In a city that loves dogs dog parks will abound. In a dog park in a city where meth abounds, heads will shit in the bushes and dogs will eat the shit. Then the dog absorbs the crystal and tweaks out.
But that’s not how the story was told to me. He started with, “The dog was acting all coked out, just tweakin’. He took it to the vet and was told there was meth in the dog’s system. He’s like, ‘How’s that even possible?’”
Apparently meth stays in your poop, and meth heads poop in public. And dogs eat people’s poop. The perfect storm.
I guess he told it better.
I don’t want to keep switching dreams.
I was at the height of my physical powers only a year ago. My body was conditioned and I could use the whole of it in synchronicity to move and lift things other men couldn’t. To get under a dining room table and heave it up and over a banister rail while walking backwards downstairs made my body feel stronger. Just last summer even, my muscles felt like they still had room to grow in my skin. They were already hardened in the forge of furniture moving, but my t shirts had a little stretch left to them. Today a grimace fouls up my face when I bend at the knees.
Rusty Sunshine told me long ago, about 40 you start to go downhill. And that’s what downhill is for me. No longer a student, no longer begging to learn more, the fibers of my biceps have matriculated. The sponge they once were is now rubbed to frayed tatters, the weight of water pulls them apart.
Sadly, its only just begun. The lament I mean. The list of ailments. Men older than me have as a talisman against the wrath of time a sacred chant that they hope will prevent Death from actually taking them – a list of ailments. As though by saying aloud how close death is, it will not sense a challenge, but instead will pass over them in the search for youth, something with fight still left in it, fight that mocks Death and rattles his scythe.
The list of injuries and other complaints. Not skateboard accidents. Not proud badges from barroom fights. Nope. It’s the muscle you pulled in your lower ass getting out of bed. It’s the font on your cellphone pumped up so you don’t have to use a magnifying glass to read texts. Oh, look how close death is, my hands cramp up folding them in prayer!
I do this physical labor because it’s how I learned to pay the bills, and I don’t want to switch dreams now, cook up a plan to go back to school and study biology and head to the forest to track the decline of everything on the planet. The dream was to be a junk man. Drive around the city gathering up another man’s waste and knowing where to sell it. That dream is happening, and I haven’t forgotten the more important dream of finding time to write. I just needed a year to think about things.