I left home when I was 18, eager to find my own place in the world. I did brief stints on California’s central coast and in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, eventually settling in the Los Angeles suburb of Silverlake, known locally as the “Swish Alps” for its large gay population and hilly terrain.
I have a tendency to gravitate toward gayborhoods; society as a whole is hostile enough toward members of the LGBTQ+ community, we shouldn’t feel unsafe or under siege at home. I like living amongst my people. Around the lake (that is actually one of several reservoirs designed by William Mulholland which store water for metropolitan Los Angeles) I spent my 20s and my 30s writing computer code by day and getting into as much trouble as I could by night. They were halcyon years, and soon to end.
Bars and the Burrito King on Hyperion Avenue were my hangouts. I was committed to a life of drunken debauchery, and I exceled at both. One apartment building I lived in was a residential bacchanal, but neurological complications from HIV would bring the curtain down on Act I.
When you’re diagnosed with an incurable fatal disease, it can sometimes be harder to survive than to die – especially when your neurologist tells you, “we’ve stopped the spread of the lesions on your brain, but the damage done is done, you will not recover from hemiparesis [one-sided paralysis/weakness].” Physical deficits and disabilities – due to illness, injury, or just age – are different when they are encountered later in life than if they are congenital; I do not mean to suggest that someone born with a disability has an easy go of it, but they do not experience loss like those of us who become disabled as adults do. Seventeen years on when my neurologist told me (in 2023), “we’ve got the PML under control, I think we can now say, after all this time, it’s not going to kill you – you’ll probably live another 30 years,” you’d think my reaction would be something like – great! – right? No… far from it!! Tell me, what am I supposed to do with myself for the next 30 years?
“I don’t know how you do it,” one of my friends said to me. Really, how do any of us do it? Live with chronic illness, or disability, or just the knowledge of our own mortality once the futility of our existence and the indifference of the universe becomes clear? We keep going because we have to, because of the annoying insistence of our bodies to keep living, an insistence that Schopenhauer called the wille zum leben or the “will to live.” It’s easier to sign-up for the Cosmic Comfort Package offered by religion or to fall into the despair of nihilism than to embrace the absurdity of life. Being alive is just so hard. Hard, but not impossible. It does take dedicated effort. Effort that is one’s purpose in life and not a means to an end.
And so as my motto I adopted Aut inveniam viam aut faciam – I will either find a way or make one – attributed to Hannibal, a Carthaginian commander during the Punic Wars, when his generals told him it was impossible to cross the Alps by elephant.
Moving to the desert, wheelchair-bound, I had not yet accepted that my life had changed. I did not see myself as disabled – I was in denial as I tried to live my life as I had before. Fate had written a script for me that I was not following, and this led to a lot of anxiety and a general malaise. I don’t remember where (or when) I first heard it, but the phrase “the best thing you can do is get really good at being you” has echoed in my internal dialog since I was a young adult, and I’ve always believed you have to act your part in the play – as written. I got encouragement in this from an unlikely but welcome source.
Enter Gordon, 8 pounds of pure love wrapped in the body of a blond, short-haired deer head Chihuahua. My dog is an essential part of the life I live now. I don’t regret a single moment of the Silverlake years, nor do I miss them.
But my dog is more than just a cold nose and a warm heart. He is a philosopher and a teacher that offers me genuine insights into life and how to live. Much has been written about the idea of mindfulness and “living in the moment” of late. But,
one doesn’t have to follow Thomas Merton into the silence of a Trappist monastery or go to the trouble of reading a book by Eckhart Tolle to learn how to live in the ‘now’ or how to accept and embrace fate; dogs show us how to do this everyday while wagging their tails with joyful abandon and smiling as only they know how. We can learn a lot from them.
I have a leading role – the leading role – in this play that is unfolding. Its second act contains a major plot twist. Fate has written my character, the circumstances of my life are the script. And through it all, I have my dog. He is a guide, and a companion. Sometimes he’s the director, sometimes the audience.
“One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” said Albert Camus, suggesting that Sisyphus in the Greek myth finds happiness in the act of rolling the boulder, rather than in the meaning of the task itself.
As I strut and fret my hour upon the stage, I face the final curtain expecting no encore, I have no interest in the critics’ reviews, and there is no sequel planned or in the offing.