Untitled

Can you pet-sit my dog for the week, Diary?

Those creepy Facebook ads that read my life and try to regurgitate spam that fits it have really taken a pessimistic turn. Four months ago, Facebook noticed I was getting married and pimped all sorts of rings and dresses and manicures and vacation getaways. Now, completely unprompted, I got one that promotes saveyourmarriagetoday.com. “Get your marriage back on track!” Is there some sort of 90-Day-Itch? I’m not Elizabeth Taylor, Facebook. Back off.

This weekend was booked from start to finish, but all of Sunday’s activities were sacrificed at the altar of “too much fun at a birthday party on Saturday night.” We spent all day Saturday shopping with The Holland Clan, picking up delightful outfits for everybody (except V, who is often content make others happy when it comes to clothes), including my wedding suit. I think it makes me look good. At the very least, it should help get my marriage back on track. At any rate, shopping normally takes a lot out of me, and doing it while playing hide-amongst-the-clothes-racks with a 4-year-old, delightful as it was, made me even more tired. Luckily, a fortifying shot of Kirschwasser and three episodes of “Mad Men” got us back on track, and we headed out The Liberty to celebrate Paige’s birthday.

The thing about birthday parties between the age of twenty-one and thirty-children is that they generally involve A) going to a bar, B) drinking at the bar, and C) taking pictures at the bar for Facebook. (Maybe this is what makes Facebook so suspicious of monogamy.) Our dear friend Liz had the most brilliant brainstorm in the history of party planning, and livened things up by hiring a magician. He was very good! In the darkness of the outdoor patio, on our half of a busted-up picnic table, he performed several flawless card tricks, rope tricks, ball tricks — standard stuff, but with enough panache and charisma to make it all seem fresh. I was fortunate enough to be standing close by, so I was the one who got a ball pushed through my hand and into a cup. I couldn’t feel how he did it. I mean, I kind of could, but I didn’t want to, so I couldn’t. It was nice to see a large group of mildly sauced, very clever young Americans suspending disbelief and cynicism and enjoying magic tricks. 

I’ve been thinking for a while about the cultural tide of sarcasm. For much of the past two decades, biting sarcasm has been the default sense of humor of youth. Moderately rebellious without being at all productive or insightful, sarcasm has sustained my generation through the tribulations of the Boomer wake. I think that’s disappearing in the next crop of Americans. I think we’re seeing a return to sincerity. Now, the sarcastic snot in me wants to say this is a sign of a new generation that swallows what it’s told and doesn’t push for change, but if I’m being fair for a moment, I don’t think that’s it. I believe the generation that grew up fully engaged online and compulsively social is absorbing a stricter sense of etiquette than my generation did, and thus a return to decency and sincerity is in order. Humor seems to be sliding from anger and sarcasm into absurdity and slapstick — closer to the humor of the ’20s and ’30s. 

Then again, generational personalities are a crock of marketing shit. There’s no such thing. I don’t believe in the particular branch of cultural studies that identifies traits among completely diverse people based on age. Kind of smacks of astrology. But, like astrology, it’s fun to suspend rational disbelief for a second and speculate on what makes a generation tick. Believing that coming of age in a certain time will mold the larger parts of every individual’s personality is like, well, believing in magic. Nobody really believes magic is real. Until a magician shows up.

After the show, everybody bought him shots. I wonder how many Facebook photo albums he shows up in, untagged, labelled in the caption as “the magician guy.” 

Sunday, we slept it off, forgoing a tour of the LBJ Ranch and an Oktoberfest tasting at The Ginger Man. Coming out of Sober September, it’s a little tough to get back the pacing. Three days of drinking in a row just wasn’t in the cards. Instead, we stayed at home and tried to soothe the temper of Cricket the Anxious Poodle, who was left all alone during Saturday’s shenanigans and experienced no magic whatsoever. Sometimes I wonder if we’re driving an already unhinged poodle to the brink of absolute insanity. I wonder what true insanity even looks like in a dog. Are there psychopathic poodles? Lacking all empathy and rotely going through the motions of domestication, but capable at any moment of slaughtering another living being without remorse?

Actually, given how carnivorous animals behave in the wild, aren’t they all psychopathic to some extent? Then again, animals generally don’t kill their own kind, or at least, not outside of highly choreographed mating tussles. Killing prey is no more psychopathic than eating pork (don’t start, vegans). So maybe there aren’t psychopaths amongst the lower orders of animalia. Or maybe they’re just as rare as human ones, and we never notice when it happens. I imagine what it would be like to be one of those National Geographic photographers, waiting patiently in a snow drift to film some polar bears, then all of a sudden witnessing a brutal polar-bear-on-polar-bear crime: passionless, bloody, senseless. We’d probably blame global warming.

If Cricket ever becomes less afraid of other dogs, I think she’d be capable of murdering one. I think she’d do it without hesitation. I really worry about that, almost as much as I worry about her proven willingness to bite humans. Am I harboring a psychotic poodle? It sounds funny, but think about the implications — am I feeding and caring for a being that is evil? 

Since I can’t know — think how hard it is to even fully determine that a human being is irreparably evil — I guess I have to assume she’s not evil. I have to assume that all our nurturing will eventually allow her to stop being Anxious and live out a life of peace and tenderness. But I don’t know.

I must go now. Cricket ripped open a trash bag and ate some burnt cookies, and now she’s panting at the door because she’s got diarrhea. Tonight, I’m leaning towards evil.