My grandma used to say Rabbit Rabbit as soon as she woke up on the first of the month. I’m not sure where it comes from but my minimal research says rabbits are auspicious and I will take any kind of luck right now. Hope you are holding up ok before the start of an anxious week, sending love from New Mexico.
On Wanting a Dog
Princess Tabitha, Willford, Goose, BIG-FLUFF. Some of the dogs I’ve favorited on Petfinder. I save them in a folder on my phone because I like their names or because they’re a Blue Heeler mix or dressed in a knitted sweater. I’ve wanted a dog for a while now. It started in the spring and like most things I get excited about, I surged on with little consideration for logistics or concerns. I think we need a dog, I said to my partner after a particularly lonely day. Where I am quick to make a decision, Willy is the opposite, thinking through things slowly, considering each angle. In this case, it was the hard and obvious fact that we had signed a no-pets lease. But even if we hadn’t, our apartment is yardless and our shared walls are as thin as paper (once, on a quiet morning, I heard what I thought was the soft scrape of our neighbor buttering his toast).
I heard about the Pet Cemetery from people who live in San Francisco and know the good, secret places. I went on a Saturday on the way to meet friends at China Beach. When I looked it up on my phone, maps took me first to a place near Fisherman’s Wharf, somewhere I never want to go, and I spent twenty minutes following a blue dot down the pier and around the cove until I was sure there was nothing there. Someone in a tie-dye sweatsuit asked if I needed directions, told me I had mistaken it for the pet museum and gave me detailed instructions to the cemetery which I forgot immediately but looked up when I got back to my car. I drove the 15 minutes and parked on the shoulder of a busy street under the 101 and across from a triangular plot of dirt surrounded by a white picket fence.
The Pet Cemetery was created in the 1950s for the pets of military families when the Presidio was an army post. Now it’s preserved by the city as a landmark, it’s only marking a barely legible sign: “The love these animals gave will never be forgot-ten.” It was strangely hot that day. The heat reflected off the dirt and the cypress trees cast short shadows. I walked around slowly, the whir of the highway above me. I’m not sure what I was expecting but it was all at once earnest and funny and sad. I kneeled down to read the headstones which were small and fading: Hula Girl: We know love because we had this little dog, Sweet Alyssum: Our yellow canary. Six great years, Ernesto the Fish 2/08-7/08, Loisa: beloved rat and friend, Ebi Baby: the love of my life.
I’ve been thinking a lot about why I want a dog. How the reasons are always inherently simple—to feel the soft weight of something warm and breathing next to me, to have something that punctuates the day, something that needs me. I’ve also been thinking about animals not just as companions but creatures to learn from. How animals can remind us of something essential about our humanity, bringing out in us a kind of earnestness that we rarely share with each other or ourselves. “What does the animal do?” Dorothea Lasky, in her book Animal writes, “They remind us that living and dying is something we must do. Their simplicity is the poetry of living.”
Give Me This, a poem by Ada Limón.
Animal, by Dorothea Lasky, quoted above. A book of lectures on ghosts, animals and shared imagination. I return to it again and again. Dorothea and I have been in conversation about the book via email for almost a year now and the interview will be published soon but in the meantime read it, it’s so good.
What Should Crisis Leadership look like? The animal kingdom offers unexpected guidance for how we might respond to the pandemic, by Douglas Starr in the New Yorker.
‘What is it about humans? What is it that would bring us together?’ Eric McNulty, a researcher on the team who was also a birder, came up with an analogy: he said that the behavior reminded him of “swarm intelligence”—the phenomenon in which groups of animals act in concert. Birds flocking, fish schooling, ants creating colonies—each individual knowing what to do.”
This conversation in The Believer by Richard Kraft and Patrick A. Howell. In it they discuss Richard Kraft’s new book from Siglio Press (<3), It Is What It Is:
“It is What it is is a colorful meditation that is precise in its role of resisting and combating Trumpism. . . Kraft refuses to settle on a new normal that is dehumanizing and outrageous in its prosaic insistence of mass denigration. Kraft’s work assigns colored cards [to Trump’s transgressions]—in the fashion of a metaphysical soccer referee—associated with “transgressing (the) rules and codes of conduct in the game” of our collective humanity and lives.”
The Media, this voicemail turned prose poem turned short story in the New Yorker that came out in the spring by Ben Lerner.
“I’m just clicking on things in bed, a review by a man named Baskin, who says I have no feelings and hate art. Through the blinds I can see the blue tip of the neighbor’s vape pen signalling in the dark, cold firefly. The raccoons are descending from their nests in foreclosed attics to roam the streets of Kensington; we moved last summer, have a guest room now, come visit. I can’t believe I haven’t seen you since his wedding.”
This Twitter account by Alex Dimitrov who starts all of his tweets with I love:
“I love leaning against a door at a party, just looking around”
“I love making something every day & very slowly”
Calling voters in the next couple of days who have received their ballot but haven't yet turned them in or don’t know where their nearest ballot drop box is. Let me know if you need help setting up an account/ getting started as a caller.
This Happily essay in The Paris Review, All The Better To Hear You With, by Sabrina Orah Mark.
“[M]any of us are bringing animals home. This is not only because we are lonely, but because we know, as Kafka teaches us, that animals are ‘the receptacles for the forgotten.’ Their silence evokes the silence of mourners. Nature, it seems, is trying to forget us. And if we must be forgotten, let us bask in the glow of our animals. Let our fade be warmed by their fur.”
What Gertrude Stein said, “I am I because my little dog knows me.”
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