Talk About Autumn

I'm finally getting over losing my dog.

I feel like I'm supposed to call her "our" dog, because she was certainly a joint project. There was plenty of vomit I never cleaned up personally. So I acknowledge my wife and friends who helped bring her this far. But fuck it, Autumn was my dog.

Meredith always said Autumn was a Texas dog. She's lean and loved being in the sun, lying on concrete, soaking up heat from every angle. When we moved here, to finish the Texasing of our dog, I put her in her crate in the back of our minivan, and we made the 2-day trip together. She whined for three hours, all the way past Baltimore, until somewhere in Virginia she stopped and accepted her fate.

Dogs are not renowned for their foresight, so we sort of assumed that Autumn had decided her life was now all about riding in a dog crate in the back of a minivan with me, and adapted.

I slept in the car with her at rest stops. We were both caged for 48 hours during the drive. We took a break the next day in Alabama, and I let her run around off-leash on Samford's quad in the bleak late January of 2015. Here's our selfie with the Ralph Beeson statue.

Still staring down the drive at Lakeshore after all these years.

Autumn and Player 3 coexisted for a while. We were wary of ever putting them together, but when he was small and immobile, we shooed her away and she got the idea. Eventually though, Player 3 learned to walk and he learned to grab and he learned that Autumn did fun things.

He was right! Autumn did lots of fun things when she wasn't vomiting partially digested fecal matter on the carpet. She jumped and ran and chased balls and was cheerfully violent—no malice, just strong and enthusiastic. From puppyhood, we trained her to roughhouse because we liked roughhousing with her.

We are not particularly renowned for our foresight either. We never planned ahead for what to do when someone small and grabby came along who wasn't good at roughhousing.

July 2015, things came to a relatively gentle head. I was kneeling on the floor, and Player 3 tottered across our small apartment trying to get a hand on Autumn. I tried to keep them separated, but was literally in no position to stop either one of them. 

Autumn got freaked out by my discomfort and the kid's unpredictability, so she told him to back off with a growl and by grazing his cheek with her teeth. She didn't bite him. She didn't draw blood. But he cried at the shock of it. The incident was portentious. Player 3 would not learn boundaries as quickly as Autumn needed him to. And I am not sufficiently ubiquitous to police them.

I briefly considered not telling Meredith, but I'm not into keeping dirty secrets from my wife. And even if I hadn't, I knew we needed to change before next time ended less benignly. We had seen Autumn fight a dog before. She is not big, but she is strong and tenacious. We could not wait and hope that her pit-mix jaws would never clamp on the boy.

I spent some time looking for another home for her, but our network in Austin was (still is) very small and quickly tapped. So I made an appointment to take her to the shelter. There was no opening for three more weeks, so we lived in a state of arrested relations for six weeks with Autumn in her crate almost constantly, to insure against further unpredictable interactions. It sucked, but maybe the drive from Philly to Austin six months before helped her adapt.

The day I took her to the shelter in mid-September, I fed her well, and we went for an extra-long walk. On our return, she plopped next to me in an armchair, hanging over one arm. We sat together for half an hour. I read and stroked her back. She smelled things. Then it was time to go.

Surrendering a family pet to the shelter is an unnecessarily lengthy process, especially when one has an appointment. One is asked to wait long past the appointment time, on a precipice of sorrow. You cannot fall in yet, because you must keep your dog from mingling with all the other dogs and cats in a constant trickle through the doors. Vigilance overrides sentiment. A dog fight in the shelter waiting room bodes poorly for your dog's chances of getting adopted.

Then, you must stand next to a kiosk with your dog and verbally answer the questions you already answered on the surrender form. Interruptions are frequent, and you have low priority on the task list. The intake administrator ignores your sniffles and eye leaks. You admit your failure as an owner to all the kindness and sympathy that government employees are known for. I had to check the box that said we could not take her back in the event that she had to be put down. If they could not find a home for her, that was her end.

