exactly?

The trouble (or maybe it was no trouble at all) was I enrolled in a novel workshop this summer to inspire myself to make good on my promise to finish this novel (my first) by the end of the summer. But instead of being content setting a private bar, I announced what I had in mind during the introductions at the first class. The class ends on August 28, and I've been working in a fever, but it's unclear whether I'm gonna make it. But, dammit, I'm going down swinging.

In the last three weeks I've written 128 pages—62 of them last week alone. For those of you who don't know about these things, that's not just a lot, it's the fucking mother lode (at least for me, anyway). On my best weeks I usually do somewhere between 10 and 25 pages. Somewhere the literary police are plotting to test my blood for all manner of banned substances: speed, excessive caffeine, more sugar than iron in my blood, latent mania, etc. But really, the answer is simpler than that. I blame Michael Phelps. Here he was collecting medals like mushrooms after a rainstorm, and I was pretty much missing it all playing with my imaginary friends. To make up for it, I staged a literary Olympics of my own. Last week I challenged myself to write 70 pages in 7 days, and I came close enough that five days in Bo-Bo sat on his pillow with his paws over his ears, screaming, the clacking, the clacking, will someone stop the clackity, clackity, clack, clack clack? I chronicled the whole business via Facebook status updates. Here's how it went down (slightly abridged):

SATURDAY, AUGUST 16
10:26 am— Catherine is honoring the Olympic spirit by setting a ridiculous goal: 70 pages by Thursday night.
3:21 pm— Catherine has 3 pages done...67 to go!
4:23 pm— Catherine has 5 done...65 to go!
6:47 pm—Catherine has 7 done...63 to go!
10:25 pm—Catherine has 10 done...60 to go!
11:14 pm—Catherine has 12 done...58 to go!

SUNDAY, AUGUST 17
12:43 am—Catherine has 15 done...55 to go!
8:23 pm—Catherine has 16 done...54 to go!
10:29 pm—Catherine has 17 done...53 to go!
11:32 pm—Catherine has 21 pages done...49 to go!

MONDAY, AUGUST 18
2:18 am—Catherine has 26 pages done...44 to go!
1:27 am—Catherine has 31 pages done...39 to go!
2:00 pm—Catherine has 32 pages done...38 to go which means she's closing in on the halfway-to-goal point....

TUESDAY, AUGUST 19
12:16 am—Catherine has 34 pages done...36 to go (and she's boring of this update conceit but feels compelled)...
9:13 pm—Catherine has 36 pages done...34 to go.
10:45 pm—Catherine has 40 pages done...30 to go.
10:53 pm—Catherine thinks it's time for a change of venue...come on laptop, let's me and you find a new place to camp...

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 20
12:37 am—Catherine is falling behind: 43 done/37 to go...
9:10 am—Catherine is falling behind: 43 done/-27- to go... (thanks to Lisa B for the catch!).
11:10 am—Catherine had 45 done/25 to go...
12:34 pm—Catherine had 48done/22 to go...
3:07 pm—Catherine had 51done/19 to go...
7:54 pm—Catherine had 54done/16 to go...slowing down only to outline the end...the END (which unfortunately still feels pretty far away)...

THURSDAY, AUGUST 21
11:13 pm—Catherine has finished her experiment. 62 out of 70 pages completed. That's roughly 89 percent. But I get bonus points for outlining to the end. Definitely A for effort.

Suffice it to say, I'm pretty damn exhausted. The trouble is that outline I mentioned on Wednesday? It was for six chapters and an epilogue. There are seven days before class. With round numbers like this, it's like the universe's egging me on. Bo-Bo just raised his eyebrows at me and released one of those doggy sighs he usually uncorks when he's pouting. The message is clear: Get on with it so we can get back to our regularly scheduled walks already.

Bo-Bo Knows Daddy Wears Aprons

Washing Bo in a tub that I can stand beside: $15.

Treat for Bo following traumatizing bath: $0.10

Bag of those same treats to bring home:$4.99

Getting the Globe to publish a photo of my husband in an apron: Priceless.

Bo-Bo Knows Blood-Sucking Fiends

Bo-Bo is a tick magnet.

I guess if I was a Pollyanna, I’d consider it a compliment that he’s a sweet enough that an army of prehistoric pint-sized goons want to feast on his blood, but the optimism is lost on me. I get distracted by the feasting on his blood bit. If we’re fortunate about anything, it’s that Bo has tan-and-white hair styled in the canine equivalent of a buzz cut. When you think of the percentage of hiding spots ticks have in Bo’s coat verses the coat, of say, Cleopatra, his Afghan-hound girlfriend who often gets walked with a pink banana clip on top of her head to keep all that hair out of her eyes, we get off easy on tick patrol. Even so, those vampires are a cunning lot. Unless they choose to settle in on Bo’s legs, we can’t actually see them. They hide out in the relative depth of the hair around Bo’s neck. We’ve found one under the half-inch—half-inch!—edge of his ear, another near his doggy ding dong, and at least half a dozen in the caves between his paw pads.


