Dogs are like girlfriends; cats are like wives

I’m going to catch hell if I really use that for a title, so remind me to change it to: Dogs are obedient children; cats are thieves and vandals. The former eagerly intuits your feelings and lives in endless gratitude for your patronage. The latter coldly observes your actions and ponders your motives so he can more efficiently thwart your desires and demolish your property. This is the bad news about cats; the good news is that the sneaky little bastards are entertaining, and the fur on their bellies is delectably soft and fragrant and atones for numerous sins. Brewsky even prostitutes his belly in a cynical—yet successful—attempt to avoid punishment, but more about that later.

I bring greater intelligence to our contests, but he brings speed, agility, perseverance, and unrelenting focus—at least during the few hours of the day he’s actually awake. For it is then that his scheming little brain is working overtime to obtain some object that I don’t want him to have, or to con me into feeding him early, or to find a three second window of opportunity in which to sneak into the garage and thence to the attic where I have to lure him down with treats. Such dastardly behavior as he regularly exhibits (including the premeditated murder of a large peace lily that lived atop the refrigerator) would almost justify shooting a dog because even one such outrage—much less an hourly repetition of them—would violate the trust and integrity that makes a dog man’s best friend and distinguishes him from a rabid wolverine. But a cat, being a psychopathic felon at heart, requires that we show it endless mercy, or else there would be no cats.

And I do—show mercy. Just last night, I was chasing Brewsky with a towel when he suddenly rolled over on his back, stretched his front legs straight forward and his hind legs straight backwards, and began to squirm slowly from side to side, brazenly exposing every color and pattern on his wonderful belly. Humiliating as it was, I had no choice but to kneel and rub that belly, me laughing, and him looking at me with intense curiosity about what such a display could possibly mean. For the 15 months that I have known him, he has devoted scores of hours to understanding the human phenomenon of laugher but without the least indication of progress.

It was only this year that I could say an unreserved yes to having a cat, and I still feel treasonous at times for bringing home the worst enemy of the many generations of dogs that I have been privileged to love. I saw the movie Cool Hand Luke last month for the first time in 42 years, and I must give it some credit for my growing acceptance of life with a cat. As you might recall, “Luke” was a convict who was murdered by his guards because he was insubordinate and prone to escape. The escalating punishments that he brought upon himself combined with the fact that he was in prison for the ridiculous crime of vandalizing parking meters, made him look stupid. Yet, it soon became apparent that his problem wasn’t a deficit in intelligence but an inherent inability to accept authority. He himself chafed under this inability, and railed against God for having made him that way. Outwardly, the movie changed nothing about how I interact with Brewsky, but inwardly it gave me a greater sympathy for him.

People debate the imagined superiority of cats over dogs or dogs over cats, but the truth is that, like ourselves, they are simply what evolution made them. Dogs hunt in packs, and therefore regard love and cooperation as essential; cats are solitary hunters to whom love of family (except for a mother for her kittens) and cooperation for the common good just aren’t terribly important. Maybe this is why many dogs—and many people—hate cats. We humans can see ourselves in dogs, but cats are as disturbingly strange as space aliens.

Yet, there’s no sweeter time in my day than when Brewsky lies in my lap in bed while I’m reading. I’m sterner with that cat than I’ve ever been with any dog, yet when I go somewhere, he comes to see me off, and when I return, he’s there to greet me. When I get up in the morning, he’s standing joyfully outside my door, and many times throughout the day, he comes to me for a cuddle. Nothing impresses me more than the fact that’s he sees through my gruffness and trusts my love. I can’t hold a creature like that at a distance.

Have you ever wondered...

how many seconds the average community television viewer could bear to watch any of the discussion groups you’ve ever been in? I just spent two hours during which I learned nothing and enjoyed nothing—except for the snacks. Why do I go to these things? I don’t mostly, but flattery works, and I was flattered by someone who thought I had a lot to contribute, although that I knew very well that I did not.

The following is a synthesis of how I commonly experience such groups.  Whether they are social, religious, political, literary, or hobby oriented,    hardly matters. Many people experience groups differently. I suspect that most of those people are raging extroverts.

