Walking The Dog

About two or three times a day when I'm home from college, my parents have me take the dog out. He's old now, so he has to go out about six or seven times each day.

I hear the call from my mom that he's just finished his meal and he needs to go, right on time. I lament that even the dog has a schedule and motivation while I do nothing in my room.

The door opens to the bitter cold. Or maybe intense heat. Maybe it's sunny, cloudy, rainy. The details change but the mission doesn't, to invoke the thoughts of a battle-hardened war hero as an elderly dog leads me down the steps.

Having been pulled away from video games or TV, I'm saddled with my thoughts again. The dog is lucky, he just sniffs his way down a handful of his set paths for a place to piss. An optimist would call it single-minded, a pessimist would call it simple-minded.

He's a hound and he takes his time stopping and sniffing everything. We love him, but it's enough to get my mom to admit that she'll never get another hound dog.

Meanwhile I'm thinking about politics, relationships, the future, those who have let me down or those who I've let down. All anxieties at once, and none of them are fun to think about. They're partially the source of my depression, partially the vessels that my depression inhabits when it needs me to feel like shit. One cyclical, negative thought at a time is hellish, but I think about them all at once for hours at a time unless I have the requisite noise (video games and TV) to distract me. It's the kind of thing I've started taking Adderall to reduce, with lukewarm results.

But like every time, after a couple minutes, something begins to change. Maybe it's those magical outdoors endorphins mom tells me about. Maybe it's something on the breeze, maybe the feeling of the natural air on my face, maybe it's not staying in the same room all day and night: but the thoughts begin to clear up. It's like I have control of my mind again. It's like it was an ad for medication, but it's just walking the dog. He may have peed already, but I'm too busy in my own head to have noticed. I notice when he poops though, I don't leave dogshit lying on people's lawns. I'm not Satan.

I think about ideas for scripts, writing, movies. I assuage my fears and doubts. Sometimes with a logical retort to my own anxious thoughts, sometimes just telling myself it'll be okay. Holy hell, it actually works.

It's an incredible freedom, not having a million negative thoughts buzzing around your mind at all times, not stopping you from getting anything done, not causing you to have a thousand-yard-stare all the time because all the damned neurons are raging a war in your brain and you're forced to watch.

Perhaps it's cliched to say, but I really wish I could bottle this... not the feeling, but this mindstate.

The dog decides, as he always does, that it's time to head home. Even though the state of my mind is benefitting from this, I'm happy to not be standing and doing nothing while the dog decides if the hundredth plant is worth some of his precious urine. It's nice, but it's also boring.

Maybe I'll start writing that script, I think to myself as he walks me back home. Maybe I'll refine my art skills, call that old friend, turn off the video games and movies and let out my creativity instead of whining to my friends about how I can't find the motivation to make anything. Maybe this represents a change, a chance, a new start.

After we trundle up the steps, open the door and I let him off the leash, it all starts to flood back. The cacophony of noise trapped in my head, the thunderous march of hate and confusion.

After giving the dog his treats I run back upstairs to continue the video game I was playing. I thought that I lacked a schedule, but I suppose both the dog and I are creatures of habit. I sit in my desk chair, put on the headset, and exit the pause menu in the game. All the thoughts dissipate, but they're not replaced by anything.

Just noise again.