Howl With the Dogs

It’s currently 10:34 PM, and all the dogs are howling. There’s none here in this apartment, but all around I can hear their calls, beckoning maybe or just being obnoxious. But beckoning for what and being obnoxious why? The answer may very well be “nothing” and “for no reason”. They’re simple creatures, really. Sometimes, and certainly tonight, I have yearned to live such a life. The life of a dog that is. They don’t have to kick off the sheet at 6:30 in the morning, fix themselves a meal, and scurry to work a job that underpays them. Then they don’t have to come home, after dodging the string of drunkards outside their apartment, fix themselves another meal, and then burrow under the sheets by 10 o’clock so they can be up and at ‘em the next morning. It’s cyclic, this human torment. But then so is the life of the dog. Cycles are just a part of nature’s nature, though. In small things, like a daily routine, and in greater things, like our entire existence. Christ, I need sleep.

It’s been 20 minutes, and after looking at what I just wrote while eating my Kraft macaroni, it dawned on me that someone might argue that a dog lacks desire, or an overarching goal, and free will, the ability to steer their lives. Thus they have it worse off than a human. But to that person, I introduce the term: blissful ignorance. They are happy because they know nothing else. They are afraid or angry because they aren’t happy. Dogs know happiness and they know unhappiness. It’s perhaps the bare minimum of sentient conception, but they seem to be doing well enough. Yes, I have work tomorrow. Yes, it’s almost 11 at night. And yes, I can’t sleep.

11:15, and I have submitted to the inevitable. Sleep shall not come. I can’t say why I’m writing. Reading always made me sleepy. But when I write, I only feel restless. Too restless to read, too restless to sleep. I want to create something. I want to write something great. But somehow the restlessness that I get from writing cannot carry me to write anything of substance. It carries me far enough that I can see, through the fog and mists, my ultimate destination. But it does not carry me to it. So what do I lack? They say ambition is the gas to the vehicle. I have no gas but I have ambition. What does that mean? 

I’m 21, but I may die by age 25. And what’s to stop me? The notion that some of us are destined for something great is romantic but ultimately depressing. Does that mean that some of us are simply screwed while others can ride Lady Fortune to a legacy of greatness and success? The successful have always believed in this motion, and I must wonder why. Napoleon always attributed his victories to the personified Lady Luck. She can be found in Machiavelli’s The Prince. So many people throughout history climbed the ladder only because luck provided them the rungs and the harness. They couldn’t go down, only up, and all on the whims of this great diety. Can it be said, then, they had no real will?  They followed a course set out for them by Providence and Fate, not by themselves. That is certainly what great men like Napoleon thought. What if Napoleon had decided to become a cobbler one day? Would Fortune have handed him the tools? 

Likewise, those hard on their luck (an appropriate phrase) attribute this to the same higher diety. They simply can’t turn the tide or reverse the wave. It washes them where it wishes and all they can do is guffaw and die quietly. 

Imagine you’ve reached the top. Whatever that is to you. Do you say Fortune gave you this moment or yourself? Did you follow the path or did you build it? The latter sounds sweeter, but then you must deal with the stress of continuing to build that path. Fortune would have already had it laid out and ready at your conception. All you have to do is walk into your grave. 

11:30, and I hate life. I check my phone constantly waiting for them. That sweet transparent sliver bearing their name, the warm and friendly green bubble next to it, and under, the message which, for all I care, could say “K”. It’s sad that that would be enough. But I haven’t admitted that to myself yet. I sent the message at 9 o’clock. Maybe their phone is dead?

The dogs stopped barking for the most part. Austin is a louder city, but not for lack of trying to be a quieter one. No matter. I should hate the noise for disturbing my sleep. But there is none, so I do not hate it. 

A great virtue of writing is that it is completely absorbent. Even when asleep, our dreams still pull us into pools of thoughts that we may have been trying to forget. Listening to music only seems to exacerbate their bitterness. Try reading a book while awaiting news of your college admission. A text from your lover. It can’t be done. But writing is different. Writing requires every part of us: if writing takes our soul, our heart, and our mind, the torment and the suffering starve. They have nothing to eat. You hope they resort to cannabilism. They often don’t. But a brief respite is still respite. 

11:44. Where has the time gone?  No reply. The dogs are silent. 

I had a dog once. Only once. His name was Tails, like the Sonic character. I’ve never played a Sonic game in my life. I didn’t even name him and when I was 10 he was already 12 years old. We had been given him by my dead aunt. Tails loved my aunt and he always seemed to be out of the moment and never with me. Despite that, I latched myself to him and tried to play with him and create a genuine bond. I don’t know why I loved that dog so much. I may have known then. It’d be impossible to be sure now. So many feelings in a relationship only exist in the present. We savor them, thinking we’ll come back and visit them in old age. But we can’t remember them all or even most. We can’t learn our lessons from the bad ones and we can’t try to replicate the good ones. So humans never change. Not because they don’t want to. Rather, they simply can’t. It’s perhaps our biggest cognitive failure. Tails died when he was 13. Peacefully but sad. He had a brief tenure at our household, but I cried for days. Now I only laugh at my reaction. See what I mean?