After half an hour of standing and re-answering questions, they took Autumn's leash. She hid behind my legs when they took her. She was joyously explosive when we were around, and (we heard) timid when we were away. Fortunately, the administrator's demeanor sea-changed once she was not talking to me. Her borderline dismissiveness with me turned to sweetness and babytalk for Autumn. 

But Autumn did not want to go. She wanted to stay with me. Her tail curled under; the timidity we always heard about kicked in as she pulled away, trying to stay with me. Someone I had never met took her leash and dragged her through an institutional metal door. And then it closed.

That was the last chink in my failing dam of stoicism. I fled the waiting room. Sat on a bench under a tree and cried my face ugly.

For weeks after I would lie awake at night wondering if we had done the right thing. If I took her to exercise more, she could burn off energy. If I devoted a couple of hours to her every day, I could rehabilitate her. Right? I'd never done that before, but now would be different? 

"I think maybe I should go try to get Autumn back," I would say sometimes.

"I don't know what to say when you say that," my wife said eventually. 

I stopped saying it.

When you surrender a dog to the shelter, you don't get updates. Maybe she was adopted immediately. Maybe they put her down last week. You don't really get to know. But we got lucky. Twice, Meredith inadvertently found updates.

 Once, Autumn was the pet of the week on a local TV show. There was a video of a volunteer bringing her home overnight, and Autumn was laser focused on a tennis ball throughout the entire video.

This is also how we found out that the "mix" is autumn's pit-mix is probably "black mouth cur." The Philadelphia shelter where we got Autumn as a puppy told us she was likely a German Shepherd mix, which we scoffed at immediately. We didn't know what she was, but it wasn't no german freaking shepherd.

After we looked at pictures of black mouth curs on the internet though, it was obvious. Her color and build scream BMC. It's just the skinny pit head and maniacally strong jaws that look like a pit bull.


And the second time, on December 24, 2015, Facebook coughed up pictures of our girl being taken home by someone.

You can tell it is her, because of the intensity with which she is clenching that ball.

 (And the one eye.)

I don't know who this woman is. I probably never will. But I am so happy that she gave Autumn another home. So glad Autumn got another shot.




I still miss my dog, but we made the right, hard choice. And now, going on a year after we decided to give her up, I have room to talk about it. Here's one more picture of her in lapdog mode, which was most of the time, and which no one outside our house ever really got to see, lying in the crook of my leg on the couch.

We still love you, Autumn. I hope your life is joyous and filled with tennis balls.

Science... don't talk to me about science.

More caustic than I would have put it, but no less precise, particularly dunning the oxymoronic popularist hijacking of "science."

Young people, angry at God, but not fully committed to the rigors of atheism often cop this attitude. It reveals my own sorry flaws when I want to slap them for onotological immaturity instead of loving them through it. I am sorry, angry people. I will try to love you better.


Neil deGrasse Tyson: pedantry in space

Neil deGrasse Tyson strides onto stage to say that actually the Earth orbits the sun, that actually living beings gain their traits through evolutionary processes, that actually your hand has five fingers, that actually cows go moo, that actually poo comes out your bum – and you are then supposed to think yes, I knew that, and imagine someone else, someone who didn't know it already, some idiot, and think: I’m better than that person, I’m so much smarter than everyone else.

See also:

‘Science’ comes to metonymically refer to the natural world, the object of science; it’s like describing a crime as ‘the police,’ or the ocean as ‘drinking.’ What ‘I Fucking Love Science’ actually means is ‘I Fucking Love Existing Conditions.’

Existentialism and Theology, c. 1996

Here's a thing I wrote in what I think is 1996. I found it on a pile of papers after we moved and I realized that I don't need to keep it in paper form any more.

I learned this from my college philosophy professor, Dr. Sansom. Like an interesting piece of coral someone gave me, I take the idea out sometimes and look at it again.

Existentialism asks questions. Theology provides answers. But the answers are worthless until the questions are asked. The fact that Jesus loves you does not answer anything for you until you care enough to ask about it.

