My Dad and I are listening to The Beatles. Have you heard of these guys? They’re crazy, man. I wrote something long so let’s get there.
WHAT HITS
Well, The Beatles. Any photo Sinna Nasseri takes. Iron & Wine’s new album, specifically, Cutting it Close and Tears That Don’t Matter. A podcast I’ve been ripping through called Secular Buddhism. When my coworker Cody says “10-4, Rubber Duckie” in earnest.
A DRIP on dogs and opportunity
Again, I am considering adopting a dog. She’s a mutt named Emily with three legs. This is an expected phase in any heartbreak, stumbling upon some fur outcast who could reconvince you. I’ve never acted upon it with success. Three years ago, this guy who lived a few blocks away said he was falling in love with me and then stopped talking to me an afternoon later without explanation. In response, I fostered a dog named Roller Blades for a weekend with every intent to adopt him. Bladey Boy rose at 5am each morning and we’d head straight outside. When he saw a squirrel he would jump four feet in the air and continue leaping effortlessly as if the sidewalk were a trampoline. Another dog walker watched this happen and yelled from across the street, “WHOA! I’VE NEVER SEEN A DOG DO THAT!” He never tired. Here are some things that made him howl - me leaving the room, when I wouldn’t make eye contact, the tv, music, the shower, wind. I hadn’t purchased groceries before his arrival and survived on half a bag of spinach, a can of black beans, and corn tortillas for our weekend together. I hauled branches, not sticks, into my living room and pushed all my furniture into the kitchen to create a makeshift dog park. While he licked frozen peanut butter out of a kong, I’d catch 20 minute power naps. At night, he insisted on sleeping with me beneath the covers. This would’ve been comforting but Rollie B actively participated in his dreams. He never told me what they were but I’d guess the inner monologue of each was, “OH YEAH. I’M ROLLER BLADES. I’M RUNNING AROUND PRETTY FAST. MY FEET ARE ON FIRE. RUN, RUN, RUN. THE SQUIRRELS SURROUND ME. LIFE IS GOOD.” The farm girl in me felt completely defeated when I realized I wouldn’t be able to adopt him, and the farm girl in me stopped me from doing it. This guy needed to live in a place where he could run. The foster I dropped him off at on Monday evening texted me an hour later and said, “How did you deal with this?” She had dropped him off at another foster by Tuesday night. Roller Blades eventually found a home with a yard. When the adoption website posted his placement to their page 18 months after I fostered him, people responded with numerous stories essentially saying, “this was the craziest dog I’ve let into my home.” I’ll never know why that guy did that.
In the city, you have a cat or a dog or a nothing. Having a cat makes you a Cat Person. Likewise, a dog makes you a Dog Person. But having nothing makes you a not. Being a nothing throws you into this realm of being “not into animals.” Because I lived my childhood with so many of them in harmony, I wasn’t aware you could not be into them. They just were. It wasn’t a subjective topic with a scale of likability. I tell people I grew up on a farm because it’s easier to say to a stranger at a party, “I grew up on a farm” versus, “I grew up in the country but we were in 4-H.” Because that’s followed by, “...what?” And then you’re knee-deep in explaining a way of youth that sits somewhere between Robert’s Rules of Order, watching your second period float away from you in a river while your best friend tries to distract the rest of the campers from seeing, and knowing how to shave a pig.
We showed pigs, cattle, sheep, and goats in 4-H. They lived in company with horses, chickens, dogs, cats, and a duck who thought he was a chicken. What’s showing? When you bring the animals to the Fair (an incomparable week of glamour), guide them around the ring (big fenced-in circle of earth), while the hottest guy you’ve ever seen in your life (26-year-old Animal Science major from a nearby college wearing starched jeans) judges how you’re showing them or how good your animal is compared to the rest. I’ll be almost exclusively talking about pigs because I don’t have it in me to spiritually explain the process of bracing a lamb. In essence, cattle are nice to lay on, a goat could survive the apocalypse, and if you were to listen to the inside of a lamb it would sound like nothing. Not, “Oh, I don’t hear anything.” Like, you’d listen and say, “Oh. So that’s the sound of nothing.”
Pigs are the best animals in the entire world. Have you ever touched a pig? Make it a point in the next year to try. Much like love, I could never put the feeling into words. They’re wicked smart with a great sense of humor. Both the hardest and best part of raising a pig in western Kansas, a place of seemingly eternal drought, is that pigs can’t sweat. This means that during the summer, every 80 minutes the oven timer will go off, you will ignore it but then bust ass to the back door because your Mom is an inch away from hollering, throw on chore boots, and sprint from the house to the pig pen to make it rain, really, for your boys in mud. It’s 105 degrees and you’ve got full control of a water source. As a kid, being in charge of the hose is the most power you have for a stretch of time. On the Catholic country kid power scale, it sits between being able to accept the Eucharist (age 8) and driving the truck (age 10). The water shows I gave my pigs laugh in the face of the Bellagio Fountains. My grand finale was completely soaking my own head and neck, climbing on top of the pig pen, and workshopping a ballad from a self-written musical that Asher refused to participate in. Looking back, I accept this. At the time, I was at my wit’s end trying to understand why my little brother didn’t want to play a character named Sweetie O’Bailey whose only goal was to make it to Hollywood. Not make it in Hollywood. Just to it.
Pigs are also relatively easy to walk compared to the rest of the 4-H animals you’re raising and, like a dog, you have to walk them. If you walk them daily, there is a shot you could turn your average-priced pig into a pig that could place in the top-third in its class at the Scott County Free Fair. By some miracle we’d release four to six pigs from their pen each summer night, trot them around, and get them back into the pen. Walking pigs with your siblings is a lot like going to war against the Really Mean Rooster with your siblings is a lot like any outdoor escapade or chore you took on with your siblings: your older brother will be in charge, your older sister will have a different idea, you will be emotional, and your little brother will be sprinting around doing some sort of clown-like physical showmanship completely oblivious to the tension growing between the three older siblings as their ideas continue to clash until one of them (emotional third child) flips a lid.
