I have never stopped being proud of being a US citizen, but that pride is certainly renewed afresh with this auspicious beginning.  I admired the President’s address and applauded many of his points.  It is not required that I agree with all of my President’s statements as that is one of my treasured freedoms.  Yet if I have any qualms, I am far too happy to be a dissenting voice today.

I congratulate and welcome President Barack Obama!

I’ve been approached by a couple of people who are my facebook friends or who read my blog about how my NaNoWriMo experience is going.  I’m having a blast.  Some days I fall behind in my word count.  Other days, I break ahead.  Abigail, the one who originally brought this challenge to my attention, and I wrote together last weekend (in a coffee shop!  I felt collegiate!  But not as poor!) and that helped me make much progress.  A word-duel midweek also helped me to keep up.

NaNoWriMo has gotten authors to send its participants some emails of encouragement and I was very tickled to be able to say, “Philip Pullman sent me an email!”  It was good, too.  And then I read his website.  Not a page, mind you, his site.   One of the things he says on his site is that he never lets other people read his work in progress, and he gave good reasons for it.  However, I’m going to break from that practice that I’ve followed so far, just to put out one excerpt here.  Just for those people who were nice enough to ask.

***

It was a snowy day in Maryland.  The rarity of snowy days wasn’t from lack of cold or lack of precipitation so much as from lack of kindness by The Weather.  There were plenty enough rainy days, foggy days, drizzling days, hailing days, sleeting days, icy days, and far more gray days than one would think from the local meteorologists’ sunny dispositions.  But it seemed to Alan as though there were hardly ever any days when he would just wake up and look outside at serenely blanketed ivory landscapes.  Today was one of those rare days and he could not wait to lose his milky dog in the drifts.

Alan climbed, ran, fell out of bed and dressed as quickly as he could.  Chalk lifted her head at the noise and then uncurled herself from the corner of her crate to emit a slow yawn as she stepped delicately out onto the wood floor as if fearing its cold support.

Alan jogged into the kitchen to grab a quick glass of orange juice before his chilly adventure.  Chalk plodded slowly behind her owner down the hallway and stopped once she could see his reddening face gulping at a glass.  She sat down, yawned again, and tilted her head at this unusually active creature before her.

Alan rinsed out the glass, stuck it into his dishwasher, and attempted to slam the device closed.  Perversely, it bounced open again.  He tried harder and faster for a couple of repetitions as the dishwasher’s door just kept bouncing back open more and more forcefully.  Chalk stood up and slowly wagged her tail, indicating a willingness to help offset by a lack of understanding about what the big deal was.

Alan took a deep breath and closed the dishwasher slowly and carefully, this time with success.  Chalk sat back down.  Alan moved quickly to the coat closet and took out his big orange winter coat that Maggie called “The Traffic Cone”.  Maybe she was calling him The Traffic Cone when he wore it?  As Alan put it on, Chalk stood up and began to wag her tail in earnest.  She recognized that coat!  That was the coat that meant she was going to play in the cold, wet, fluffy blankets!  Should she stay here?  Should she run to the door?

Alan managed to coordinate putting on his coat and walking to his door simultaneously, though not without minor injury along the way from the coffee table.  He was going to ice it in just a minute.  Well, snow it.  With his shoes on and his coat zipped and one glove on and the other glove in a pocket and a leash in his hands, Alan called, “Here, Chalkie!” and instantly realized he’d made a mistake.  Chalk’s ears stood up as straight as they could as she heard her name and then, responding to the agitated high pitch of his call, proceeded to react appropriately.  A hurried dash, a great lunge, and a successful pounce completed with a tangle on the floor.  This was almost as much fun as the wet blankets.

Reminding himself that this was his own fault, Alan struggled to keep his voice calm as he said, “Good girl, Chalk, that’s just what I meant.  Now, let me get up so we can try again.”

