The typical response from my friends when I make a dog video is:  Why do you do that?  You’re insane.

Many writers would have made dog videos, or, worse, CAT VIDEOS if they’d lived in the age of YouTube.  For example: Kerouac, Bukowski,  and definitely Patricia Highsmith.

We writers, even those of us who have at some point been branded quirky, subversive, shocking are essentially just goony, reclusive idiots who talk to animals and do other childish, occasionally charming things when we’re not pounding nails into the floor with our foreheads (Eric Bogosian quote).

There are some social butterfly writers.  Truman Capote.  Neil Gaiman. These guys had/have such huge lives, I don’t know how they ever wrote/write. But these are superhero writers.  The rest of us spend a little too much time alone, in our underwear.    Some of us become secret connoisseurs of cat videos (how else to explain the extraordinary amount of media references to cat videos, other than journalists are sitting home watching fucking cat videos?)

I have made dog videos for four or five years now.  Mostly just because looking at images of  my dog (s) in motion soothes me.  Also, my dog Mickey, LOVES being photographed and filmed.  Seriously.  He was once photographed by a high fashion photographer (for the wonderful Unexpected Pit Bull calendar) and the photographer burst out laughing when, as soon as she took out her gear, Mickey began posing.  She’d never seen a DOG do this.

Recently, I made a two-minute movie about Mickey encountering zombie hookers in a cemetery.  Why would I possibly do that? I have no idea.  It just seemed funny. I have a pretty idiotic sense of humor.  Sometimes, I’m funny, but mostly, I’m a jackass.

David Sedaris is very very funny. It’s unclear to me what his stance is on the subject of cat videos, though I think there is a passing jab at cat videos in his hilarious new book, Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls and, of course, this jab implies a familiarity with CAT VIDEOS.

I did a reading with David Sedaris a bunch of years ago, and it was pretty great.

We hadn’t met or read each other’s work before the reading but, in one of those beautiful coincidences that keep life worth living, it SEEMED like we were buddies who had planned on reading complimentary pieces.  Mine was about eating too many dried apricots on a bucolic country trip with a new love interest, his was in a very similar vein.  We both read about terrible humiliations.  The audience laughed and laughed and laughed.

After the reading, David Sedaris and I hugged and vowed to remain forever friends. We haven’t crossed paths since.   He became DAVID SEDARIS.  I became a quirky, subversive, shocking novelist who sometimes makes dog videos.

Okay.  I even made one cat video because I got pissed off at that wildly successful existential French cat, Henri (no link to that bastard, he gets enough attention already.)

I made a lame attempt at a rebuttal cat video starring my reluctant, ancient, cat Lulu.  I’m a little ashamed of this.  But not that much.  Not as much as I was the time I ate too many dried apricots while on a bucolic vacation with a new love interest.

There is something really pure about making dog videos.

Some of my work is pretty hard-nosed and people assume I’m a seen it-all-five-times-and-didn’t-like-much-of-it person.  But I’m just a quiet, animal-loving, yoga-enthusiast idiot who sees magic in many places, including dog videos.

Perhaps my friends think I’m insane for making dog videos because even  they can’t reconcile the side of me that produces melancholy, twisted books with the jackass who makes dog videos.

Neil Gaiman has helped me with this.  I always used to feel that, as a writer, I couldn’t show the side of me that believes everything is potentially magical, that all the world is a dog video.

Then, I read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and liked it immensely. In particular, I  liked the way he matter-of-factly goes from the familiar to the fantastical almost in one breath – and it works beautifully.

It was very liberating to see someone do that successfully.  And I felt less crazy.  I felt like it’s okay to write brutal things one minute and make videos about my dog meeting zombie hookers the next.

Neil Gaiman does not, as far as I know, make cat videos, though he DOES post Tumblr pictures of his aging cat and also of his dog, a beautiful, rescued white Shepherd named Lola who I briefly met a few weeks back.

Reading Neil Gaiman gave me permission to let loose completely,  incorporating a sense of wonder and magic into hard-nosed writing.  Something I’ve long avoided doing.

Perhaps, once I get used to doing this, I’ll have less need of making dog videos.

But I hope not.

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I’m heading off to teach yoga in a few minutes and am having the standard-issue mix of dread and slight excitement at the prospect of cajoling people into doing unusual things with their limbs and their minds for 90 minutes.

I prefer teaching yoga to teaching writing. I always worried that teaching writing (excepting the occasional workshop) might kill my writing.

I don’t have that fear with yoga.  There is no killing yoga. It would just come back.  Like a zombie.

Zombies have outshined vampires and well-to-do housewives as a national obsession.  And seem in no danger of leaving.

I like magical creatures, mythologies, Sci Fi, and zombies.  I talk to trees and inanimate objects (and people and animals too)  and consider everything imbued with a spirit.  Including zombies.

I have the notion that, if the need ever arose,  I could reason with a zombie the same way you can sometimes reason with or whisper to a difficult dog or horse.

Maybe I’ll be in big trouble when the zombies come.  Or maybe I’ll have a lot of a work as a Zombie Whisperer.

I wrote  a short story, Zombie Hookers of Hudson, because I like zombies, and also because I was asked to contribute  fiction for The Marijuana Chronicles, coming July 2nd from Akashic Books.

Rather than drum up some long-ago shenanigans from my weed-smoking youth, I invented pot-smoking zombie hookers.  My zombie hookers are pretty benevolent.  Because they were invented by someone who thinks she’s a  Zombie Whisperer.

I think zombies are popular because we all think the world is ending.  Pretty much every culture and civilization since the beginning of time has thought their world was ending.  In our time, there may be more of a case to be made for this outlook. The earth is heating and the weather is getting really fucking wonky. Even some Republicans admit this by now.

Most of my life,  I’ve had recurring post-apocalyptic dreams.  As a youngster, I loved Planet of the Apes, Road Warrior, and Bladerunner because these movies looked like the landscapes in my dreams.

When I first moved to NYC at age 17, Bladerunner played every weekend at the St Marks Movie Theater.  And I went EVERY WEEKEND.  My friend Bliss and I would sit there, reciting it pretty much line for line, smoking lots of weed and cigarettes (this was Lower Manhattan in the 1980’s, you could shoot  heroin in your jugular on the subway and no one would look twice, though I never actually tried THAT) and cooing over Rutger Hauer and Daryl Hannah (those standing backflips of hers were particularly awesome, watch here, though it is heartbreaking.)

Sometimes, leaving the theater, it was hard to distinguish the barren, bombed-out-looking landscape of the Lower East Side from the sets of Bladerunner.

Movies like Bladerunner, Terminator, Planet of the Apes, 28 Days Later etc…are just manifestations of our collective unconscious same as Hieronymus Bosch paintings were in the 15^th century.

Right now, our collective unconscious finds zombies particularly appealing. It’s somehow cozier thinking zombies will wipe us out than a series of weather events or biological warfare.

And yoga is the zombie of mind/body practices.

Yoga started a long, long time ago and, no matter what anyone does to it, no matter how many of us freaky yoga-loving loons interpret and transmit it, it keeps working and finding new converts and, for the most part, spreading well-being and some degree of peace.

Yes.  Yoga is a cult.  But,  pretty much everything is a cult.  Human beings like cults.  We like believing in the same things.  It makes us feel less alone.  We are a weird, conflicted species, celebrating individuality and original thinking, but all, at heart, believing the same thing:  That the zombies are coming and yoga will make it better.

Time to go teach yoga.

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I read about half a John Updike book once then grew enraged at the chronicling of the ennui of the well-to-do and flung the book across the room.

Somewhere in my mind, I lumped John Cheever in with John Updike, though I  had never actually read a single sentence of Cheever’s. I made one of those categorizations I was prone to in my late teens and early twenties.  Because I knew EVERYTHING in those days.

Now, fortunately, I know very little.

A little later in life, I came to be friendly with John Cheever’s daughter, Susan, who I liked, both as a person and as a writer.  I felt a vague stab of guilt for not having read the work of her late father.  But I still didn’t read it.

Through the years,  on hearing of my love of swimming and, in particular, my love of swimming in the pools of hotels where I wasn’t staying or of people I didn’t know,  friends kept asking if I’d ever read Cheever’s The Swimmer or seen the movie. I would just say “No,” and leave it at that.

Six months ago, while on vacation in Mexico with my boyfriend, I went swimming at a particularly spectacular beach.

My boyfriend stayed on the beach, reading and slathering himself in SPF 2000 sunscreen as I went into the water, cavorting, doing handstands and backflips. Glad to be alive.

I have since read Cheever’s The Swimmer.  It is an astonishingly good story.   And what I was feeling in that moment, in that beautiful sea, is very well expressed by this:  “…he was breathing deeply, stertorously as if he could gulp into his lungs the components of that moment, the heat of the sun, the intenseness of his pleasure.”

I was feeling all that.    My head was under water, inside the sea, hearing the woosh of the Caribbean. And then, I heard a dog barking.  I  could probably hear a dog-in-need bark from 200 miles away.  I immediately swam toward the shore and peered at the beach, where I saw a scrappy tan pup barking at my boyfriend.

There were other people on the beach, but this dog had singled out Seth, the guy with the giant straw hat and the SPF 2000 sunscreen, to ask for help.  Because this dog needed help.  He had a hideous, very infected bite wound on his front leg and his ribs were sticking out. 

As it happened, I had a can of dog food in the basket of the bike I’d ridden to the beach.  I was planning to  feed a very sad-looking stray poodle-type who hung around the bakery in town.

We found a discarded flip flop, put the dog food on it, and fed it to the pup.  He devoured the food and started on the flip flop. Then, he drank the contents of my water bottle, and then my boyfriend’s water bottle too.

I sat, looking at the pup, marveling at how he was not in good shape but was able to be happy in that moment, smiling at me, squinting his surprising bright green eyes.

As I wondered how we would help him (we had no car, no cell phone service,  and were miles from where we were staying) he dug a big hole in the sand, right under my bent legs,  burrowed in, and took a nap.

This was the beginning of a very wild 48 hours.  Through the help of about a dozen local people, including the folks at Alma Libre Books, two animal rescue women, and a bunch of veterinarians who routinely donate their time at a clinic for low cost veterinary care, we got the pup medical attention.  And all our new Mexican friends URGED us to get the pup out of Mexico where it was thought he had fallen off the back of a truck of a man transporting pit bulls and, generally, men transporting pick-up trucks full of pit bulls do not have good intentions.

Later, I wrote a short, highly fictionalized account of this event.  It’s up on Akashic Books’ site, here: The Killing Type.

So we ended up adopting an injured 6-month-old Mexican beach dog and flying him home with us to New York.  We called him Esteban, “Stevie”, after the child of the hot brunette and the Mexican Drug Lord on the show WEEDS.

Mickey, my dog of the exceptional ears, immediately liked Stevie.  And Stevie liked him. 

Stevie has his issues, he doesn’t know how to meet other dogs on leash and he hunts the innocent garter snakes in our yard. But we love him deeply.  When he is not being an insane adolescent dog, he is extremely loving, funny and handsome.

Also, he got me to read John Cheever.

Even though we’d found Stevie on a beach, we didn’t know if he could actually swim.  I have a friend with two  greyhounds and they periodically fall in the swimming pool and immediately sink and have to be rescued.  They can’t swim AT ALL.

As it happens though, Stevie can not only swim, but he’s an avid swimmer.  He has already jumped into one swimming pool, three smelly ponds, several creeks, and the Hudson River.

I made this movie of him swimming in a pond.  I called it The Swimmer, nodding to the John Cheever story.

Then, I decided, it was probably time to read John Cheever.

I discovered I greatly admire the writing of John Cheever.

The moral of this post is,  If you adopt a Mexican beach dog, you will find out you love something you had once categorically dismissed.

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I drove down  to Olivebridge today to see old friends, Kate, Sarah, and Farmer Thom.  Mickey rode shotgun, as usual, and I always love watching the way he sniffs at the air during our little road trips, trying to figure out where we are going by the smell of the air.

We got about five miles from our first Olivebridge stop, Kate’s house, when Mick started making high-pitched squeaking sounds, smelling Kate or her beagle (also named Mickey).

I lived in Olivebridge for about six months last year, in a crazy blue house that had been built from a bomb shelter kit. Apparently, 1950’s bomb shelter kits don’t call for very good plumbing or roofing or heat so it wasn’t the most hospitable dwelling and, anyway, six months into my tenure there, my boyfriend and I decided to shack up.  In Hudson.

The land the bomb shelter is on is beautiful though and Farmer Thom, the first former-urban-dweller-turned-Hot-Farmer I ever knew, lived next door.  Thom is a retired FDNY firefighter and an Accidental Farmer, having never made a plan to farm, but stumbling into it by starting a small garden and then, Presto, a few years later, he has acres and acres of delectable vegetables and the tending of vegetables rules his life.

Kate and Sarah live a mile down the road.  They are lovely humans and Kate, a wildly talented painter (Kate Paintings Here) is descended from a long line of farmers and teachers (actually, I’m totally making this up, but I THINK it’s true) and Kate was waxing wistful about  Olivebridge as it was during her childhood: working farm country.  Evidence out the window here, behind Wistful Kate, Big Mickey and Little Mickey. 

Sarah, Kate’s partner, a professional organizer who is always impeccably dressed and always on the go, had to go before I even got out of my car, but Kate and the Mickeys and I had a beautiful walk in the woods, then lounged around eating bonbons and drinking coffee and yakking for a while as Big Mickey tried to hump Little Mickey, who was absolutely mortified.

Then, Kate went to whack some weeds, and I went to visit Farmer Thom.  It was a fairly short visit, but Thom showed me a gnome, retrieved from the Olive town dump, a gnome I am slated to inherit when he is done scaring scavengers off from the strawberry hoop house. 

After introducing me to the gnome, Thom gave me a glass of root beer and then pointed out that here I am blogging about Hot Farmer Laura, as if Hot Farmer Thom had never even existed.

So now, the record is straight:  Before I ever met Laura Ex-Urban-Dweller Turned  Hot Farmer, there was Thom the Ex-Urban-Dweller Hot Farmer

Perhaps this is just more evidence that there is farming in my future.

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I am not a foodie.  In fact, eating is a nuisance and I’d be really happy to just have an IV once a day to get nutrients.  I don’t enjoy cooking or doing dishes or shopping for food.

The only thing I LOVE about going to artists colonies is being FED.  Even if the food is HORRIBLE, I’m intensely grateful for it because I didn’t have to deal with any aspect of it other than eating it and possibly complaining about it.  (My Yaddo Movie)

I do like some food.  Apple turnovers for example. Ethiopian food.  Almost all the food in Italy and all the produce sold in the medina in Tangier, Morocco.

Also, I’m a vegetarian. And I’m allergic to garlic.  And I don’t really eat bread.

I’m basically like a really fussy toddler. You probably do NOT want to invite me over for dinner.

But I have a new friend, Laura the Hot Farmer:

Laura is all about food.  She is a chef and her husband, Dave, who she met at chef school, is also a chef.  Together, they run a popular Brooklyn restaurant, Applewood.

Laura and Dave and their two daughters now live upstate and grow their own food. And I don’t just mean vegetables.  Here is Laura’s blog about the life of a Hot Farmer.

Laura and Dave have some land and a red barn-looking house pictured here with Chimney the Gnome in foreground:

They also have two delightful pit mix dogs, a bunch of chickens and cats, an extremely pregnant goat named Cindy, and, as of this writing, two piglets named Pig and Other Pig:

If those don’t seem like the most enchanting names for pigs, it’s because the family does not wish to REALLY name the pigs as they are going to EAT THE PIGS.

My vegetarianism started when I was 15-years-old.   I had never really enjoyed meat anyway and then I became smitten with a vegetarian horse thief in Georgia (the state, not the country). After making out with the vegetarian horse thief, I pronounced myself vegetarian and that was that. A little later in life,  I continued being vegetarian for ethical reasons.

Laura the Hot Farmer points out that eating animals  is a long discussion.  That, basically, cows and chickens and pigs as we know them (as opposed to wild boars etc) wouldn’t be around if humans hadn’t raised them for food.  She also points out the difference between eating one of her own pigs, killed with one quick gunshot to the back of the head, and eating some pig that was killed in a slaughterhouse (even organic, free range, etc livestock is killed in a slaughterhouse, has to be to comply with FDA regulations in order to be sold to the public).

“There is no taste of fear in the meat.”  Laura says of eating the animals she raises.

I personally don’t wish to taste ANYTHING in meat, so I don’t eat it.  All the same, I have tremendous admiration for what Laura the Hot Farmer is doing.  She is completely conscious of what she eats, having known it it since it was a small piglet or chick or plant (I thinks she eats some beef she’s never met but only if its been vouched for by someone who HAS met it).

Maybe if I grew my own rice and beans and tofu and vegetables, they would taste better and I’d enjoy cooking them and putting them in my body.

Maybe it’s time to become a Hot Farmer.

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One of my mom’s horses, Mulie, died on Monday.  He was 25.

Mulie was a thoroughbred, registered as Oat Bran Blues.  My mom trained him as a racehorse and he won some races, coming close to a track record at Delaware Park in the early 1990’s.

Here is my mom on Mulie for a morning workout, maybe 1992:

When Mulie was done with his racing career, my mom brought him home to her farm and taught him a second career as a show horse.  When he was too old to be ridden,  Mulie spent most of his time in a field with another gelding, living out his years as a well-loved grass-eating machine.

The problem with horse racing, as I see it, is what would have happened to Mulie, a gelding with no breeding value,  if he hadn’t had the good fortune to be trained by someone like my mom, a woman who feels responsibility for every horse she works with.

The problem is people who can afford to buy a horse,  or dozens or even hundreds of horses, but don’t see these horses through to the end of life. In the case of most thoroughbreds, not  even seeing them through their entire racing careers, letting them get sold down the food chain till they end up sore and neurotic, potentially suffering a fatal break down, being sold for meat on the black market or, maybe, if the horse is lucky, getting pulled by a rescue group and taught a second career.

The act of making anyone who buys a horse, any horse, accountable for that horse for its lifetime would revolutionize horse sports  -and racing in particular.  It could be something as simple as setting aside a percentage of the purchase price of the horse.

Buying another living being is a karmic contract.  There are no two ways  of looking at it.

As a foal, Mulie was very curious about the world and he once poked his nose into a hornets nest and got stung so badly one of his ears was stunted and flopped to one side, making him look like a mule.

Mulie was a goofball.  Though basically a mellow guy who could be trusted to give a safe ride to even a small child, he was prone to spooking and shying at the sight of unexpected things.

I last saw him a few weeks ago when visiting my mom:

He had lost some weight over the winter and his coat was a mess, but he was still Mulie.  Polite, but indifferent when I came into his field to be near him for a while. He was standing there munching hay and, once in a while, acknowledging my existence by looking over at me.  Then, a  bird landed on a nearby fence post and Mulie lifted his head, widened his eyes in horror, and snorted loudly, spooked at the sight of a bird he’d probably seen 80,000 times before.

I rode Mulie a number of times through the years, and my mom had done amazing things with him.  You could get on his back, and just LOOK in a certain direction and he’d go there.  She had taught him to respond to and enjoy every nuance of a human’s body.  It was an incredible thing.

Most of the horse trainers I’ve met possess this skill to some degree. Working with horses is an artform.  It’s a calling.  You do it because you have to.  Because a life without horses would not be one worth living.

My positive experiences with horse people at racetracks are why I am not categorically opposed to horse racing. I don’t think the problem has much to do with the trainers, jockeys, grooms and hotwalkers. The problem is lack of accountability.

The problem is in what would have happened to Mulie if his owner hadn’t given him to my mom at the end of his career.

It’s funny the value we arbitrarily assign to the lives of other beings.

People were all up in arms about horse meat in burgers a few weeks back and yet,  by now, everyone knows just how graphically hideous the life of your average beef cow is.

Why is it fine to eat a cow, but horrible to eat a horse?

Pigs are a lot smarter than horses. Yet, for some reason, it’s okay to keep pigs in gestation crates, but the NY Times is outraged when a race horse is given too much horse Advil.

I don’t eat animals, and I don’t condemn those that do, I just wish they were more CONSCIOUS about the whole thing.

We are a strange, fickle species.

No wonder Mulie was looking at me like: What? What do you want? As I stood in his field.

Animals don’t understand us very well, because we make no sense whatsoever.

Rest in Peace, Mulie.

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Buried in my previous post about Non-Hoarding, is a link to the skulls of the Mutter Museum and, fearing no one will click on it, I want to say: CLICK ON IT.  Or here: Adopt a Skull.  

It’s a catalog of old skulls needing some upkeep.  It gives delectable, poetic descriptions of the people whose flesh once wrapped the skulls.  Also, if you’re heading to Philadelphia, the Mutter is a REALLY cool museum (of medical oddities) AND my  friend Cristin O’ Keefe Aptowicz just got a fancy book deal for her book about Dr. Mutter which I can’t WAIT to read and which, I suspect, will set the world on fire.  Or at least my brain.

Okay then.  As you were.

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The cat is not away.  As previously documented, though Lulu the Cat used to travel – at least around my old neighborhood in NYC — she is now 19-years-old and doesn’t get out much.

My boyfriend, however, IS away.  I’m not doing anything debauched in his absence, at least not yet, but I’ve already filled an enormous garbage bag with expired food, dish towels the color of gym socks,and old plastic containers, their sides yellowed like the teeth of an old horse.

One of the things I love in the philosophy of yoga is the concept of Aparigraha – non-hoarding.

Not grabbing for more than what we need.  Traveling lightly.

I’m not  a neat freak, nor even particularly tidy, but I hate excess, especially if it’s not aesthetically pleasing.  If my eye has to rest on any clutter, I want it to be really interesting.  Like some of the rooms at the Mutter Museum, especially the one filled with cases of skulls. 

I spent most of my teen years living with my dad, a nomadic horse trainer.  We moved every six months, sometimes very suddenly.  I’m not sure why except my dad was restless.  He went from one horse training job to the next, always hoping the next one would be better.  Sometimes, he’d get a job managing a huge riding stable, taking care of up to a hundred horses.  Other times, he just trained a few show horses for persons of wealth.  We lived on lavish farms and in tiny cramped cabins.  We lived above and next to barns and, once, actually in the barn.

I  learned to pack really fast and not grow attached to any objects.

I was nearly 30 before I bought an actual home furnishing. A Moroccan lamp.  I remember feeling really weird about buying it.  Like now I had this THING to take with me everywhere.  I felt some sort of responsibility for this beautiful THING.

My boyfriend, though he does practice yoga, has missed the non-hoarding boat.  The first time I walked into his old apartment, I almost vomited.  There was stuff EVERYWHERE.  Mostly magazines and newspapers, in leaning towers, in every corner.  But other stuff too. He had something like 50 rolls of toilet paper.  Six jars of sunflower seed butter.  80 boxes of tea.

Fortunately, he has a lot of good qualities, so I gritted my teeth, bought a bunch of garbage bags, and helped him throw out 80% of his stuff.  Now, we live together and he claims he has NO STUFF,  that I’ve thrown it all out.  So he hoards things in small, secretive ways.

He’s really skinny and eats constantly, so he has his office right next to the kitchen and he can do whatever he wants in that kitchen so long as, once in a while, I can get a meal from it.  I’m not even sure what all goes on in that kitchen.

Five minutes after he left for a trip to Boston, I opened the fridge to look for a snack, and suddenly, I saw it.  EXPIRED FOOD.  HALF ROTTEN VEGETABLES. Mysterious pools of STICKY STUFF. 

I started pulling open kitchen cabinets and drawers.  STUFF EVERYWHERE.  More Ziploc baggies than the Van Patten Family could use in a lifetime.

I started hyperventilating.  The dogs, sensing my agitation, started barking and Stevie, the 10-month old pup, snatched a grimy-looking dish towel off the counter and raced outside to shred it.

I got out a garbage bag and started gleefully throwing stuff out.  Eventually, I had to stop myself or I was going to throw out everything in the house.

The thing is, my boyfriend is a man, so he probably won’t even notice that he’s missing seventeen yellowed containers, five expired yogurts, and several jars of BROWN STUFF.  And, at the end of the day, it’ll all work out.  Maybe my boyfriend will start to hoard less, maybe I’ll stop throwing EVERYTHING out.

On a hoarding-related note, here is a sad and horrible thing: My dear friend Susan Roth sent an email that the Kingston, NY, SPCA has just intervened in an extreme hoarding case.  103 cats and kittens were seized from a hoarder and they are at the Kingston SPCA, getting care, and will eventually all need homes.  Here is a link if you’d like to help by making a small donation or, better yet, adopting some cats: UCSPCA.

Then, when your cats are away, you can throw out all their stuff.

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So, it’s been scientifically proven that human beings need community.  Sangha. Without it, we get crazy. We are pack animals, like horses and dogs and sheep and cows and wolves. We need one another.

Some of us admire cats for their independent attitude, but, if we try to live like cats, we end up wearing hats made of tin foil. Or becoming increasingly cantankerous and hoarding plastic bags.

For most of the last twenty years, I’ve worked for myself and by myself.  But, much as interacting with other humans can sometimes be problematic, painful, etc. I’ve pretty much always forced myself to do it.  To see people and talk to people every day.

People make us think things. Sometimes they make us feel things.  Sometimes they make us feel unpleasant things, but, still, we are feeling, we are being, this is GOOD.

This is where yoga comes in. I attended my first yoga class 12 or so years ago.   My best friend, Jenny Meyer, was doing a very extensive yoga teacher training program and I was so sick of hearing her talk about yoga. I hated yoga.

Then I took a yoga class.  And really liked it. And went back the next day.  And the day after that.  My body felt good but also, there were things mentioned, non-harming, speaking the sweet truth, things I had long believed in and suddenly found in words and concepts.  There was also a yoga community. A sangha.  I sort of thought all the yoga people were freaks.  Then I remembered, I’m a freak, and these are my people.  Or some of my people.

I have short arms and a long torso.  This makes some of the yoga poses that women are traditionally good at, those gumby twisty poses where one wraps arms around oneself or under a leg, not that much fun. Jenny Meyer, my best friend, of course has long lovely monkey arms.  See here:

Recently, one of my favorite people in the world, the writer Kelly Sue DeConnick, posted on Twitter about having short arms like a T-Rex.  I have spent time with Kelly Sue’s arms (not in an intimate way, but, for example, we have been to Great Adventure together clad in skimpy outfits) and can assure you that Kelly Sue’s arms are not T-Rex arms.  Here is Kelly Sue:

Her arms look like nice, good, Kelly Sue arms. However, I thought it was really funny that Kelly Sue posted on Twitter about having T-Rex arms and, because Kelly Sue has many followers on Twitter, other women posted about having T-Rex arms too.

I have T-Rex arms.  Now I am part of a community, a Sangha, of women with T-Rex arms.  A community started by Kelly Sue.  Who I have not seen in the flesh in too long, but with whom, thanks to social media, I have some contact.

Here is me with one leg over a shoulder. My arms looks deceptively long in this picture.  But it’s the iPhone.  Making my arm look long when, in fact, my arm is barely longer than an iPhone.

There was a story in the NY Times about a You Tube star, a young woman who basically never leaves her house.  She just stays in, making low-tech You Tube videos of herself impersonating other people, videos that literally millions of people watch.   And millions of people communicate with her.  But she’s all alone in her house.  Is that community?

On the other hand, there’s Suleika Jaouad, the young woman who contracted a horrible cancer and wrote about it in the Times and, as a result, has zillions of followers and many of these became actual friends who helped her as she battled cancer.

Our internet interactions aren’t the same as sitting down and comparing T-Rex arms on a water flume, but they are something.  Sometimes something really good.

We are social animals.  We are dogs and sheep and horses and people.

Here is Mickey with his old friend Candy, playing T-Rex.  Mickey and Candy both have short-ish arms.  Not full-on T-Rex arms, but they definitely look like T-Rexes when they stand on their hind legs and bat at each other with their arms.  Can interacting through the sangha of social media keep us connected and  stave off a trip to the hat factory?

I dunno.   But, if it weren’t for Twitter, I wouldn’t know that Kelly Sue considers herself to have T-Rex arms.  So I wouldn’t have had my heart warmed by the thought of Kelly Sue.

I would have a whole different experience if I could go have coffee with Kelly Sue right now. But I can’t.  She’s in Oregon and I’m in New York.  So, for now, I’ll just take my T-Rex arms to yoga.

I'll Buy That For A Dollar

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