I don’t know. All the days and breakfasts and poops and walks are blending together. I do know that every night we have to take a detour to avoid the loose dog from last week, except one night when a different dog, a white dog that clearly belongs to the yard he runs out of, riles the shit out of my pack and makes my heart pound out of my chest.
Leashes, people.
Fences.
Come on.
Here’s Tulip chewing on a deer antler/being cute:
Day 5
We have an appointment with a volunteer from CCB to work on manners. She shows me how to get Tulip to approach a dog and then interrupt her and get her attention so she doesn’t come across as so intense to the other dog. The woman also suggests that I tether Tulip to something stationary in the yard and then walk Redford or Violet by her on the leash, let them realize it’s all good. Tulip doesn’t spend any time off leash during the session, but it’s a start.
She enjoys the hot dog treats.
A lot.
Maybe we’ll take a treat-based class.
Day 6
I’m busy squeezing an 8-month-old’s chubby thighs (my brother’s kid, not a stranger, though I don’t blame you if you wondered) and don’t get around to working with the dogs. We do go on a walk, and sure enough, we have to turn around because of the loose dog. Grrrr.
Day 7
Tulip and I go to Auntie Wa’s house. Tulip patrols the fence for 45 minutes and then my niece and nephew chase her around the yard for another half an hour.
When she gets tired of running and flops, they take turns jumping over her.
She’s going to make some family with kids really happy one day.
Yesterday’s was a Retrobruxist of sorts, but it’s Friday, so here you go.
Three years ago I did a sleep study. I never did write a blog post about it. The abbreviated version: it sucked, and they didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.
Two years agoRedford shat himself in his crate, and I questioned everything, which I do on bad days.
I’m rull tired. I’m just starting to get almost enough sleep after seven weeks of being a petulant child about bedtime.
And I hosted the MontiStorySLAM again on Tuesday. By all accounts, it went well. I feel like it went well. I think it went well. I was less nervous this time than for the last couple. (And it’s always such a rush that I think I’ll never sleep again, until exactly 45 minutes after, when my brain ceases to function entirely and I PTFO.) But it takes a lot of work and preparation and practice.
Anyway, that’s why I haven’t posted this week. But you can read the stories I told that night here on the blog, if you’re interested:
My arms are sore. The day prior, five friends and I flipped a giant tractor tire a mile. (It’s a workout created by my sister-wife. She dubs it “the enTIRE mile”.) Upshot is my forearms are Meredith Baxter Burny, and correcting Tulip on our walk is a chore. I decide that, instead of physical corrections, I’ll use mind control. I say, “Tulip!” real short and concentrate real hard on being the boss of her, and wonder of wonders, she drops back six inches letting the leash go slack.
I have to do a lot of mind control, probably about as often as I’d been doing tugs on her collar, but my forearms are saved.
Day 2
I spend most of the day crying. Emotional upheaval, probably not helped by the fact that I’m not sleeping enough. I’ve been walking the dogs between 9:00 and 10:00pm to beat the heat, but when I get home, I’m wound up and don’t go to bed until midnight. Tonight I skip the dog-walk so that I can get to bed at a reasonable hour. Lights out at 10:37pm.
My brain wakes me up at 4:15am. Stupid brain.
[My friend asks, “Aren’t you scared to walk that late at night?” Um, I’m walking 190 pounds of pit bull. Nope, not scared.]
Day 3
More mind control. I think it’s working. I have to choke up less on the leash when we go by the house with three big Rottweilers in the yard. At home, I look online at Rottweiler rescues. I need to stop; I have a problem.
Tulip has 120 Facebook friends. No adoption prospects.
Day 4
On our late night walk, the pack gets agitated. I look around to find a loose or stray dog (it’s too dark to see if it’s wearing tags) about 20 yards away. Redford lunges, and when he can’t get at the stray, he redirects on Violet and Tulip. Tulip snaps back. I’m able to separate the dogs and hustle away from the strange dog. People pooh-pooh pinch collars—they say they’re cruel or whatever—but those things are the only reason none of us has to go to the ER.
Day 5
I have scheduled a walk with the adoptive “father” (he’s only 22!) of Tucker, the boy dog that was confiscated with Tulip. In the pictures, Tucker and Tulip look alike, though he’s clearly mixed with something other than pit bull. It’s possible Tulip is his mom or sister. I’m hoping she remembers him and they have a grand ol’ time together.
