FOOD or NOT FOOD

Note: forgot to post the post last night, so today has a bonus Bleat.

I love when the mail delivers something that instantly screams out to be A COLUMN NOW, please. I have a piece due Friday for the National Review, the back-of-the-book cultural “bright” spot usually inhabited by Mark Steyn. You know those scenes in horror movies where the heroine has a haunted dream, and everything’s desaturated, with dead leaves blowing around? Well: the new Restoration Hardware catalog arrived today. It’s like that.

Apologies if the bright, vivid colors sear your eyes. The dead muted palette has a purpose: the preface specifically ties the new look to “the global economic collapse,” and seems to suggest you should buy these things so you can position yourself as an aesthetic curator of the best of pre- and post-industrial civilization.

My God, who died? The level of pretension in the item description is just precious. Genuine reproductions! Oh, this will write itself.

Happily now we roll towards the wonderful hell: Fair starts Thursday. I have been writing about the Fair for twenty-five years. It’s like writing about the same battle, over and over again. Little changes, which is one of the eternal attractions, but it makes for interesting challenges. You have to presume people remember what you wrote before, and since I have a horror of recycling material, this means coming up with new, fresh perspectives on the About a Foot Long Hot Dog stand.

I have to admit I’m not looking forward to the About a Foot Long as I have in previous years. The last few dogs have not settled well. Hot weather, cold – doesn’t matter. They hit the stomach, and then they laugh at you. Couldn’t resist, eh? Well, do what you want, but I’m not going anywhere. Or maybe I am! Comin’ up! Just kidding. I’m not even that crazy about a corn dog, to be honest. I like them, and it’s certainly part of the Fair to have one, just as it’s part of the ritual to buy a bag of Tom Thumb donuts (Light as a feather!) and save a few for later, only to find they have turned into a donut version of something that staggered out of the Pet Semetary, all wrong. Just wrong. But you can’t eat them all at once, because then you’re sick. Fair food turns on you faster than a French ally after the war’s won.

Heresy it may be, but with age comes wisdom, and maybe I don’t have to eat what I ate a quarter-century ago. They’ve probably changed the grease. But still. There’s a hot dog place that makes an unbelievable chili dog on a seeded roll. There’s a place that serves hamburgers whose flavor whispers of drive-ins long ago. There’s a joint I know where you can get hot meatloaf if it’s a cold day, and they have Heinz 57 – the old Lutheran Tabasco – if you want to give it a jolt. And the coffee’s unlimited, too.

Stop! I’m blowing material! Good Lord, I must be mad. I’ll be writing and shooting and talking about this enough in the next ten days.

The Fair, again? It was just the other day. Where did the year go; what did I do?

Lots, as it turns out. The year between this Fair and the last was a pile of barbed wire, but it got better and better and now it’s fine, all things considered. But I shouldn’t be writing: I should be cleaning. One houseguest left today; another arrives tonight, and you know your wife wants the place to look spin and/or span for her sister, so I’ve been polishing and wiping and straightening while blasting techno from the iPod. I draw the line at sweeping the garage, though. If she wants to put on white linen pants and crawl around on hands and knees, well, then a price will have to be paid.

Back in a bit.

So. This morning I had a meeting at the kitchen table with one of the paper’s bright young multimedia guys; he’s got us hooked up with something that will add location-based social media and several other buzzwords to our Fair website offerings. Get this: here’s how my job keeps changing. Today I wrote the replies people will get on their cellphones when they enter certain answers into the program. I was chosen because I could deliver Snark, if needed. Since we’re also pumping tiny 10-second videos as part of the plan, I had to write ten little scripts, deliver them in front of my greenscreen in the basement, then ship those off. Tomorrow we shoot the introductory video, and the motto is “fast.” Mike me up, get the camera off the sticks, 360 around me while I yak, and bang, next scene. Then I will shoot my own video, blog about the Fair, write a column about it, and that ends the first shift around four.

Something I’ve noticed about people in multimedia and web-related professions: the entire day is the workday. I like this. I mean, it’s hell if there’s no downtime, but everything’s exploded: there is no office in the old sense, just places where the magic rays of wifi connect you to the throbbing invisible gristle of the great Imaginarium. There’s no five o’clock quitting time because you might have a great idea at seven. You live your profession, more or less, sliding in and out of work and personal roles. It’s that last point that makes it different from soul-crushing jobs like, say, being a law partner: you’re always billing, you’re always working, and it’s all either-or. Some days I feel like I spent two decades twiddling my thumbs waiting for this world.

Really: when I got into newspapers and was given a computer hooked up to the AP wire, it was heaven. But frustrating: do more! Be more! Have some more colors! We would read Wired and dream of the world to come. When the internet eventually arrived – and it seemed to do so all at once, bang, here’s the browser, GO – it was like being starved for a week and getting a plate of hamburgers with a frosty malt and oh, we invented safe non-toxic cigarettes full of vitamins that enhance lung functions; light upa and drag ‘em deep! It’s everything you’ve been waiting for, chum.

Anyway. Nothing more redundant than spending your time on the internet writing about the internet; sorry. Little else to say today. Took my daughter to piano. Glared at the sun for not being warmer. BE WARMER. Gave the dog a scrap of pizza, then took it back because my wife reminded me I should cut it up for him so he can’t eat it all at once and enjoys it more.

But it’s possible he’s frustrated because it takes longer to eat.

She didn’t agree. I think she’s wrong. For dogs there are two states: FOOD and NOT FOOD. Once they hit the second state the fact that there was ever FOOD in the first place is forgotten; they are now experiencing NOT FOOD, and so the mission is now FOOD. Which is why he drove us nuts today. From me he expects no scraps while I eat. I never gave him any. As Alpha, I eat what I want, and if there’s anything left, that’s another issue. But the rest of the pack always shared , out of that peculiar human virtue called kindness – or, more likely, their inability to turn down that pleading, curious face – so he has, over the years, come to view their food as his food. So. When they come home after I’ve had supper, he harangues them. When they eat separate meals spaced a half-hour apart, he has to yell at them. When everything is done but there are still visual and scent-related clues that the possibility of FOOD exists, he will bark to be let outside where we sit, BARK to demand we go inside, BARK when we get there, BARK when we leave in exasperation, and BARK until someone does something stupid, like give him a few bits of kibble, which guarantees more barking tomorrow.

The wife and child say “he feels cheated” otherwise, but I try to explain that they are investing human emotions into a rather simple creature. What dogs want is this: they want an answer. Is there someone at the door? Yes or no. Is a walk about to happen? Yes or no. Is there more food? Yes or no. If the expectation is YES and the answer is NO, then they put their head down and stare and sigh, that wonderfully human gust of disappointment, but it’s the sound they make when they get the answer, and it’s the wrong one. But that’s okay. It fits in the order of things. Dogs hate uncertainty. It makes them neurotic.

My dog’s not neurotic. He just has his priorities straight and knows what works. From that we could all take a lesson.