I arrive early but the meeting starts late, and people continue to arrive well after that. Sometimes, it will be in a place where everyone can be seen and heard, other times not. We are instructed to “tell us your name” and to answer a getting-to-know-you question. No waver is extended to those like myself who had rather be taken out and shot than to answer such questions. I can’t focus on what anyone else is saying until I’m done with my own little speech, so I try to be among the first to go.

With introductions out of the way, the discussion begins, often when either the host (if there is one) or a self-starter from the group tells about something they heard or read. The subject thus presented becomes the group’s focus for one to seven minutes, which is about how long it takes for someone else to turn the conversation in another direction, a direction which might be an enlargement of the current topic but is usually unrelated.

Politics and religion are always popular subjects, but since people are generally in basic agreement, the discussion often degenerates into snide remarks about the opposition under the guise of humor. This soon becomes tedious and to the seeming relief of almost everyone, a new topic is born. The pace accelerates when someone makes a trenchant point regarding this topic, and someone else either offers a doubly trenchant enlargement or a doubly trenchant counterpoint. Then follow more points, enlargements, and counterpoints and, finally, counterpoints to enlargements of counterpoints, combined with an occasional clarification or question (often rhetorical).

A woman who hasn’t said a word for an hour tries to speak, but a loquacious man talks over her, and everyone joins him in pretending he didn’t hear her. If people allowed themselves to acknowledge his rudeness, their silence would imply approval, so it’s better to keep quiet in the interest of inner peace and outer harmony.

A woman whom I would suspect of being on meth if she were young and skinny becomes so frantic to speak that she squirms in her chair like a child who needs to go potty. When more people are watching her than the speaker, he surrenders the floor. Her victory ends six minutes later when someone finally interrupts her in mid-sentence, which is the only way to interrupt her since her speech lacks commas, periods, or even spaces between words. Upon losing the floor, she looks stunned, like a rich child whose lollipop was grabbed from her hand by a Bowery beggar before she even got in the first good lick.

The host of the group—knowing a little of my difficulties in such settings—makes a few attempts to draw me out by calling my name and asking what I think of such-and-such. Silence reigns as every pair of eyes turns my way. I read in them the question: “What’s wrong with you that you need encouragement to talk?” I look at the host who is smiling a self-congratulatory smile that seems to say, “I’ve done my part; now let’s see if you can do yours,” and I mumble something—I don’t know what. The discussion soon moves away from me like a receding tide behind which I lie choked and battered.

A man takes the floor from the person who took it from the person who took it from potty dance woman. As he talks, his voice gains volume and his gestures gain speed. I speculate that he’s subconsciously trying to forestall interruption by working himself into a frenzy of passion and implied volatility. A third of the group speaks little if at all, but the talkers are either: oblivious, accepting, resigned, or like it that way. Maybe they mistake silence for attention and consider it a tribute to how adoringly scintillating they are.

I’ve wanted to leave since the meeting was fifteen minutes old, but it’s impossible to exit gracefully that early. I decide to stay for 90 minutes, but I stick it out for 112 so I won’t scream "NO!" if someone asks, “Do you really have to leave so early?” There’s a fair chance that no one would, but there are people who delight in directing everyone’s rapt attention at some poor schmuck whose only crime was trying to sneak out the door. I remind myself to walk slowly when my mind finally rebels and orders my body to get it out of there. The cold air and silence are welcoming, but I’m too drained to enjoy them. I’m also sleepy, and my head hurts. I ask myself what good I got from going, and I can’t think of anything.

So, Snowbrush, why the hell don’t you just charge in there and take the group in a direction that’s more pleasing to you. They might even welcome it.

I’ve tried that on a few occasions, and I found it to be a constant uphill struggle that few if any people supported—at least openly—but that did attract criticism. My belief is that groups are as they are because that’s how the majority of the people want them. If I’m in a group, and I don’t like the way it works, I do better to leave at the outset rather than try to implement change, make enemies as a result, and then leave.

I also have a personal problem that makes me ineffective in groups. Namely, my pause time is slow. This is a term that I made up to represent the interval between the time when one person finishes speaking and another person begins a response. When slowness to speak is your style, and you’re shy on top of it, you’re dead meat in most kinds of groups. For me to speak in a group, I have to work myself into a pace that feels aggressive, if not hostile. This guarantees that I won’t enjoy speaking or have anything worthwhile to say even when I do get the floor. In fact, I’m sometimes so surprised when every eye in the room finally turns in my direction that I forget what I wanted to say.