12:01, and now a new day. No reply. They may be asleep. They’re off tomorrow, but sleep is a human need. Sleep…where are you?

For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to write a historical fiction series. So many episodes in history could find themselves on TV’s across the country, boasting 9.4 ratings on IMDb: “The next Game of Thrones. Brilliantly crafted and executed, this will become a staple of American and human media.” But, then, historical fiction is so ostracized. Do they not realize that if you want the story of Game of Thrones, you can find it in the history of the Sengoku Jidai in Japan, the Wars of the Roses in England, the War of the Three Kingdoms in China? Admittedly, none of the above mentioned had dragons. But you can still see, with your own eyes, the armor worn by Oda Nobunaga, the great warlord that unified Japan. Such a man fit inside that armor, that armor you are currently posing next to. Greatness was cast and this was its mold. That’s why I prefer historical fiction over sci-fi and fantasy. It’s tangible. It’s here. And above all, it’s in reach. 

And now I’ve spent a little short of two hours writing this spiel. I could have been using this energy to research, to compile, to write a story worth telling. I have the ambition, but where o where is the gas? 

12:41, and I’m thinking of them. This is the consequence of writer’s block: it leaves you vulnerable. I use to write poems before I found I wasn’t a poet. I couldn’t even bother to rhyme. People expect that you know. Rhyming. If they can’t find these recognizable patterns in their lives, you better damn make sure they can find it in your poem, Yeats. Ah, Yeats. He wrote “The Young Man’s Song” when he was an old man. Did he do it to revive those feelings he once had? The feelings he couldn’t retrieve?  

“For he would be thinking of love   

Till the stars had run away,   

And the shadows eaten the moon.”

Was he trying to replicate those nights, to bring them about again? No. Yeats knew that was folly. He was a great poet, but he was only human. He was great because he faced this, and he made others do the same.

The stars are running away and the moon is being chewed on, and what am I thinking of? Yes, Yeats was great. 

1 in the morning, and now we come to the crux of this dilemma. I am torn between stitching heartbreak and filling in a blank track record. I cannot do both. Which do I remedy? Which should I remedy? If success can take the bitterness out of loneliness, out of sharing your heart with no life partner, no linked soul, why are the successful always portrayed as being bitter? Why does Scrooge eat his meals on Christmas Eve alone, facing no one but the ethereal apparitions in his fireplace? What is he thinking of, in his silk robes? Is he thinking of a girl from his youth? Would he give it all away for her?  Dickens would have us believe it is not only natural but good for Scrooge to entertain such an exchange. Is it?

Not to say I can’t have both success and a partner. Not to say I’ll ever have either. But it’s human nature to make decisions this way. We put to ourselves the age-old scenario: this or that? What you choose is what you desire, truly desire. Now it stands before me: do I want love or do I want the gas?  Both of them are keeping me up to 1:30 on a work night, so they both mean something. But which means more? If I cast off the lesser, perhaps I can attain the greater. That is the logic at least. 

What did Tails have? Tails had all a dog could’ve wished for and more. But happiness eluded him. He knew this, and it troubled him. Perhaps he didn’t know why. He had love and possessions at one point: he lost the former and never smiled again with the latter. What does that say about the two?

He was a dog, though, and I am a human. But because humans are more complex creatures does not mean they aren’t vulnerable to such perceptions. Our complex emotions and thoughts are all based on what dogs already have. The perception of the presence, or lack thereof, of happiness. I’m unhappy. I’m unhappy because I’ve written this and not a compilation of sources for my book; I’m unhappy because I sent a text, ending with a question mark, to a person whom I have pledged my heart to, and have received nothing back and, as a whole, very little in total up to this point; I am unhappy because I cannot sleep. Do I know, though, which of these things is contributing the most to this feeling? I can't say I do. I speculate the causes; I do not know them.

Can I live in obscurity or can I live without a mate? I’m living now with neither. But I’m living unhappily. The dogs are barking again. I wonder what set them off?

I think I see the sun, but I’m simultaneously sure I don’t. It’s 3 in the morning. I’ll be driving to work as it’s rising. I’m tired now. I don’t know what it was, but finally, the feeling has descended upon me. They replied as I started my bibliography. Funny how that worked. I closed the computer, though, and I left the text alone. They can wait. I’m laughing now. Not perhaps as you might to a Bill Burr-Conan interview, but as you might to you archenemy being pummeled by a baseball. I envied the dog just 5 hours ago; now I realize I am it. We both fall victim to nature’s cycles, we both want happiness but cannot construct what that happiness is. The dogs are barking for the same reason I’m writing. It’s primal, really.

The idea of sleep has long been abandoned. Rather, I think I’ll do what I’ve been doing already. I’ll run outside and howl with the dogs.