blue funks | Wendy Welch: Books, Yarn, Cats, Opioids

Those of you who do any kind of travel for work will recognize this syndrome: you go to where you’ve been invited, do your stuff well and intensely for a week if you’re in a festival or at a conference, or if you’re an itinerant consultant or storyteller, several places over a month or two.

And the last night, post-reception, post-e-mail exchanges with other artists, post-follow-ups on future events you’d like to get contacts for, the last night before you go home, you walk or cab back to the hotel contemplating all the wonderful people the world holds, how glad you are you got to teach writing skills to so many students, how energizing and lovely they were, how happy and blessed you are to do this kind of work.

Entering your hotel room, the evening lies spread before you like a peacock’s tail: will you swim first, walk across to that little Greek diner and get your salad? Check your e-mails? Download and post your photos of the two schools and the festival talk you did that day?

You sit down. And that’s the last time you move, except to pick up the remote to find the latest reality TV show, and sure enough here are a bunch of decorative thirtysomethings all mad at each other for no reason you can discern, but wait, are those dead people? Oh, this is the one your friends have been talking about for the past year, but you can’t follow a thing. Why do they keep killing each other instead of the zombies?

You might also find energy enough to open that ale you bought at the beginning of the week in a fit of localvoreism but didn’t drink yet because you’ve been doing three events a day and chatting with people and you wanted to be clear-headed.

After the zombies, a rerun of a Hollywood talk show will appear. You’ll channel surf, sit through half of something called Game of Thrones–and if you thought the undead-ers were incomprehensible…. If it’s a game, why are all these people screwing each other all the time–literally?

Hi ho the glamorous life. You can get a lot done during the weeknights back at the hotel, high on events that have gone well. Discipline exists for those evenings. But that last night before you go home, just take two aspirin and go to bed hollow, drained, as if the Dump Truck of Art hit you from behind, then sped off laughing while your body lay sprawled on the pavement.

It will pass. By the time you get home, you’ll be raring to get back to your writing schedule, answer e-mails that yes, you’d LOVE to go to the next place. More cool people to meet, fun places to visit, great ideas to explore. Life comes back.

It’s okay to take that night off, the day after; regroup, recharge, relax. Just stay off social media and DON’T take any selfies. Trust me on this; no good will come of it. Put the remote in your hand, and don’t touch anything else with an On switch. This, too, shall pass.

Jack’s guest blog this week offers praise where it is long overdue: to the staff dogs of the Little Bookstore.

…inter-staff relationship maintenance…

We blog often about our menagerie of cats, but rarely write about our dogs. When we moved from Scotland to ‘The Snake Pit’ (as Wendy describes it in The Little Bookstore) we brought our cat Valkyttie and dog Rabbie with us.

Sadly, we lost Rabbie just as we were moving to Big Stone Gap – he got out of the yard at The Snake Pit (we hope not with help) and we never found him, though we tried everything. Towards the end of the search we got a phone call from a guy who thought he’d found him, which is how we were adopted by Bert. Bert is a ¾ size version of Rabbie.

About eight months before we lost Rabbie, Wendy had found a black Lab pup wandering the roads, and that’s how Zora became part of the family. As Senior Executive Dog, Zora taught Bert everything he knows. But of course, Zora was trained by Rabbie, who taught her everything from food-specific begging eyebrow movements to a stock vocabulary of menacing growls. It’s quite odd to see Bert exhibiting Rabbie tendencies he learned from Zora!

I always describe Zora as an earth mother with Eeyore tendencies. One hundred percent placid and never excited, she will happily yield the right of way to the smallest kitten, and in fact cuddles some of the orphans who foster here. She has a dog bed beside ours and when we retire of a night and she plods round our bed end, if she sees little Nike already curled up there in the plush, she will turn and head back to the less comfortable fireplace rug. Sometimes in the night we hear Zora emitting a low growl akin to a purr, which signals Owen is home from his rounds and bunking down with her. She all but tucks him in under her tail.

All our animals have bookstore duties and Zora is our human resource manager. Bert is the polar opposite, and takes his job as security manager VERY seriously. At the slightest incursion to bookstore territory (which he considers anywhere within his hearing) he will emit strident warnings and race out to the yard to launch guided missiles at the garbage men, the airplane flying overhead, the leaf that had the audacity to fall into the yard. Zora generally raises herself onto one elbow and yawns.

Those are our dogs, God bless ‘em. They put up with a lot from the cats around here, and never let it get them down. I suppose it was seeing Zora looking at the Portuguese version of Wendy’s book, which arrived yesterday. It features Valkyttie on the spine and flyleaf. Valkyttie is also slightly less obviously on the US and Korean editions – which doesn’t help at all. Zora never says much, but it was clear that she felt the wee bit hurt at receiving no recognition, so we thought a blog wouldn’t go wrong. The dogs are an integral part of our bookstore, after all; they just don’t have as good an agent as the cats.

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