Black Dog.

For reasons too personal and too numerous to delineate, I've been dealing with a ferocious Black Dog for about a week-and-a-half. It's been a long time since I've had one of these bouts, but this one came on hard and the Dog gripped me with vise-like jaws that gripped and locked.

I tried almost everything to get the Dog to relent. I called friends. I called more friends. I doubled down on working hard. I took long and vigorous walks. No matter what I did, the Dog kept his unrelenting grip on me.

The Dog, in fact, was getting worse--more vicious, not less--as time went by.

Some of this is age related. I realized at the age of almost 69, many many of the little things in life that I've always cherished have been homogenized or modernized out of existence. Or they just don't have them up here on the Gingham Coast where I spend the majority of my time.

For instance, you can't get decent Chinese food up here. I can drive an hour round-trip to a Chinese place near one of the big casinos. But the food, in reality, is not as good as any of the greasy spoons (or greasy-chopsticks) that dot most New York City neighborhoods. I suppose I have a craving-driven diet. When I need a good chicken and broccoli or a good pork fried rice, something ersatz just won't do. So, I remain unsatisfied. Which is no way to go through life.

The same holds true for bagels. 

You can find them up here. But they're the store-bought, six-in-a-cellophane bag type of circles. They don't get stale and they have a list of ingredients longer than a New School Masters' thesis. A simple, fresh, warm bagel made with just water, flour, yeast and a pinch is impossible to come by. The few bagel shops that make facsimiles of New York bagels falls as far short as a Twinkie does to a soufflé.

We used to call these Chinese cookies. They were a metaphor for life.
It took work to get to the chocolate.
Today, you can find them stale and packaged in cellophane in various New York delis.
You can no longer find them fresh.

The final Black Dog straw was the Sunday Times NOT arriving once again. For about 45 years, 52 weeks a year, I've rewarded myself for completing the week by taking an hour and a good fountain pen and doing the Sunday Times crossword puzzle. 

There are more challenging puzzles, but the Sunday Times' combination of size and difficulty was perfect for me. It made me think and allowed me the joy of unravelling something tough. It was a way for me to pat myself on the back and say, 'geo. you did it again.' 

Over the last 2,340 Sundays--that's 52 a year for 45 years--I've probably done 2,300 puzzles. That regularity has a salutary effect on me. Even as life gets more and more chaotic and haphazard, I've always had the puzzle to unwind with. I could count on it. It wasn't quite like counting on the tides, but it was as close as you can get in our tump-flected sumpiverse.

Last Sunday, the paper arrived. But without the magazine section. This Sunday, the entire paper was like ethics in politics--a no-show.

Delivery of the Times, if you're a New Yorker is like trees blooming in the Spring. Or a rainbow after a storm. Or a smile from a pretty girl. It's one of those things you can take for granted, but really are too important not to.

The paper and puzzle MIA pushed me right over the abyss. I said to myself, "Everything I hold dear is gone. Everything that matters to me has vanished. All my verities have disappeared."

I played those sentences in my head--trying to refute them. I couldn't. I tried again, again I couldn't. The Black Dog drew blood and gripped tighter.

I started the Sunday puzzle on the Times app, and that's fine. But it's not the same thing. It's like eating a steak from a feeding tube.

So I went downstairs and checked my email.

In it there was a four-word email from a client of mine--my longest-running client. We had worked together for five years--then separated. Now he's back.

The note said:

Thank you. Let's proceed. 

That's when the Black Dog began to release his grip. And that's when I realized that for all the impermanence in the modern world, for all what so often feel like a complete lack of control, the old order isn't as fleeting as the Black Dog had me thinking it was.

The thing that doesn't change is working.

Working hard.

Doing the work.

Getting the clients.

Getting knocked down.

Getting up again.

Working hard.

Doing the work.

Getting the clients.

That's what moves me forward. That's what staves off the Black Dog.

That's what keeps me alive.