Fucking the dog

I went for a long walk through the buzz of orientation week on campus tonight -- frisbees in the street, girls in the height of goth finery, road construction that only U of T would have happening this week, wide-eyed frosh, a few weaving drunks, young women with a coffin effigy for lives lost in the middle east -- the stirring stew of eagerness for ideas and Life and uneasy anticipation.

I tend to pick up phrases of conversation as I roam through, and one that rung out at me tonight, a few young guys on a patio on College drinking beer -- was "fucking the dog."

A lot front-loaded into that. The person I most associate with that phrase is my lost friend H, who tended to the small-town-Ontario language of his roots, homage, in some ways, to his father, like his continued membership in the Legion. He'd use these terms in his round radio-announcer voice, simultaneously ironic and assertion of a foundation that had made him. We had an ongoing riff about that term, which I'd never heard before I'd met him, and which he frequently used in contexts that made people blanch -- like the time he was trotting merrily down the street, walking his friend's tiny terrier, and ran into a couple of pals. "What'd you do all day?" they said. "Oh, fucked the dog," he chirped, bark laughing when the two fastidious guys turned their gaze on the terrier with horror.

The big irony is that I haven't talked to H in four years, after a friend-breakup that was as wrenching and unkind (on my part, mostly) as any lover breakup -- but I came across his blog on the weekend (while idly trying to discover, deep in my drunken night with S, whether he still worked at her firm). And, this triggered a lot of reflection about our friendship, where it had gone off the rails, cringing at my part in its ending.

So I emailed him. An apology, of sorts. Not just about our finale, but about the whole arc of it. I see now that I needed, always sought, a kind of intimacy from him that was a displacement of something missing with A, and I was as miserable when he couldn't meet it as I was with the lacks with her. I played out a lot of of those lacks on him, culminating in a final burst of "you know what your PROBLEM is?" flaying arrogance.

I'm very different than I was four years ago, I think. So much more tentative about how I relate to people, shape them, so conscious of how I've expected other people to follow my narratives of need, how I've railed at them when they haven't. A bore the brunt of that; H carried a fair bit of it.

And I'm also conscious that part of the uneasiness with him was that we both had a fair bit of the same kind of arm's length yearning to fulfill... something... about our work, shared bursts of optimism when we touched near it (he with poetry and fiction, hopeful new loves, running a marathon), deflation and misery when it receded and we didn't know how to grasp it differently.

The uneasiness is wrapped up in the touchstone phrase, too -- our friendship was, in a way, fucking the dog -- marking time near each other, shaded near but not of real intimacy. Time spent wanting to do things differently but only approaching it.

I'm working through a lot of this stuff about how to grasp and live into my voice, my passion, put my work and my life in the same place, not sit around the edges of it. I do more than my share of measuring out the coffee spoons and not just doing what I can in the day. Posting, in particular, letting the very real rewards of the online community take up so much time. I think "getting obsessed and staying obsessed" is partly about the "bursts of brilliance," as Pamela calls them, but also about the steady building of the tedious, the dividing up the units of work, as F levers through his day. Just... doing the tedious things, staying at it, until the bursts of brilliance come in the sides.

I do know that living my life and doing my work are inextricably intertwined in a different way than, say, if my work were in a lab -- my way of loving, talking, walking through the city -- when your work is about making social worlds, all of this is part of knowing. But knowing and doing something with the knowing are two different things, and while the two are more latched together for me than for some people, the doing something needs to be more tightly shaped for me than it is.