Itchy and Scratchy

Millie has an irritation on the skin around the top of her tail, to relieve which she has chewed out all the undercoat, leaving the harsh topcoat alone lying over skin of quite remarkable whiteness. She stood quite happily on the examining table this morning while the vet probed her (to rule out worms) with a digital precision to which aliens can only aspire, and I now have a bottle of medicated shampoo and a brief course of steroids to provide more targeted relief than good-old-fashioned scratching. I could try my luck with her at the shows next weekend, but I’m sure that exhibiting a dog with secret bald patches is bad competitive karma, so any attempts to start her campaign to title will have to wait a while.

Hopefully the itching will stop presently and with it her recent night time game of waking up in full-scale burglar bark and jumping off the bed in order to run up and down the hall.

It’s troubling, in terms of social conformity, the way I don’t begrudge my dogs any of the things which constitute reasons why I don’t want to have children: the necessary putting aside of my own routines and plans, the expense, the cleaning up shit. But it’s because, really, of the ways that my little guys aren’t like children that I feel confident of my ability to care for them: their needs are quantifiable and can be met easily enough, and I don’t have to worry about my genetic inheritance rising up to sting them, scorpion-style, at some later date. The emotional risk, with dogs, is so much smaller.

It’s a cold but beautiful spring day and the footpaths round here are increasingly overhung by blossom-heavy branches. That is one feature of spring here that you don’t get in other New Ziln cities to the same extent, due to the preponderance of native bush, which has of course a spirit-lifting effect of its own but, being evergreen, doesn’t have the seasonal explosions of colour that you get here. As much as I love the various flowering cherry trees that are a feature of a Christchurch spring, I like especially the magnolias, the mature trees in particular. The flowers, as Manon and I agreed some summers ago, look pretty sexual on it. Driving or walking past one is a Frida Kahlo kind of moment in a city more genteel Sisley than angry, broken-hearted Mexican.

I’m listening as I type to Beth Orton, whom I like very much. Her vocal lines are sinuous and sit well over both acoustic arrangements and electronic beats. I love the colour and the wear in her voice, not to mention the pleasing gap between the sincerity and occasional melancholy of her lyrics and her off-stage persona, which is rather more direct. (Sia Furler is comparable, though less engaging, I’d argue; small wonder Beck has recorded with both.) It was while listening to Beth Orton on my last day in Wellington that I had the spiky moment (as I put it at the time) that so rattled me, but which has since come to seem like one of a series of important moments when you recall something that tells you something about who you are now. (To qualify that particular experience, I should add what Mariella said to me on Wednesday night: “remember that those Belgian beers are quite strong”.) A-Lee said to me last Sunday that she thought that short, intense periods of depression usually signal some sort of shift in consciousness, and I have to say I think she’s right.

Thinking back, the grief that followed my Wellington sojourn (helped by those Belgian beers, most likely) made me realise that (as Vanessa avows of her own life) that there might be some feelings that I don’t get past except in the longest of long terms, and that that’s tolerable if not ideal. Late winter blues in August and September helped me face up to the fact that things will never be put right with my former supervisor, not even with all the reason in the world, and the drugless bender of a fortnight ago tilted me in the direction of aesthetic theory or, if I can’t manage that, aesthetic reflection. These experiences, iterations and reiterations, are what stay in my mind concerning the last few months, as much, if not more, as the various art gallery and movie theatre epiphanies that come as a result of hanging round such venues long enough. (Those who opine that galleries and theatres are tailor-made pick-up-joints for literati and intellectuals are, as far as my experience goes, talking about a parallel universe; perhaps looking at the pictures on the wall is the first of my errors).

It’s a good thing, on this ordinary sort of Saturday, to be feeling as if there is some form and mindful purpose to these temporarily crippling depressions into which I regularly dysthymically trip (though it’s not the tripping, but rather the debilitating intensity, that’s a product of the dysthymia). It’s not the depression itself that’s intolerable when it occurs but rather the secondary fear that this might be the start of something with no perceptible exit, as was my first experience of depression as an adult. If I’m a bore on this subject I don’t (for once) apologise. It’s a marker in my life, a post driven into the ground, from which I slowly grow more and more distant but whose shadow remains visible.

Nanette has left a message on my phone with a tantalisingly vague invitation to come and “watch a black and white movie”, on the strength, no doubt, of the success of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane a month or two ago. The harvestparents tell me that harvestbro and the Red Eyes have gone on tour to rural New South Wales, and that they’ll drive back via Sydney over the next week or so. And, eradicating any trace of envy at this news, it’s only three weeks till the dogs and I hit the southern road ourselves, assuming my darling hellion eats no more of her coat in the interim.