Having a dog as large as Chalk was convenient for many reasons.  This time, she made a decent support structure as Alan steadied a hand on her back to help him get up off the ground and stand once more.  He patted his dog on her head and said, “Thanks.”  He tried again, this time calmly starting off by directing his dog to sit (which she did) and then connecting her leash to her collar and directing her to wait for him to open the door (which she did).  Alan walked out onto the small cement landing outside his door and, holding the door open, called for Chalk to join him (which she did).  A moment to make sure he had his keys and lock up and then they were off on their adventure.

There was a grassy hill beside his house that ran up to an open space behind a neighboring apartment complex.  The open space bordered some woods where one could often spot deer along the edge or foxes running across.  That seemed an ideal place to enjoy this winter wonderland.  First, a quick walk around his neighborhood to take care of business in their usual, regulated fashion.  Then as they completed the circuit, instead of going back inside, Alan started sprinting up the hillside he had targeted with a shouted, “Chalkie, release!”  Chalk ran with abandon.

Happy, wet, cold, warm, silly, messy chaos erupted as man and dog derived enormous pleasure from painting an abstract expressionist tribute to Jackson Pollock behind several quiet buildings.  The medium may have been the message or the message just may have been “Hooray!”  The art went on for almost an hour.

At last, Chalk seemed to have tired of picking up snowballs with her teeth and Alan had grown tired of picking out clumps of snow from his pants, and they began their heroes’ journey home.  Upon reaching the top of the hillside together, they both paused and looked down the now very steep slope to their goal and their house.

“I may not have thought this through all the way,” admitted Alan aloud.

“Huff, huff,” was Chalk’s considered response.

“That’s easy for you to say,” continued Alan.  “You have four legs and could probably get down this much more easily than I can.”  He paused.  “Come to think of it….”

Alan made sure the leash was fastened to the immobile ring on Chalk’s collar rather than the slip-tight ring and then told his dog to Stay.  Her continued huffing appeared to be in agreement.  Then her master, pleased with his own cleverness, began to edge down the hill while releasing small increments of the leash.  At ninety-seven pounds of mostly muscle, Chalk’s only visible response to the additional weight on her leash was to lean back from the crest of the hill.  Here was a newly discovered convenience.

Quite tickled, Alan said, mostly to himself, “Good anchor, good anchor!”

As he reached the end of the four foot long leash and grasped the handle carefully, Alan could see that there was still probably another fifteen feet or so before the slope of the hill curved sharply to an end.  He quietly and carefully called up to his dog.

“Okay, Chalk, now slowly…  Slowly…  Come…  Slowly…”

Chalk edged forward a bit and looked down at her master.  And then stopped.

“No, it’s okay, just do it slowly…  Come on, Chalkie—oh, crap!”

As soon as she heard her master tell her to come, Chalk followed orders and began to walk down the hill.  As soon as she started moving, though, she slipped just a little and responded by picking up speed.  This cycle of slipping and speeding rapidly continued to increase in magnitude as Chalk actually slipped and ran and slipped and ran down the hill, passing Alan in the blink of an eye.

“Bad anchor!  Bad anchor!” called out Alan as his precarious perch was entirely lost.  He was quickly pulled forward past his center of gravity and then onto his chest and face which served as the runners for his impromptu body-sledding down the hill behind his great big sled dog.

For her part, Chalk had continued her run down to where the ground was level beneath her before slowing to a stop and seemed quite pleased with herself for not falling.  Ever the compassionate companion, when Alan finally did slide to a halt behind her, she trotted back to her master and affectionately licked the back of his head.

Alan lifted his head up to spit out some combination of what he hoped was just snow, mud, and grass.  “Bad anchor,” he repeated quietly once more before collapsing back into his face-down resting place.

Chalk sat down to wait.