Advent Abdication 2015

Wrong species, wrong side of the fence.

Church in my life, in many ways, has been a disappointment.

I don't seem to be giving up on Jesus. As I get older and more experienced, I am ever more deeply committed. But churches, oh boy, if only I could do without them.

Somewhere in the distant past, I got the idea that church was where you went to get loved and accepted. Over and over (with a couple of notable exceptions) church has been instead where I've gone to get marginalized and blown off.

I'm weird and needy. I get that. But that's kind of Jesus's niche, right? He didn't come for the well people, right?

We're going to try somewhere new tomorrow, for the first Sunday of Advent. And it occurred to me tonight to try something new too: to just not try to find friends at church. To not hope for acceptance or love by the people I meet there.

That doesn't sound like a winning move, but at least it's different. Different than smiling and shaking hands and trying to remember names and going to activities with hope of making connection and still getting blank looks and uncomfortable silences after months of effort.

Starting tomorrow, I'll go to meet God. Frankly, he's challenge enough. I'll make relationships if they come. But I won't hunt for acceptance and friendship. Just be cool with what is, not stricken by what I don't get.

Seems paradoxical to try this tack on the very first day of the season of expectant waiting. But in here, it seems like a new direction. Let's try it and see what happens.

Bonhoeffer in the car

I read a chapter of some theology book last week, involving Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and every time I drive alone now, I think about it.

In his prison years, leading up to his execution, his writings took some corners that surprised people. He talked about Christianity needing to become religionless. Religionless.

Previous attempts in early 20th-century Germany to evangelize were religion-based; there was a not-necessarily-wrong assumption that everyone had a religion, and the gospel was telling people about a better religion in Christ.

Bonhoeffer said that state of affairs was ending/had ended. Modern people of his era did not even acknowledge that they had a religion. You couldn't tell them to get right mit Gott because there wasn't an understanding that there was a wrongness in place. That was weird and new in the 1930s, and according to Bonhoeffer, Christianity needed to be religionless to communicate with these people.

My understanding is that Bonhoeffer had a specific meaning when he said "religion" that you needed to understand to make full sense of his call to religionlessness. He thought that religion, as it had been known, was a seeking of God in ignorant places. As humans gained increasing knowledge in a widening variety of disciplines, that leaves ever-shrinking holes for religious people to look at and shrug and say, "Yeah, I dunno, God I guess." Instead, religionless Christianity would seek God in knowledge; find him and worship him among the discovered things.

But here's the first thing I drive around thinking about: That's not that different from now. The term "post-Christian" gets used to describe where we are, but according to Bonhoeffer, that was already going on 80 years ago.

I guess that explains why Bonhoeffer has been so influential among thinking Christendom; he caught the front edge of that wave when no one quite recognized it as a wave yet.

The second thing I drive around thinking about is: That was 80 years ago! Four generations of people have marched onto the marble since then, enough time for two more giant shifts in behavior, even if you don't count the world-wrenching advent of the Internet. I'd be surprised if we were still only in the middle of that wave. More likely, we are being hit with the next one or two now. But what?

Atheism is a popular bugaboo, but I think that's mainly a boon for the evangelical urge. Real, committed atheism is damn hard to live out, not least of reasons is that God is peskily real and present. Only an ubermensch can dream of staving off God for a lifetime. Anyone even slightly uncommitted to the proposition leaves God an opening to come in and change them. Really, the only downside to the rise of atheism in the world is that it causes well-intentioned people to waste time walking down stark roads before they come back to love and hope. Otherwise, it's open season for caring evangelists.

A hole where people used to keep religion is no longer the big issue. I think maybe the bigger issue is people adopting new/old religions that don't seem to involve God. Religions that think roadside bombs are good ideas, or mutant American nostrums embroidering free market ethical egoism.

We have religions again that compete with Jesus. Not that Bonhoeffer's words aren't still useful. But religion is back, and we don't know what to call it now or what to do about it yet.

