My Friends and I Would Hang Out Late in the Painting Room.

We would turn on the massive TV they had in there, to play music or something like that while we were studying. When it was turned on it would always default to the same screen, to this same cable-run 24/7 channel that was about pets. It would only be on for a few seconds before one of us switched the screen to Spotify, but I got the gist of the show, and this was it: there was a family and they had a pet, a precious pet, except the thing was absolutely rabid and vile. So they called in an expert on pets and pet behavior, who never seemed to be the same person somehow, even though it was always the same show. This person, who was always a middle-aged man with gentle eyes, who talked in the same solemn, kind tone to both the camera and the animal, understood the pet on a psychological level. It was like the pet in question, a pit bull or something, the pitbull’s eye would twitch, and the man would shake his head sadly and say, “She doesn’t feel great about being alive right now. She feels sort of strange, uninspired is not the word but maybe more frozen. The shadows of the tree branches curl at her feet, she eats her good meals and every day ends up all right, in the moon. But the goodness is slipping through her fingers. She can feel it all around her so completely that she is drowning in it, but how do you say thank you to the whole world? It is a beautiful problem to have, but hard, because she sees everyone else walking, praying, laughing, going about their lives and she thinks, what is wrong with me? Who taught them to say thank you for the wildness of it all, how do they do that? There is a quiet curse that sits deep in her gut, that all the world is goodness, and well, well, what if she goes about the life and ignores the pull, and it is a hard thing to realize, that all the world is goodness and maybe you are not.” 

He would pause.

A heavy pause, and the pitbull twitched again. The silence was heavy, the man’s eyes sad. The silence was so very heavy and naked.

Then he would throw down some prophetic solution like, “Pet her on the left side of her head more often and feed her only leafy greens, she’ll be normal in a week.” 

And then we’d switch the channel.