You’d think your goal at the Fair would be to win it, both in showmanship and class. For a kid whose thing is raising and showing animals, it is. For a normal 4-H kid, your goal is to somehow gain enough confidence in the arena restroom to convince yourself that you’re going to be okay during Showmanship. Showmanship is when the judge is judging you for how you’re showing and not the pig for how they’re pigging. You’re in the ring with every other 4-H’er your age and the judge is pretending to look at the animal but he’s actually looking at you. He may come up and ask you questions like, “What would you change about your pig?” or, “How would you rank your pig compared to that pig?” or, “Are you ok? That’s so much armpit sweat for a kid.” The physical act of showing any animal has trends over time. During my era, you’d sort of lean forward like a little troll and slowly walk behind your pig while pointing, moreso gesturing, your show stick at your pig as if to say with your body, “I present to you…pig.” A good showman would make sure their pig was always in line of sight of the judge and never take their eyes off of him. Are you with me? Let me break this down further.
You’ve been up since 6am. A few short days ago you were using your pink Canon Powershot and some paintbrushes downstairs to make some sort of abstract imagery in the basement because you’re enrolled in Photography, haven’t taken a picture all year, and the fair is 36 hours away. Flash forward, you get the Grand Prize. Awesome. But you had another photo win its class and it rests right beneath the Grand Prize Photo in the Grand Prize Photo Booth where the Entire Town stops to see the Grand Prize Photo. The Grand Prize Photo is innocent and honestly extremely badass for 2006. Everything is black and white but the paint on the paintbrush is still red. Sick. But the photo that won its class is mortifying. The photo has put a shadow on your entire fair experience. Retrospectively, you’ll see it’s the first and finest lesson in creating - the entire act is embarrassing, completely, always. Even this substack. Even that play. Even the musical on top of the pig shed. The whole entire. It never stops. You’ll never stop cringing, you’ll only learn to talk to it. But the first cringe hurts. Especially when it’s a close up black and white photo of your lips while you’re putting on lipstick that you’ve taken selfie style at 10:45pm in your bathroom running on fumes and a creative high from the paintbrush photo you just edited that looks like it could be the next album cover for The Black Keys - Kids Bop Version. I know this photo doesn’t sound that bad but you get good grades, live in the country, and are a Catholic for God’s sake. Lipstick is for town girls. You’re just Catherine Huck.
You’ve been up since 6am. The lipstick photo haunts you. You’ve successfully scrubbed and shaved two pigs while somehow getting into a fight with every sibling. Now, you’ve forced your sweaty body into Show Clothes which consist of Wranglers, a collared button-down that once belonged to your brother, and boots. You’re staring in the bathroom mirror with only twenty minutes to spare before you have to believe in yourself . Because at 9am you’ve got to circle a live hot around the hottest guy you’ve ever seen in your life without breaking eye contact with him. Not once.
The best thing that ever happened to me at the Fair was the whole thing. As a 4-H kid, you’re a celebrity for the week. All your cousins in 4-H are also celebrities. All the country kids are celebrities. Nobody sleeps and you eat Tater Twisters for every meal. After each show, I’d crawl up the bleachers and sit between Grandma and Grandpa and vent about every single thing that had gone wrong. There was this thing called the Barnyard Olympics that I don’t have the time to cover. All the 4-Her’s become one sort of mass family existing together in non-stop event hell Sunday through Sunday and by Monday everything was gone and you’d be back to being whatever you were before. The worst thing that happened to me at the Fair was the time my pig entered the ring for Showmanship, tore off at 77mph, and sprinted around the ring three times effectively doing hog wheelies before running directly between the judge’s legs. From behind. Have you ever seen a pig sprint? Make it a point in the next year to try.
I’ll never know why that guy did that but I understand it in the same way that I understand why I have done what I’ve done. Only in retrospect. Plainly, I speak of regret and acceptance. Alan Watts has a lecture I’ll paraphrase, that you could sit and dream every life you could possibly lead and, in the end, you’d still find yourself in this one. “And you would make further and further-out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today. That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have.” It’s what the film Everywhere Everywhere All at Once is knocking at. What I believe Iron & Wine is speaking towards in his new song, “Cutting it Close.” I take immense relief in letting myself believe there is a life where he did not die, one where I never left the animals, one where I raised nine kids in a pasture next to my siblings, one where we worked out, one where Roller Blades chin rests on my arm as I finish this edit. But as it happens, no, I don’t have a pet but I grew up in the country. Sure, I would love to see a photo of your dog.
WHAT’S UP, MOM
It is only right to feature Mom in the post where I talk about the Fair. Every joke in that was for her in an attempt at belated gratitude. Having four children involved in multiple projects in the Fair? I don’t know how she slept. My Mom is incredibly curious. She’ll walk into any room or situation and ask a question so completely out of left field that it makes me say, “How did you even think of that?” before pondering an answer. Usually, I don’t have one. It’s a characteristic I have such respect for and it’s one I try and copy into my own life. She is tough and wise as heck and, unknowingly, has made me a better writer because she’s taught me to say only what needs to be said.
1. What is something strange, cool, or funny that happened to you recently?
2. What advice would you give yourself one year ago?
3. After pondering your answer, have you stumbled upon advice that rings even more true?
Say a prayer and let it go, my man. See you there.
everyone has boobs!!!
You forgot to mention the rabbits! In my nightmares I still hear the sounds of a carrot crunching...and then realize that carrot was actually my thumb. Pain.