Zeke’s popularity among readers of this blog has been a great help to me in the last months. I can never repay the kindnesses you have shown, and I will always be grateful.
I’m not going to be writing about him here anymore, at least not in the manner in which I have been. He may pop up as a character in a story here and there, but he won’t be the subject of any more posts.
Writing for one’s audience is a tempting thing, and I don’t think it’s entirely a bad impulse. There’s been another dog at work here, one owned by a guy named Pavlov. People comment more on the Zeke posts, and I find myself responding to that in choosing what to write about.
Someone once referred to the writing I do here as being in the “open a vein and bleed through the keyboard” mode, or something similar. It’s not a bad description of the way I write, for good or ill. There are drawbacks to the technique. Writing about one’s experience of the inevitable sorrow in one’s life inevitably opens the door to people who will tell you you’re not feeling the proper emotions. My patience for that sort of response is thin enough at the best of times. Yesterday it made me want to do violence to my computer.
There is enough sentiment these days out in the blog world, attached to arguments I have studiously avoided, that by the act of writing a blog one is obligated to write about certain things: the underreported political issue of the moment, the taking of sides in inter-blog arguments. If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know how I feel about that assumption of obligation. It’s enough these days to utterly deprive me of the desire to write about anything political. Pile upon that the assertion that my feeling of loss, as expressed in a post, is egotistical because it doesn’t fit someone’s personal religious beliefs (based on a shallow misinterpretation of zen aphorisms at that) and I come close to tossing this thing out onto the Wayback Machine scrap heap.
Besides, even I’m getting bored with my whining about my dead dog.
So I’m taking him backstage again: he is, after all, my dead dog and not the Internet’s. To all of you who have sent their best wishes, commiseration, shared grief and shared stories, I can’t express how grateful I am. You truly touched us.
When I feel like writing about something else, it’ll show up here.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Categories:
Zeke
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