We arrive at Duke’s east campus. Tucker walks up with his person. Tulip is excited. She tenses up. She sniffs at Tucker. He hesitates. She says not-nice things to him.
(sigh)
We walk anyway. It’s fine. But damn.
Day 6
I go on a tubing trip down the Dan River that lasts three hours longer than I expect. Tulip is in the crate for almost eleven hours. When I get home, she has jumped around in there and managed to slide it across the room, but she’s otherwise OK. I’m too tired to take the dogs for a walk.
Day 7
Tulip is CRAZY. Between the long stint in the crate and not being walked since Friday night, she has a lot of stored-up wiggles. She gets them out by running laps through the house and tossing her deer antler to herself and then chasing after it.
We go on an extra-long walk. I use a combination of physical corrections and mind control.
Tulip’s always real interested in whether I’m going to eat that.
I celebrated my first CrossFit-iversary one year ago today! (Shit, I should do a post about how totally beast—ha ha—I’ve gotten in the last year. Maybe tomorrow. Retrobruxist Friday is a lazy day.)
Bit o’ the ol’ 3/8-life crisis over at Avid Bruxist headquarters, folks. So far, I’ve bought a new car, dyed my hair dark, and made inappropriate advances at a friend.
So! Guns!
Right?
I don’t know, I’d always wanted to shoot a gun, and my buddy Kyle, you know, has several, so in my I’ll-be-37-next-month/dead-soon-enough/might-as-well-do-shit mode, I requested a tutorial from him. We got our schedules aligned and headed to the shooting range Monday night.
I read the whole rules and rights and responsibilities document and signed away my right to sue the place if I shot myself dead.
Kyle rounded up our eye and ear protection and bought some ammo. The dude behind the counter, who had a holstered sidearm, handed me a target sheet. “Skeletor,” remarked Kyle (about the target, not the dude). We were assigned lane—lane?—6, but we had the whole place to ourselves. I thought that was probably a good thing—I wasn’t sure how floppy my aim would be, and accidentally shooting somebody would probably harsh my (whatever the opposite of) mellow (is).
The range was different from what I expected. First, it was about 100 degrees in there, and second, well, the place was shot all to shit. Seems like exactly what one would expect; don’t know why I pictured more white walls and glass? That doesn’t even make any sense! Did I see that in a movie?
Anyway, walls were black/ceiling was black. Or at least everything had once been particle board painted black and was now pock-marked and pulpy-looking.
Kyle clipped Skeletor up to the hanging thing, scooted him away a few yards, and loaded one of his weapons. “What am I shooting here?” I asked him.
“A .40—it’s what the cops carry,” he told me and placed it in my hand.
He told me how to grip the gun (during the session, he had to say, “Finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot,” aboooouuut 9 times… maybe 11… baker’s dozen). He asked which was my dominant eye. I told him right. He told me to close my left eye. Knees bent, he said. Lean forward. Aim. Don’t pull the trigger; mash the trigger.
The noise-canceling headphones left only a dull roar from the exhaust fan and Kyle’s voice prompting me from behind.
I gripped the gun. My hands felt greasy. I closed my left eye and aimed at Skeletor. I bent my knees and leaned forward and mashed the trigger. Blam! The gun jerked in my hands, and I screamed a ridiculous, high-pitched, girly scream. Kyle was laughing behind me. We both looked at the target sheet.
“Nice, Amy Scott. Center mass,” Kyle said. I had hit Skeletor pretty much in his evil goddamn heart. Whoa.
The gun held 12 bullets. I shot all twelve. All twelve hit in the box in the middle chest. Skeletor’s vital organs would’ve been porous.
The first knuckle of my thumb was red and stinging, but I was ready to shoot again. Kyle loaded the gun and moved the target a little farther away. I still hit mostly center, but with each shot, my thumb smarted more, and I was pulling left. On about the ninth round, the flesh on the back of my thumb in between the knuckles split open.
“Jesus,” Kyle said, looking at the blood. “Show me your grip.” I showed him. Oh. Oh. I had been holding the gun totally wrong, and it had been biting me on the kickback.
For the last few shots and then a whole clip from another piece (9 rounds), I held the guns properly and, guess what, no more bleeding.
Kyle offered to keep going, but I was sweaty and shaky and tired. Plus, I liked the way Skeletor looked, and I didn’t want to mess it up.
33 shots. Even those ones outside the box, I feel like probably would’ve slowed him down.
