Fritz the Nutcase

After waiting nearly 5 months for an appointment with a veterinary behaviorist, Fritz has finally been diagnosed as hyperactive/hypersensitive (Doggy ADHD) and with Generalized Anxiety Disorder. He will begin his medication regimen this evening, and I will attend our training class sans dog. He is currently sleeping after our 3 hours of driving and 2 hour intake. I appreciate all the people who have told me Fritz is a good dog. But Fritz is also an absolute frenetic ball of activity, and fostering multiple dogs and having a first reactive adult dog have shown me that I am not inept at assessing dogs. That dog has issues, and this is the first step to better managing them. I knew that months ago. Time does not heal: engagement does. We are about to hit dog adolescence where shit goes haywire, and I am so thankful that I now have some medications to temper it. I will also be taking Taiga in later, because her issues are different but perhaps more subtly complicated than Fritz’s.

I would say that the past decade of my life has been marked with these types of experiences. I have identified a problem early. I have been dissuaded, whether actively or passively, from pursuing solutions to that problem. Then, when the time is right, my assessment comes to light and not much has changed from the first time I asserted that this thing - whatever the thing was - was going to be a problem. If that sounds self-righteous, so be it. I’m tired of uttering fake humility when I’m not wrong.

The current president of MSU has just been offered another million dollars a year to deal with a difficult board. He first appears to have tried to muzzle their ability to speak, and now there’s some kind of offer to pay him off to keep him in his position. The most telling sentence of local news articles comes from someone explaining that no one knows where the money will come from. The institution is already bankrupt (the debt from multiple settlements is massive). Stanley - the previous president - turned down just such an offer before he left. The Board keeps talking to the press despite threat of censure. I don’t know enough to know exactly what the hell is happening at that institution, but I do know they are laying off people who do actual work and losing talent that might actually achieve something while these Boards and Presidents and Provosts and whoever else bat around entitlements like tennis balls and waste the money that could strengthen the actual folks working at that institution. I do not regret resigning for a minute, and I also have truly come to have a lot of hatred for the fucked up, corrupt nature of academic politics. I love education. I would suffer a lot of things for better educated workers, too. But whatever the hell this thing called university is, it’s a mess.

I only had to wait 5 months for Fritz to be assessed. I waited 12 years to realize that I’d been an extremely high performing professor who was completely out of place in the institution. The outcome, however, was the same for both situations. Whatever I perceived early on became the articulated reality later.

When I think about this gift of perception that I seem to have in the context of a life, I can confess that I have no fear of mortality. That seems to actually be the benefit, rather than problem identification. I could die tomorrow - any of us could. That doesn’t scare me. There are enough people who love dogs and who love my dogs that someone would take them. They’ve also been set up for success with medication and training. They’ll do fine. My house would sell, there would be money to cover my debts, I have a will, whatever. I do not feel, even at 44, that I have left anything in my life undone. I think that fear drives a lot of people. However far my orchard gets is how far it gets. I have raised so many other people’s children at different points in time that I don’t have any sense of loss at not having my own. People would be sad, just as I would be sad if my friends or family died, but I would be dead and that would not be my grief, it would be theirs. If this sounds macabre, please know that it’s a philosophical argument about a self. This is not what a death wish sounds like; we’ve all read enough novels and seen enough film to know that that looks different and is far more tortured than feeling like you’ve made appropriate choices and don’t have regrets.

But I think there is one thing I will carry to the grave, and that is the utter and absolute rage I feel about raising an alarm - however small in context - and being ignored. Or pushed off. Or argued with, or or or. If there’s a way to tell someone that they do not belong in society, that’s actually the most effective way to do it, as long as it happens repeatedly.

I do think that has been one of the defining features of my life, even from my teens, and I think a quiet rage about it will accompany me always. I lived with a terrible German host family at 18 and raised the alarm there early. I was brushed off, in both languages. I volunteered at local nonprofits in grad school and pointed some things out about the children I was working with. I went to the Ombudsman in graduate school with some complaints about a faculty member. Nothing happened. I watched things in job interviews that I reported to higher ups, and made reports to faculty grievance channels when I was being asked to do some odd things as a faculty member; I did something similar through unofficial channels when I worked as a theater tech after college.

This kind of sounds like a list of activities around “snitches who get stitches,” but some of these complaints were not minor. There was a three year old toddler in my host family who was neglected. Those children I was working with were behaving in ways that indicated early precursors of later criminal activity, and it was because they were poor, smart and bored. I often wonder what happened to one in particular, knowing that this city has a massive amount of gang activity. The faculty I reported were engaging in illegal activity, with consequences for the university if others complained. No one did. I think about the complaint I just filed against a payroll company that was a darling of the small business scene but that was operating without a license. I said, the year a certain dean was hired, that I did not like him. Tame words. He bankrupted the college.

When we think about certain bodies that say these things, it’s important every chance I get to remind myself that I am not insane. Because the reactions from other people to raising alarm indicate that assessment along a spectrum: everything from “that’s an overreaction” to “you’re nuts.” The problem is that I’m not nuts. I’m just paying attention. And if you are paying attention, you’re likely to see what I see. You’re going to say, yes, that dog has an anxiety disorder. Or: that institution is corrupt. Or: wow, that guy’s an idiot. (If you’re not as enraged as I am, maybe you say, more kindly, that guy’s not paying attention to what matters.)

I think at this point I do wonder: what on earth happened evolutionarily for our society to be so deathly afraid of actually dealing with a problem early? I don’t think insight is in short supply - at least not as short of a supply as people make it seem to be. Silence and “go along to get along” seem overused. And there’s something culturally that promotes anger but not solutions. That’s not just a social media thing: it had to be there first for social media to exploit it so well. It’s the essence behind all those colorful idioms where people are full of everything from beans to hot air to shit; where people run their mouth or shoot the shit; where they sell snake oil or behave like a used car salesman. Those are much more colorful idioms than the deadly “she’s a straight shooter,” which makes me imagine snipers. Maybe the essence of all of this is simply that solving problems is boring and people prefer more colorful, performative behavior.