When is the Riddler like Jean-Luc Picard?

I was thinking about the Riddler tonight, how he's so damn smart, but permanently smalltime. He'll never be a Ra's al Ghul, even if he is as smart as Ra's, because he's in it for the art. He has the stuff to be bigger time. He can plan a heist, he can manage a small organization of henchmen---building blocks of mastery there. It's not like he's Solomon Grundy, incapable of putting it together. He could do it. But most of all, he wants to make clever riddles. So he'll never be big time. What's important to him is not big time stuff.

Reminds me of Picard in Next Generation, that one episode where he traveled in time or whatever and was just a dude in a science officer uniform, all because he never punched a dude when he was younger. Backed down from a fight, missed his “destiny” as Mister Enterprise.

I've backed down from a lot of fights. I've spent a lot of time poring over riddles. I wonder if there's still time and chance to be a major villain, a starship captain. Or am I just a dude in a blue shirt now?

Seems like there's a chink in the thinking here, the assumption that being captain is preferable to being a science officer. But I haven't finished the thought.

Cry Havok

My eyes water a lot more in my 40s.

I'm fleetingly aware that my emotions have been out of whack for most of my life. I'm still not sure what emotional health really looks like; without a model, I'm unclear that I'm doing it "right."  But the depressions are shallower and briefer, and I like to think the mood swings have improved as I age. (Although they started surfacing again a few months before Player 3 was born. Maybe they were more untriggered than resolved.)

Another sign that the terrain is shifting though, is how much more frequently I tear up at music—compared to the "never" of my youth.

I have a long-standing love of Bill Mallonee/Vigilantes of Love music. A few years ago, I noticed that just the opening chords of his song, Nothing Like a Train, make me moisten around the eyeballs. When I hear them, I relax. It feels like everything will be OK.

"Irrational" is a word that gets thrown around a lot, and feelings are almost by definition irrational. But there's no reason for me to feel "OK" about this song. It's a sad song. I just do. A couple of Dar Williams ditties do it to me too, and a tune by the Weakerthans. Something in the folk/rock makeup that turns the spigot, somehow.

Most recently, I've noticed it at church. The community we're settling into in Austin, Servant Church, does hymn standards much more often than my beloved Circle of Hope.

Circle's DIY ethos extended all the way to worship music. They wrote a lot of their own songs, and cribbed a few others. That was fine.

But hymns have been winnowed. You don't generally hear crap hymns. Since most hymns are more than 20 years old, there's a clear consensus on what the good ones are, and there's a nice catalog of them. You can sing the good ones on a rotation, and it takes a long time to repeat.

These old, tested songs, I did not know how deeply they had burrowed into the masonry of my heart. "Immortal, Invisible" is not what you'd call a tearjerker, but that thing unpacks majesty. Somewhere in the second or third verse, once it's good and warmed up, I need a tissue.

Will this phenomenon intensify? I imagine embarrassing myself as I get older, turning weepy every Sunday, more frequently dashing to hit skip on a shuffle play because I don't want to cry right now dammit.

I don't like that I've become this way. But also, I love it. I spent a bunch of years in a Cold War with emotion. Like an arm slept on, I can expect some prickle as this limb awakes.

I like to move it

According to some social science report I'm not going to bother researching for this post, moving is one of the most stressful events in an adult's life. And it is!

A lot of the stress revolves around how much petty crap you have to remember to do. Address changes and tying up loose ends at the old place and still walking the dog at the end of the day.

I imagine that if some disaster hit, a fire or earthquake or war—from which we all made it out safely—and we had to flee our old home and start up in another location... that would have been almost preferable. Just drop the mic and walk away.

Instead there are literally dozens of hanging tendrils from the change that remain unaddressed. Nothing terrible, but all need to be done.

No one's bothered to make a list of what remains undone, so one floats by occasionally (Did we get the car registered yet?) and free-floating stress just drifts in, interrupting and complicating whatever else you were doing. (No! And it's overdue! Hope no one notices!)

