April 7, 2010; Fritz!

Yesterday, while walking along with Skeeter, I fritzed.

It's the only word I can use to describe it. I started to shake, yank at the leash, whimper, growl. You name it, it was there and I felt like a big sissy. But this has happened before and I'll tell you—as I told Skeeter later—why it happened now.

All was well. It was a decent, gray day. Gray days, with no wind, keep the smells close to the ground and make the colours pop. On bright days, the sun burns off the smells and the colours all blend together to become one big phantasmagoria that people don't see but that most animals do and pretty much treat as hum-drum. But, suddenly, we came across this one house with the door open and a moving van in the front.

This is what I smelled and all the smells there was no happiness:

the things in the van (the sofa and beds with all their human stinks of food and lust and filth and, especially, the baby bed with its particular smell, the kitchen table—which still had traces of food stuck to the edges of it, some chairs where some dog had pissed on the leg—a female dog, and clothes, some smelling of toxic cleansers, others not); the moving men (three of them, one of them smelling of money problems and cheap cologne, one smelling like unwashed humans smell and one smelling more like cigarettes than anything else); the people moving in (three—mom on the rag and smelling of it and tears of anxiety, dad smelling of anger and his work in an office—quickly-pressed shirts, ironed over sweat-stains, and baby smelling like a baby: a little powder, a little ointment, a little shit and lots of piss); the people who had moved out (a couple, a wrecked couple, screams and anguish and rage sticking to the walls still—things gone terribly, terribly wrong; beyond the wrongness of a normal couple breaking up but brutal-wrong, blood-wrong).

And it all came into my nose and formed nutsy pictures in my head that made me a nervous wreck and I just wanted to get away away away and, thankfully, Skeeter saw this and didn't tardy and we walked on and soon I got a grip. When we got home I told him everything and he answered with, "There were stories about that couple" and left it at that.

But then he said he absolutely understood and told me why. "A few days after 9-11, I was still in a bad state. I had the TV on 24-7 and just absorbed it all. Read all the newspapers, watched all the specials, surfed the net for more and more information. I was reaching that point: a fritz..."

"Yes, yes," I said, "that's it. Good word."

"And then, the morning that the stock markets were going to open in New York, I sat in front of the TV. On the screen, at any given time, you had images of that day, you had a pictures of the president or someone, you had, in the background, talking heads or newscasters discussing the event. In the corner, larger than usual, was the stock ticker telling us how the market was responding—going up and down and up and down but mostly down because Wall Street types are monsters—and at the bottom of the screen you had the news crawl with more and more and more and more news." He sighed. "And I fritzed. I cried and went to bed and stayed there for two hours and when I came back I started all over again because that was all there was to do."

We were very quiet.

"Yes, yes. That's it," I muttered.

And we both thought of the same thing: TV and Twitter and Facebook and Google and newspapers and books and worlds and worlds of information coming at you all the time all the time all the time...

...and a couple across the street who had moved away if not apart.