Many years ago I came across a cartoon of a dog straining at the end of a tie-out, his face fixed in a rageful scowl. The title of the series was, “The Angriest Dog in the World,” and the caption read, “The dog who is so angry he cannot move. He cannot eat. He cannot sleep. He can just barely growl. Bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis.”
The comic strip was created by filmmaker David Lynch during a time in his life when he himself was very angry, and ran in the LA Reader from 1983-1992, the latter date being when I first saw it. Most likely it resonated with me because of my own feelings of emotional incarceration. At the time, I was working for a boss who liked to say my job, for which I’d spent four years in college, two years in graduate school, and another six months studying for licensure, could be done by a “trained monkey.”
I shared the angriest dog cartoon with my husband, who worked for the same agency. It resonated with him, too, and we kept the cartoon around for years, until we finally left the offending agency for other jobs, and bosses who did not compare their employees to circus animals.
I hadn’t thought about the cartoon in a while, but was reminded of it recently when my husband and I were at an out-of-town get-together with a group of people we knew only tangentially. My husband struck up a conversation with one of the men, who proceeded to regale us with a tale of anguish so wretched and full of rage we almost felt sorry for him.
I say almost, because his misery was completely bound up in a recreational endeavor that, it turned out, he was so good at, his life revolved around taking spectacularly expensive trips to luxurious locales around the world in order to defend his enviable titles. Which he could do because he’d made it to the tippy top of his profession, and was fabulously wealthy as a result.
“I hate my life,” the man growled. “As soon as I can quit [the purely recreational sport at which I excel so brilliantly], I will never do it again.”
As I recall, my husband and I sat mostly in bemused silence as the man talked, nodding our heads every now and then in a show of ape-ish solidarity. Because, really, who doesn’t hate it when your life goes so well you’re rewarded for it in ways that exceed your wildest imaginings? How is that any way to live? When we finally pried ourselves away, my husband said, “Wow, that guy was like the angriest dog in the world.”
The comparison was spot on, with the exception that, in the man’s case, what he was straining so hard against was a shackle of his own creation. And though the dog could theoretically step back and relieve the pressure of the chain around his neck, he could not fully escape it, while this angry man could have relieved his own misery in an instant by making a different choice. Even a trained monkey could see that.
I thought about the angry dog/man the other day. I had pulled out my whiteboard and proceeded to outline, in week-by-week columns, everything I must complete by December 31st of this year. The list was rounded out with important birthdays (my own included, so I remember to get a head-sized hunk of City Diner’s three-layer New York Blackout cake), staff meetings, writers group meetings, dog training sessions, doctor’s appointments, and get-togethers I mustn’t forget because they are happening at my house.
In other words, I have willingly chained myself to a never-dwindling list of must-completes and have-to-attends and don’t-forgets that is a little like my incarceration at the terrible agency, except that I am not rageful, because I truly enjoy everything I’m doing (with the exception of the doctor’s appointments). Also, no one is calling me animal names. More importantly, there’s no time scheduled in for emotion.
But it does make me think about how we caretake our time, how, like Escher’s hand drawing a hand, or Harold and the Purple Crayon’s young protagonist who sketches out his every move before it happens, we create our own life, for better and for worse. How comical that we ever revile what we ourselves have brought to be, as if it is a hand other than ours making the choices defining our life’s course. How much more comical when we, like the angriest man in the world, despise what good fortune has brought us, simply because we’ve chained ourselves to the fear of losing it.
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Dana Shavin is an award-winning humor columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist and Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs, a collection of her most popular columns spanning twenty years. More at Danashavin.com. Email her at [email protected].