My wife has commented before that I only get irritable over small things. She has been surprised by my calm during large, intense events. When our beloved (and sometimes behated) dog almost died, she was, I think, almost angry at how casually I behaved.

But then, I knew what I could do and what I couldn't. I knew what my responsibility and capability was. I wanted Autumn to live, but if she didn't, it was out of my control. If she died, we would grieve and keep living. If she lived, we would play-fight with her and take her down to the river for swimming again and things would be well.

Contrast that to a bat-swarm of responsibilities that come after a move, with no clear boundaries or action plans, or even a scope of what must be done. And we're not even done! We're just in the starter apartment! Buying and occupying a permanent home is still on the horizon!

But I still like moving. I like new places. Circle of Hope in Philadelphia taught me the joy and value in staying. But that pied piper plays a mean flute, and now I'm stressed in Austin.

Lent 2015: time-wasting

This Lent I have set myself the quixotic sacrifice of time-wasting.

It's sort of hard to know what's wasting time and what's fiddling. Sometimes reading a comic book is wasting time, and sometimes it's productive stimulation and sometimes it's research.

But as a concrete expression, I have barred myself from my ipad. No dinky time waster games for 40+ days. No reddit on the tablet.

I can still waste time on my desktop, and I do. Or even on a couple of analog time wasters I've got here. But when I find myself wandering that direction, I am at least aware of it and try to veer back in the direction of doing something instead of nothing.

At the Ash Wednesday worship we went to, it was impressed on me that the vice, the thing you give up for Lent, is not the point. You walk around and you're like "I'm giving up hooch for Lent." But that's not the deal.

The deal is that when your vice is gone, you've kicked your own crutch away. The vice was covering over a hole and now you have an obvious hole in you. 

Depending on how long you've had that cover-up there, you might not even know what's living in that hole these days. Maybe it's just an emptiness. Or maybe it contains things you put in there because you didn't want to have to look at them any more. And now you're looking at them. For 40 days.

But that's not the point either! The real point is that God is there to help you fill up the hole. The point is more God. And the by-product is a wholer, holier you when you two are done with that.

For me, living in a brand new city strips even more away, because I have a lot of free time. Which means a lot of opportunity to waste time. Which means a lot of opportunity to stare into the hole and asking God what kind of spackle this thing is going to take.

Restless and deprived of my usual consciousness salves, it's been grim so far. I've been reading a book on the Holy Spirit which isn't grabbing me. Tonight I finished a book of Robert Howard's Solomon Kane stories, which has actually been more productive. (Solomon Kane—worst Puritan ever or pure psychotic?)

But I'm hopeful about what things will look like come resurrection day. The antsier I feel now, the more I hope for an epiphanic payout. A lasting change instead of the returning tide of mild hedonism.

Go Not-Very-Far Together

The African proverb says that if you want to go fast, go alone. And if you want to go far, go together. It doesn't say anything about how exhausting going far will be when you go together.

I've been in Austin for about a month. Only now am I not falling into a comatose stupor at 10 pm every night and waking up 10 hours later, barely refreshed, having dreamed seemingly every somnolent moment.

M talks about not knowing how to make friends. I think I know how, except that there's a one-year-old in tow, who does not give a red-crayon shit about the ennobling discussion I'd like to have with a just-met would-be peer. Being responsible for a young child is like having a hobby that somehow pushes you away from sharing your interests with others.

I know how to find places where like-minded people gather, make ingratiating small talk, and slowly entwine my life with those of promising strangers. It's hard, but I understand the mechanics. I've never tried to do this under such odd restraints though. I have to flee the scene during afternoon nap time and the very second dinner ends to make it home in time to bed down the loveable demand factory.

I do not see how the African proverb makers found the ability to go anywhere together. We can barely make it to the Chipotle and back.

I would think the entire proposition untenable, except that billions of adults do it every day.