I don’t know your problem but I do know the answer.
Mud.
This article about “luxury dog boarding” stalks me here at Glencadia Dog Camp. Yes, I have written about this before, bothered as I am about this article. If you think writing about this article once would be enough, apparently you’d be wrong.
Here I am, caked in mud, shoveling out poops, thinking about someone “pampering” a dog. Petting, sure, but whatever products are for sale for pampering, I am not a fan. I am not sure I would want anyone to pamper me (I don’t thanks, I lied, I am sure), but if a dog finds a stinking corpse, s/he will roll in it. So, if you can find a way not to pamper a dog, they would probably be happy, assuming that providing carrion to roll in does not fall within the bailiwick of the pamperer (giving the thesaurus a workout a la John “litotes” Stewart).
So here we are in a world where a war in the Middle East has been tragically dragging on for 100+ years and is still making headlines. The international settlement is up for grabs. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is running amok and overturning. The never-ending election cycle might be important but is certainly not intrinsically worth much brain space. Thinking about any of that could get depressing, not to mention inadequacies, problems, or whatever else might be dragging you down, etc.
So, mud.
How will mud help with all those problems? It won’t.
But, if you are rolling in mud, you are definitely not thinking about anything that comes from somewhere not immediately next to you, like right there. There is really no reason, at least at that moment, to think about anything beyond what you can see and feel, at least for some time, and there is no other way to truly be happy other than to forget everything that comes from away.
If you are a dog, you don’t think twice, you just leap into it, roll around, get it on your nose, and come out completely caked in mud. If you are wearing custom-tailored business attire you impulse purchased in Paris when you were feeling flush and hold a PhD in incomprehensible ancient languages (if the language is incomprehensible they might not offer a degree for studying it, but I digress) with an established Wikipedia page cited by people with blue checks, it might not occur to you to leap into a pool of mud, presumably.
But now that I mentioned the idea — don’t think of an elephant—you know you want to do it. You’d love to just throw decorum to the wind and jump in. Forget your outfit, that you are supposed to be a respectable adult, and leap into a pool of mud.
Now, if you have a PhD in Political Science, you already are rolling in mud so there would be less of a point to the operation. If politics were really amenable to “scientific” analysis, would I be writing about 100+ year-old wars or would someone have put a definitive stop to that kind of thing? PhD in Political Science just means you are an A+ bullshitter, and I should know because my father had just that degree and he was an impulsive ignoramus, may he rest in peace in the backyard behind some hotel in Bali perhaps, but who knows? But yet again I digress.
More mud.
What is mud? Loamy, deep, excellent soil here in Upstate New York, Columbia County, with water. There is nothing bad about it. It’s not dirty. It doesn’t smell. And when if dries, if you happen to shed, it just flakes off.
Highly recommended. Photos from today and yesterday.
Happy mud day!
