The giving and taking of sticks

Gus demands we play with a stick; I think about making things and sharing them

Give and receive

Listen. I know dogs like sticks. I’m not an extraterrestrial. But there have been times when I’ve contemplated my dog’s delight in carrying a stick and felt pretty flummoxed. Surely, zoologists, this is mysterious animal behaviour.

Consider: A dog doesn’t need a stick. He is not a beaver. He has no dam to build.

Yet my dog struts when he has a stick to carry. He lifts up his head and his tail; he prances with paws high, and he makes strong and frequent eye contact: Did you notice I have a stick… Have you perhaps perceived this…

Sticks also prove to be one of his more successful ways to engage me as a playmate at the park. He finds one and brings it over so I can admire it. I say, “Wow, Gus.” He makes his little growly noise, meaning something like, Oh, this? You want this? The best stick within twenty meters?

The author’s dog dares you to take this stick

I reach for the stick. He pulls it away at the last second. We repeat.

If I get the stick, we play tug for a bit until I get it from him and can throw it. Then he either fetches it and restarts the game, or he gets distracted by a dog or a strange smell or a human with hands in pockets.¹

There was this one walk when Gus was especially persistent in initiating the stick game—I remember being surprised that he kept showing me the stick when I could see dogs nearby that he might want to play with, and even some humans with their hands seductively pocketed. But he just kept making strong eye contact and insisting I must want this stick. So we played with the stick. It made Gus extremely happy.

Meanwhile, I felt oddly moved. It was surprising and flattering. He wanted to play with me, even when he had other options. He liked me.

There was a time before I brought Gus home when I was afraid that he wouldn’t like me. It just seemed like a dog might decide otherwise. I wasn’t sure I was very fun.

But he did like me. He does.

So tonight I’m thinking about connecting with my little pal through sticks—because you can only play the stick game if the person you like wants to play the stick game. You can only say I like you via stick if you have a stick to play with.

Insight, if that

There’s something I’ve been noodling on the past couple of days vis-à-vis reasons I (and you? most people?) make art.

This goes back to making art a kid. Part of the experience for me at that point was, crucially, that I loved the process of making things (in my case, mostly stories; sometimes visual art). I have diary entries from when I was eight where I’m like I hope my family gives me an hour tomorrow to work on my story. I am very close to being finished.

I loved those hours. I fought through hand cramps to make the most of them, and sometimes through my unfortunate little brother’s attempts to recruit me for games.

I can easily recall—and, often and blessedly, reinhabit—the joy in being allowed to spend time on my little projects. But there was another side of it which I think I put together recently, and which I think is harder to nail down as an adult when I’m in a professional context and the realities of publishing are at the fore.

The other side was that a huge part of my joy—or was it the culmination of that joy?—was to take the thing I made and give it to people to delight them. I really, really wanted the thing I had spent so much time on, and which I genuinely thought was good and could make people happy, to find its way to them so it could give them joy.

What’s getting to me right now is that there is such sincerity and vulnerability to this. There is vulnerability in saying, “I made this, and I think it’s really good, and I think you’ll like it”—the kind of vulnerability we might learn to evade by saying things like, “It’s not even that good,” or, “You probably won’t like it,” or, “It would have been better, but I didn’t have much time.”

It’s also that there was such love in it. Love, and a desire to connect. While I don’t think I’d ever (at least at this point) publish anything I didn’t think was at least enjoyable or worthwhile, I wonder if I’m always so effectively led by love.

I think the desire to connect is still there. But I think life trains you to bury it. Enough indifferent treatment of your heart, and your heart becomes a thing you learn to hold close rather than hold out.

I think you have to un-bury that desire, though, as an artist.² I think this is something I forget to talk about when talking about the practicalities of publication. I usually miss it in discussions of the business of writing and publishing, too.

But I think I feel it in the best art I encounter. I hope I can keep it at the heart of how I spend my hours. I hope I can keep it at the heart of the best things I make.

You guys,

I was so serious about needing a better Substack title. Help me or I’ll be mocked by all the other humanities majors on this app.

Hits du jour

A short list/shortlist of things I’ve been enjoying lately:

• I got a little stylus for drawing on my phone. I did approximately zero research beforehand and just got the cheapest one in stock at my local Staples, and it has been serving me very well. I believe it’s an Adonit Mini 4, but I imagine if you’re in the market for a stylus you could research and find a better one. (Clearly no affiliate links happening here.) I highly recommend getting one if you like doodling on your phone! I’m happy to use my finger, but this lets me be much more precise. Then you can replace scrolling with drawing weird little guys.

• This book by Ian Mortimer was fun: The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England. I actually think I preferred one of the other books in his series, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England, but both are great. What’s best about them (besides the generally engaging writing) is he spends a lot of time on the minutiae of life in the period: how you get dressed, where you go to the bathroom,³ how you get from one neighborhood to another. These are the kinds of things I find really hard to dig out from a lot of secondary sources, but which are absolutely essential if you’re trying to imaginatively inhabit a historical moment (for, e.g., writing historical fiction).⁴ I don’t have his other books (on Restoration England and Regency England), but I hope I will someday.

• This is going to read like self-promo, but FB reminded me of this exchange I had with an Uber driver seven years ago, and I was very happy to be reminded of him. I hope he’s at, like, 88% happiness these days.

• I am terrified of losing my engagement ring if I have to take it off (I have a history of misplacing things), and I am very pleased with this ring-keeper necklace I got off Etsy. It’s very pretty, and putting your ring on it feels like one of those at-the-cottage topology puzzles, like, Get The Twisted Nail Off the Loop thingies.

Catch up soon, friends.

1. Universal sign for “I am carrying delicious treats.”

2. And as a person?

3. Alas… “bathroom”… an anachronism.

4. No medieval/Elizabethan stories currently underway; sorry if this was a tease.