On top of this, people often don’t hear what I’m saying, or they can’t understand my pronunciation (when I was a child, I had multiple speech problems, and I’m not completely past regarding my voice as an ineloquent embarrassment with an icing of Southern hick). Like the woman who finally tried to speak only to have someone talk over her, people sometimes talk over me. Whether they actually talk over me anymore than they talk over anyone else, I can’t honestly say because I haven’t kept count. Maybe I just hate it more. I not only consider interruptions rude, but I take them as proof that I wasted my time even trying to be heard.

I also see most discussion groups as being mostly dishonest. Beneath the shallowness that passes itself off as rationality, erudition, and politeness, lay the deeper truths of dominance and submission, of right brain versus left brain, of why groups create unacknowledged roles for their members, of what part our species’ tribalistic nature played in bringing us together, of why different groups appear to react to conflict so similarly, and of whether the apparent acceptance of the thinly-veiled rudeness that some people use to get and keep the floor suggests that it is interpreted as a strength.

I believe that the people who understand the most about group dynamics aren’t the ones who do the most talking. The silent ones are essentially outsiders, and as such we can better observe the finer points. This outsider views most groups as embarrassingly bad theatrical performances in which the same players perform the same painfully shallow roles before the same silent and unexpressive audiences, sometimes for years. Whatever good I possess—and I see this as being true of most people—isn’t likely to appear in the context of a discussion group.

Why she turned out like she did, I just don't know

My pet name for Peggy is Fluffy after a squirrel that was in a Little Golden Book that my aunt got me when I was four. I personally hated the book and loathed the squirrel (I wanted to cut its tail off and hang it from a car antenna), and I even told Peggy this, but she said I had damned well better call her Fluffy (she says it reminds her of how cute she is), so naturally I call her Fluffy in order to make her shut-up already. If she’s looking the other way when I say it, I sneer at the back of her head in order to prove that I’m not some little woozy-man who’s going to let a woman push him around. I have to be careful that she’s not looking at me in a mirror when I sneer because she often stares at me through mirrors as if she thinks I’m too stupid to notice. It’s like she can never let me out of her sight. I don’t think she trusts me, probably because she has a guilty conscience. You’re no doubt wondering how she got this way. I'll tell you what I know, but it's not much.

After Peggy and I got married in 1971, everything went great for about two weeks. After those two weeks, I noticed that Peggy would still do what I told her to do, but that she wasn’t doing it with any enthusiasm. At first, I figured she was just sick, but I didn’t say anything to her about her sickness because it weakens a woman to give her sympathy—or appreciation, for that matter. It also encourages her to pretend she’s sick when she’s not sick in order to get out of work and to force you to treat her nice. Women are devious that way, so it’s best to play it safe and only talk to them when they screw-up.

After another two weeks, Peggy’s behavior was no better, but it was a lot worse. She had deteriorated to the point that she wasn’t just slow about getting things done, she wasn’t even doing them. It was like I had married a really sweet and sensuous dog (an Afghan maybe), but then a mongrel cat from Planet Bad-Ass had crawled into the dog’s brain through its nostrils. It got to where I would tell Peggy to fetch me another beer, and she would look at me like, “Yeah, right, when hell freezes over.”

I finally spoke to her about how I was the husband, and she was the wife, and the wife is supposed to do what the husband tells her to do because it says so in the Bible. When I said this, she got really mad, so I never brought it up again, and I finally gave up trying to make her do anything—her or the cat for that matter because I knew they weren’t going to do it anyway. Now that the dog is deaf, blind, arthritic, and hard to wake-up, I don’t even get the satisfaction of telling her what to do, although, god knows, she would obey me if she could. I feel like a captain whose ship sailed right out from under him in shark-infested waters.

When Peggy and the cat sleep until noon (which is pretty much every day), she makes me bring them breakfast in bed along with a small vase of yellow roses and a large vase of fresh catnip. I hate doing it, but I hate it worse when she yells at me. We’ve been married for forty years, and I don’t know how much longer I should give her to get her act together.