I’m so wired after I finished watching the beginning of Heroes, Volume 3 (the Television series) that here I am blogging about it.  The remarkable characteristic of Heroes is that people who don’t care for or actively dislike comic books, still enjoy this series.  Completely predictable, however, is the fact that comic book aficionados often enjoy it as well.  I fall into the latter category, although I fell out of practice when I realized that spending money on comics rarely lead to positive experiences with women.

I enjoy Heroes, but I don’t usually obsess over the show as many of my friends have done, nor did I feel disappointed by the show as many of my friends have felt.  Maybe that’s because I don’t find myself demanding that the show be anything other than what it is.  It is a live-action television show with no costumery nor fantastical realms (aside from Las Vegas) that still attempts to tell stories in the way that serialized comic books do.  Not Graphic Novels, not anime, not Superhero movies, but regular old flimsy paper printed, 32-page long, multi-arced comic books.

Graphic Novels, real ones not the flash-based webisodes that get called that, have the protection of their own labels to tell stories in whatever style the author chooses.  They are novels, told in graphical format.  Their subjects may be extraordinary or mundane.  They may contain a great deal of dialog or pages of wordless images.  They may run just a few pages or take up encyclopedic volumes.  Graphic novels are not best analogized by TV or movies or even books.  The closest comparison is immersive video games.  After that, real life.  I claim this because you are forced to see images, but you are not forced to hear or interpret anything else.  You can mute the video game, you can ignore most of reality, but generally you don’t close your eyes to your experiences.  Graphic novels should be impressive or they’ve failed.

Comic books are nowhere near as immersive.  They are structured to be episodic.  They often contain quick summaries of the story so far at their beginning.  They often contain numerous advertisements breaking up the flow.  They are colorful and vibrant and it takes the best of writers to be able to carry off ensemble stories.  There may be issues that progress nothing of the canon of the comic book’s universe.  There may be issues that contradict canon, hopely to be retconned back into continuity later.  And while it may not be the main purpose of a story, every comic book staff member has the idea in the back of his mind that should someone pick up a single issue, that issue (any issue) should be compelling enough to capture a new subscriber.  That’s not necessarily commercial so much as it is survival instinct.

This is how the story of Heroes unfolds to me.  It is often quick and exciting.  The stories progress the canon and develop character, episodic, and overarching… arcs.  They capture the audience with flash and glamour and emotion but avoid the costumes and dastardly plans that would diminish the mainstream viewer’s perception of the show. Certainly there are times when the story progresses slower than at others. Upon occasion, a character seems to take foolish actions or act one-dimensional.  That’s unacceptable for “24″ perhaps, but isn’t it reasonable for The Adventures of Jimmy Olsen?  When my friends tell me that something in Heroes has disappointed them, I tend to suspect that they’ve lost sight of the conceit of the show: it is a comic book.  It is a well-disguised and well-written comic book, but that’s what it is nonetheless.

Tonight, I got to see new characters, new ideas, and new story lines introduced.  I am enamored of the speedster as I’ve often wanted the powers of The Flash.  I am intrigued by the escapees (what can Jesse do?).  I am reassured by the old familiar faces.  I am amused by Park-Man and the dialog between Sylar and Claire.  I still wish someone would kill off Mohinder and Maya.  And I did not see it coming: the last statement of Angela Petrelli.  Wow.  These were two good issues and I will definitely pick up the next one.

Last Wednesday, I realized I had owned my dog, Dru, for four years to the day.

Then Friday night, August 29th, 2008, as I was playing with Dru, I held up a treat for her to reach by standing on her hind legs.  She only stood up about half as high and for half as long as usual.  My first thought was, “Did my dog’s warranty run out?”  The thought that followed was a vague concern that my four-and-a-half year old dog was starting to develop hip dysplasia and I should get her more hip-helping treats.

On Saturday, I took Dru to a nearby playground behind a school.  This is a pretty fancy high-tech playground – everything looks like a kid-size version of a Playskool  toyset for Li’l People.  AND instead of the super safe sand or gravel that I seem to recall lined the grounds of my childhood’s playgrounds, this one’s foundation is made up of one-foot-square black tiles of…  Nerf?  Supernerf?  Something that’s like Nerf but a little bit like blacktop tar at the same time.  It’s bouncy.  When my dog runs across it, she looks like she’s bounding.