I got home from work today to find two bullet holes in my living room window. (My neighborhood is so fancy!) The cops came out and said, since the bullets hadn’t pierced both panes of glass and there were four dents in my siding as well, it was most likely a kid with a BB gun. My sister suggested I laminate Skeletor and hang him outside. Yeah, I could put a sign next to him that says “You aim your goddamn BB gun at my living room window again, I’ll aim my .40 at your center mass”.
I come out of the shower to find Tulip chewing up a pair of flip flops that I’ve just bought to replace the flip flops Violet chewed up two years ago. (Yes, I have been wearing them since then.) I snatch the shoe out of her mouth and—I’m not proud of this—I throw it at her. It glances off her foot.
It is mangled. I’m so mad I flop down face-down on my bed and just breathe. It’s only a flip-flop, I say. She didn’t know any better, I say.
Eventually, I get up, but I give her the silent treatment. Though she has always followed me from room to room, she stays on my bedroom floor and looks sheepish.
I last about five minutes before I crawl up next to her and rub my forehead against her neck. She forgives me. Dogs.
Day 2
A woman who has previously adopted a CCB dog wants to meet Tulip, though she has a cat, and I think Tulip might eat a cat.
Day 3
My buddy Phil develops a plan to bomb a bunch of neighborhood listservs with an email about Tulip, including links to her Facebook page and tumblr.
I write and forward him the email, and he implements the plan.
Day 4
Due to the listserv bomb, Tulip gets lots of new Likers on Facebook. Everyone thinks she’s so funny.
She shits on the deck again. Very funny, Tulip.
Day 5
Two different prospects contact me about meeting Tulip. I send them my availability for the weekend, and we set up appointments.
It totally zoomed past without my even noticing, but August 2 was my three-year blogiversary*! That is crazy-pants!
Anyway, I thought I’d start a feature that some other bloggers have, that is, on Fridays, offer a weekly look back at a post from the same week in previous years. In other words, be able to publish without doing any work. Whee!
This entry from three years ago is not the very first Avid Bruxist post, but it’s the piece of writing—a Facebook note, actually—that made me start the blog.
Two years ago, this week, my grandma passed away. Hell of a woman.
I don’t sit on posts. I draft and publish, draft and publish. I know I shouldn’t. I know I’d have a better blog if I would let an entry cool off for a few days and then looked it over before I shot it into cyberspace. I just don’t. It’s not something I can force myself to do.
But I sat on Mostly Naked on the Internet. I drafted it last Friday and could not conjure up the courage to let people see it. I pulled it up on Saturday. No. Sunday. No.
Monday morning, I was doing a version of that scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Offwhere Cameron’s like, “He’ll keep calling me… He’ll keep calling me until I come over… OK! I’ll go, I’ll go, I’ll go, I’ll go, I’ll go, w— I’ll go. Shit. GodDAMMIT… Forget it. That’s it.”
Except mine was, “I’ll post it. I’ll post it. It’s going to bother me until I post it… No. No. No. Nope. Absolutely not.”
I waited until I was almost going to be late for work, clicked Publish, and then shut down my computer really fast, as if doing so might lock the post inside.
But it didn’t. And now I’m Mostly Naked on the Internet.
And it’s remarkably liberating. I mean, a lot of people have been complimentary of my body, which is sweet and flattering, but of course, not the point. Mostly it’s been validating to hear people use words like ‘honest’ and ‘brave’ and ‘inspirational’ and ‘totally bitchin’.
Here’s what I hope. I hope the post encourages other women to start their own Love My Body/Real Beauty campaign. I hope they’ll look at uniform femme-bots in ads and, instead of considering themselves deficient in some way, they’ll… I don’t know. Remark how odd it is that the models look like they came from a cookie cutter? Something like that.
(Don’t get me wrong: The Victoria Secret model is a totally valid version of the female body. It’s just not the only version.)
I hope women will look at their Rand-McNally stretch marks and their dimply legs and say, “This body grew another human inside it,” or “This body can deadlift 250.”
I hope when women have Bad Body Thoughts, their inner badass will perk up and say, “Cut. That shit. Out.”
I hope when their friends start saying mean things about their own bodies, their outer badass will perk up and say, “Cut. That shit. Out.”
Of course, when I say women, I’m including myself. I hope that I do these things.
(sigh) Growth. It’s hard. But good.
Now excuse me while I go clean out RiteAid’s supply of Dove products.