Most dog owners would just dip Fido in a chemical bath or slap a nuclear-strength-flea- and-tick collar around Spike’s neck, but such brilliant inventions are a big Greyhound no-no. I don’t really get it, but the math goes something like this:

thin greyhound skin + sensitive blood = serious health hazard.

OK, fine. But blood-sucking fiends are a serious health hazard, too! Fortunately, we’ve only found dog ticks. These aren’t the lime disease carriers, but they can give humans something called Rocky Mountain Fever. And if you’re dying to know about Rocky Mountain Fever, do your own damn Google search. The last think I need is to have the symptoms of another disease in my head to pick from the next time I’m feeling a little under the weather. I already have something like a panic attack every time a migraine strikes: This feels like a stroke. What if this time it’s a stroke. This is it. The big one. I’m coming to get you Margaret! So I need to know the symptoms of Rocky Mountain Fever about as much as a problem gambler needs to be reminded of the high that comes with beating a full house with a higher full house.

It’s bad enough that the Google searches I did to determine that Bo had dog ticks and not deer ticks gave me nightmares. Have you ever looked up ticks on the Web? They don’t just give you a bullet point list of what to look for. They give you pictures. Giant poster-size prints that’ll give you flashbacks to the Saturday creature features that scared the piss out of you when you were kids. You remember? Those horror movies about insects? I remain traumatized by the one about the ants where a kid is swarmed by the things and jumps into a pool to drown them and drowns himself in the process. There was also one about a tarantula invasion. In that one a child gets cornered on a swing set. Are you itching now? I’m itching now. So, yeah. Pictures that show a tick with all those legs and gnashing teeth and what looks like a suit of armor get filed up there with the killer ants and tarantulas and come out in my dreams. Particularly this one:

I was in Ireland, but it looked a little like Venice. There were tinkers* lining the streets. There was one guy in a car with his head resting in a tin washtub filled with water. I didn’t feel this was the safest pillow and called the nurse who was on our tour with us. She woke him up and said he’d been poisoned. The remedy was a shampoo. She supported his neck with one hand, and shampooed with the other washing ticks ranging in size from the horrific silver-dollar shaped to the wake-up-before-you-crap-your-pants, king-crab size. I’m sure if I hadn’t woken up, itchy as all hell, I’d have been swallowed by the kind of tick you’d expect to see in Jurassic Park.

So what’s a poor bug-phobe to do? Due diligence, of course. At first, this was twice-daily checks in which Mike and I went on blood-sucking safaris and evicted those pesky pests first with pliers (so NOT the tool for the job as Bo’s yelp told us), then with olive oil (we’d read that olive oil would make the ticks give up the ghost; instead the smell of oil in his ear—so close to his mouth—sent Bo into a fit of trying to lick his own ear which, while amusing, did nothing for the tick), and finally with pliers (just right).

But really, who wants to spend the summer on tick patrol?

I decided to beat the bloody bastards at their own game. For about a week, Bo and I went on a very odd walk. Every bush we past was met with an inspection. If he cleared it the whole week through, it was good grass. If I found a tick hitching a ride, that place was toast…at least for the summer. And though to passing cars I’m sure it looked like I was giving my dog some seriously bad touches, we figured out that there was a nest of blood suckers in the fields down by the cemetery and in the playground by the beach—they are so off the daily tour. Combine that with Winthrop’s cruel no-dogs-on-the-beach-from-May-1-to-Oct.1 rule and Bo-Bo’s having a very urban, very concrete-only summer. We pass the entrance to the beach; he whimpers. We pass the cemetery; he whimpers. We pass the playground; he whimpers. On the plus side, there’s no more barbaric tick-removal rituals, and I’m no longer having nightmares about blood-sucking fiends.

* I think the word tinkers might be derogatory. This is the name our tour guide had for the wandering people of Ireland, but this same tour guide also told us that “tinkers” had a habit of finding things before they were lost which seemed like a stereotype to me. In any case, this was a dream.

Bo-Bo Knows Fame

Bo-Bo gets mentioned in my (micro) article in today's Globe. Extra! Extra! Click here to read all about it...

Bo-Bo Knows Dingleberries

'Nuff said.