 |
Friday, January 10, 2003
posted 7:16 AM
CHOCOLATE DOGS
Got up at 4AM today to try to squirt utterly black liquid charcoal into our geriatric dog, which at midnight had sneakily devoured three-quarters of a bar of Belgian chocolate. Eating chocolate, at least in terms of heart rate, is the doggie equivalent of eating a golf-ball made of crack, so my wife and daughter had to take her off to the 24-hour emergency vet, where your credit card makes that $150 sound as you open the door. Last time I was there, one of our cats had Kitty Ebola, but they pulled her through for roughly the cost of a new iBook.
Strange, how differently substances affect different mammals. The physiology of catnip, though only in cats, is such that if it worked that way on humans it would be one of the most widely abused substances in the world. The concentrated essence of one particularly potent Japanese species will cause classic nipped-out kitty-cat reactions in wild, fully-grown African lions. Something I’d love to see.
At the animal emergency clinic, they speak of Chocolate Dogs, and there was already another one there when ours arrived.
WHAT TO DO IF YOU MEET ME
Someone was wondering about this.
Well, you might try keeping mind that behind whatever mediated projection of “William Gibson” we’re both, in our different ways, complicit in, there’s a guy who once sat on the cold kitchen floor in his bathrobe, trying rather unsuccessfully to squirt disturbingly black fluid down the throat of a small, intensely uncooperative dog.
Every once in a while, at a signing, someone will come through who’s so anxious, at the prospect of actually meeting “the author”, that they’re visibly trembling. This is always deeply weird for me, as my self-image is such that I am myself the one who’s supposed to be nervous at the prospect of meeting heavily-mediated humans.
But when I read a post by someone who first read Neuromancer at age nine (and is older now, one supposes, than, say, twelve) I start worriedly backing into the perception that for some people I’ve had the sort of impact that my own early favorite authors had on me, and that they can be as unnerved at the prospect of meeting me as I used to be, as a reader, in that same situation.
What I now believe, though, and what has largely eased this anxiety for me, at the prospect of meeting a favorite writer, is that it’s never really possible to meet “the author”. You meet, as it were, the personality through which the entity you’ve enjoyed interfacing with is sometimes, and usually only at a keyboard, able to manifest. If you haven’t figured this out, you generally set yourself up for disappointment. (The great exception to this, for me, was William Burroughs, who actually did seem, in every way, to be “the author” -- perhaps, paradoxically, because of the consciously mediumistic nature of his work.)
I myself am lucky to greet my own “author” on anything like a regular basis, and my fear (to touch on another recent thread) is mainly that the feckless, procrastinating, profoundly unreliable bastard will one day fail permanently to show up, leaving me having to pretend that I know how to write fiction.
1/10/03
|
|
