Rory Cheatam Walks a Scrawny Dog

Rory Cheatam took the dog for a walk, on behalf of his mother. She
called up to him from the kitchen where she was reading a newspaper, her voice as high-pitched and straining as it was in his memories of adolescence. Groaning, he shoved himself into a pair of leather boots and lumbered down the stairway. He took mind of the pictures hanging on the walls as he stretched a sweater over his back and lanky arms. He had knocked down so many. Heading into the kitchen, he eyed the target of his disdain. The dog sat under the table, with its tail curled and its head lowered. To one side rose a wall of draping pink fabric, a nightgown, a soaring tower of cotton and polyester which, to the dog, must have seemed like the walls of a cathedral or perhaps the cliffs of Dover. Rory eyed his mother as well. She sat there, with her glasses slipping down her nose, a handsome nose, and her small mouth pursed and moving somewhat, mouthing the words she was reading. A handsome face and a beautiful woman, even in her old age. She didn't look up at him.

He grabbed a leash and a small plastic bag and headed for the door. Opening it, he felt a rush of cold December air. The dog followed, obediently.

Obedience wasn't the problem with the dog, Rory could admit that. The dog was frightfully obedient. Too obedient. Morbidly obedient? It made him uneasy. Living things should have more control over their lives. Or at least more of a free spirit. Rory shook his head. What do I know? He thought to himself, and crossed the street, the dog trotting faithfully beside him.

It took a long time for the dog to relieve itself. So long that it caused a bit of an existential crisis. Why am I walking this dog in the first place? Rory looked down and hated it when the dog looked back at him. How did it know that I was looking at him? He was probably listening to the vertebrae in my neck move. What a little son of a bitch. He probably thinks he's walking me.

"Jokes on you," Rory called out, surprisingly loud. "I'm walking YOU." Ahead of Rory, an old lady paused in her garbage can processional. She stared at him. "Good evening!" Rory exclaimed in a very clear and slow voice, with lots of emphasis on each syllable. He had no clue if she was hard of hearing, but she had the clear and sharp eyes of someone who had developed hawk-eyed vision in compensation for some other sensory deficit. She was probably hard-of-hearing, Rory concluded and it wasn't until he was two blocks away and the dog had carefully selected the rusting yellow carapace of a fire hydrant as the final resting place of its sacred reservoir of urine that a single faint thought echoed through Rory's mind. I should really help that lady with her trash cans. He headed back, but when he got to her house she was gone and the lights were out, and the night sky above the streetlights started to fill with large flakes of snow.



Here's a picture of my car in the snow. I've named this car "Susan B. Anthony, Champion of Women's Suffrage".

Unmanmade

I had a nightmare two nights ago, and I would like to describe it here, on this blog. It seems an appropriate place, and I haven't posted in awhile so here goes:

I woke up at 7:30 in the morning clutching my pillow and my mattress tightly and my eyes were tearing and my heart was pounding. I remembered the dream vividly and I still remember it. It was an anxiety dream in the truest sense, and my subconscious most likely conceived it as an unintentional by product of issues yet to be dealt with. In the dream, I was still in college. All of my friends had graduated and I had the distinct sense that I was alone. Not in a physical way; I was surrounded by happy and energetic young students, but in an emotional way, and I felt like I was part of the scenery, an immobile and inanimate object framing the collegiate experience of others. I suppose that I felt like a ghost, now that I think about it. Yes, a ghost. Anyway, I had to get to class and I couldn't remember what building it was in and I was running across campus, flying really in the way that ghosts tend to, and I remember thinking that this is it, this is the end, the death of everything I've known and all of the people I have met and all the experiences I have had, all melted and drained into an inaccessible abyss or, worse yet, packed onto a super sonic rocket and propelled far beyond my reach, maybe into orbit around a better planet somewhere. I gasped with fear at the notion of everything I loved going missing and I awoke with my eyes tearing and my heart pounding as I said before.

Here's a photograph of me in New York City: