Tag: Wikipedia Page 8 of 13

I still get excited about things like sleeping. People are tired and hearing about it makes me tired sometimes, too. With the up and down winter we’ve been having, I’ve been paying attention to what my dog does and when it gets cooler she sleeps more. Writing and sleeping are fun things for me to do. But if I was a dog I wouldn’t be able to write. So what takes the place of writing for dogs? I think that would be eating, drinking, pooping and peeing.
When we write we are emoting to one degree or another, telling a story and/or trying to get something out from within us. When you’re a dog, you get the stuff that you’ve eaten all day out at one time later on in the day. Writers “eat” or experience, sometimes ingest, things, in order to write more. Dogs do their writing by of course pooping and peeing. When you get to be an older dog, you must have a little help. Sometimes that means being held up as you squat to poop or pee. Dogs that weren’t at all amenable to being petted or touched in any manner too frequently when they were younger are suddenly agreeable to a little help when they assume the proud position of “Squatting Dog.” They don’t want to soil themselves—aka collapse in their poop and pee; neither do we humans who metaphorically collapse in our own respective piles of writing dung every so often.

Carpal tunnel is an awful thing and limits many writers to how many hours they can spend at the keyboard. I like to use an ergonomic keyboard in order to minimize my fatigue. For me, the change from a conventional keyboard helps keep the keys tapping and the Bob Skelley (or “BS” as we like to say in the business) flowing.
Streams of consciousness
Structured writing is one of the things I loathe and I enjoy blogging particularly for the chance to just flow freely when composing new posts. Free of editors or the criticism of what others may think, it is just easy to go from one thing to the next without any apparent structure—which suits me just fine. Although I can write in a structured environment, format, context or setting, I prefer freedom of choice and my mind drifting to where it wants to go.
When an individual is fatigued there is a good deal of gibberish that may flow from their keyboards. For me it is not so much gibberish but the things that don’t seem to have an orderly flow. These things are definitely orderly in their consistent lack of any order whatsoever, however. Get that?
English: Dorothea Lange, Resettlement Administration photographer, in California. The car is a 1933 Ford Model C, 4 door Wagon. The camera is a Graflex 4×5 Series D. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Controlled chaos was always something we aspired to in one profession or another; that, and making the daily commute to and from work in one piece—no easy task these days. You hear the demise of the car is soon at hand, but until mass teleportation is reality cars will be a necessary evil.
Voice activated vehicles are now all the rage. I for one don’t want to talk to my car. I just want to drive it. I don’t want to tell it to adjust to my ass because someone else’s ass has been sitting in the seat. I can pull the seat back to restore it to its proper position. I don’t need to tell the car to do it for me. If I wanted to talk to my car I would prefer to tell it things like, “Please do my homework,” or “Get me a ham sandwich,” or “Take out the trash?” I feel if you ask it to do menial labor, you need to ask in the form of a question like on Jeopardy. “I’ll take brain damage for 30 minutes, Alex.” After all, any car worth talking to should be able to do things for us. It’s what we have them for in the first place and as our world modernizes we need to be able to have our vehicles do the heavy lifting so to speak.
What I find myself doing these days is listening to opera music in my car as I drive it. It relaxes me. I realize my reflexes may not be what they were in my 20s or 30s, but if I’m relaxing with opera, then the little bit of momentarily brilliant reflex action still in my possession will be able to potentially save me from harm during my daily commutes.

Back to the dog
A good blog post always returns to the scene of the dog before closing itself out. One of the best developments of late for the dog beside its training its humans to support her during defecation and tending to her needs whenever possible is the procurement of a camera that allows us to see her every move when we are not able to be in the house.
I was told by someone that they knew a pawn shop owner who had one of these cameras in their stores. They were able to catch many employees pilfering goods from the shop. This person went on to tell me that people would deny stealing right up until the time the owner said they had footage of their burglary (I always thought burglary should involve the eating of a hamburger). And even when they were confronted, they still denied doing the dastardly deed.

Well, the dog can’t deny anything because it can’t say anything. But the camera has audio capabilities, too. So, it picks up on her whimpers in case she is ever in any distress whatsoever. The camera can be turned on remotely. The same person who told me about the cameras being used in pawn shops told me my wife didn’t get one only so she could watch the dog; she could also see what I was up to in any given unsuspecting moment. I thought this humorous as I envisioned my wife checking me out remotely and hearing me speak to myself or the dog. Then she could say something in her best disguised voice, like, “Get me a ham sandwich, now!” or “Clean up the living room before I get home!” or “Tell the car to move the seat back to the proper position” or “You’ve definitely written enough and it’s time for bed.”