One of the things I do with her at playgrounds is take her up onto the weird structures so she gets used to walking over various surfaces and rope bridges and heights.  This time, I had her stay on this one platform about three feet off the ground while I jumped down onto the bouncy ground.  Then, I called for her to jump to me.  She tilted her head back and forth and didn’t jump.  I thought maybe she didn’t understand and so I stepped back a little and crouched down with my arms open wide (a standard come-to-me pose for dog training) and sure enough she jumped down.

Onto her head!  I didn’t see that coming.  She’s always been very athletic as a pit bull mix and so if I’d predicted any craziness, I might have predicted her jumping onto MY head.  But no: she face planted and then rolled over and then bounced back into the upright position.

I immediately shot forward to hold her and inspect her all over for bruising or bumps or for indications she had bitten her own tongue or any body parts that seemed tender or out of place…  She seemed perfectly fine.  I had just taken her into the vet for a drop-off visit a couple weeks previous for her yearly comprehensive physical and she’d passed with flying colors.  At this point, she still seemed fine.  As a rare treat for her, I let her go completely off leash at which point she started running around the Nerf-ground.  And then around the grass that was around the Supernerf. Now, I don’t speak fluent Doginese but I think I heard, “Wheeeeeeeeeee!  burp.”  She seemed fine.

Sunday, I played with her around the house and she still wouldn’t stand up very high so I bought her some hip treats.  When I took her for a long walk, I noticed that she was starting to drift from side to side while walking – more than usual.  But I figured she was just tired from all the exercise I was giving her.

Monday was a holiday, so I got to play with Dru some more but now I noticed that when I would hold up a hip-helping treat for her, she would try to stand and then when she landed on the ground, one or the other of her back legs would flail out as if she’d got a cramp there.  Once again, I physically palpated the area, tried stretching out her limbs here and there – no problems and no reactions.  Well, lots of licking of my face while I was trying to concentrate, but no pain reactions.  That evening, I started to notice that her head was becoming very tilted to one side and when I took her for a drive, she was awkward in both jumping into and out of my car.

At this point, I grew concerned that maybe she was having neurological problems and so I tried some sensitivity tests around her body (pinches) while keeping her attention forward with some really delicious treats.  She felt all the pinches, showed no tenderness.  I tried some flinch reactions toward her eyes and noticed that her right eye seemed normally responsive but her left eye seemed not to flinch unless my finger practically touched it.  This day, she was also lethargic and seemed to want to sleep more than usual.  I let her.

The next morning, I took her into work with me to keep an eye on her.  This was yesterday.  Sure enough, she still had problems getting into and out of my car.  And at work, we walk down a long narrow hallway and her head was pronouncedly tilted to one side and she kept bumping into either the hallway or me.

I called for a vet visit.  I have an appointment there this morning.

Last night, I did the doggie-equivalent of looking up her symptoms on webMD.com (it was more like dogmd, but called something cuter) and found lots of results for “vestibular signs” that point to bad news.  It could just be a minor inner ear infection.  It could be brain cancer.  A couple of places were careful to point out that the most common version of “canine vestibular disease” is the ideopathic variety which often clears up quickly.  Labeling something as ‘ideopathic’ just labels the medical practitioners as idiotic because it just means ‘we have no idea why this happens’ but sounds cooler than ‘mysterious’…  “Sorry, Mr. Roth, but your dog has Mysterious Inner Ear Curse.  Have you tried a gypsy?”

Anyway, I’m going to go into the vet today and hope that they find… I don’t know… a piece of dog biscuit stuck in her ear?  Something simple that won’t require bajillions of dollars of surgery and medicine but will actually fix her.

I hope Dru’s okay.