Sometimes You Need To Take Yourself For A Walk

I am browsing through Cesar's Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems, which is written by Cesar Milan-- the "dog whisperer" himself (no relation to the slightly lesser known "dog hollerer") and Cesar believes that walking your dog is the "single most powerful tool" to connect with your dog's mind, as "fish need to swim, birds need to fly . . . and dogs need to walk," and I think this might be true for humans as well, but the difference is that humans don't need to walk in a pack-- obediently following the pack leader-- humans need to walk themselves . . . we occasionally need to be alone and moving with complete autonomy-- I think this taps into our hunter-gatherer roots . . . perhaps it's why women like to go shopping; I certainly walk to relieve stress and my friend Whitney recently reminded me of a perfect example of how well this works: several years ago Whitney and I drove from Virginia to Colorado for a wedding, and we were supposed to get a good night's sleep and start the drive bright and early, but instead we stayed up until three in the morning drinking beer and playing darts, and then we spent twenty-two hung-over hours in the car together, and when we arrived at our destination in Boulder and parked the car, we had a brief argument about the best way to walk downtown-- where we were meeting a friend-- but the argument was more about being in the car too long with each other, and so, without any formal good-bye, we simply parted ways, and I took the high road and Whitney took the low road, and twenty minutes later, we met at the bar (I think Whitney got there first, but we actually didn't speak of our separation or the argument until hours later) and after each of us had our "walk," we were able to tolerate each other again . . . and even cooperate with each other: we bought a wiffle-ball and bat and when we crossed the continental divide, we took turn pitching to each other in a very civilized fashion until Whitney hit one over the edge of the continent: the ball plummeted over a cliff and onto a snowbank and we were quite pleased with ourselves-- but then, to our surprise, some high school kids clambered down the cliff and formed a human chain and "rescued" the ball and returned it to us, so we had to hit it off the divide again.

7 comments:

Kev said...

hey whit - do you notice that dave HAD to point out that he "took the high road?"

Al DePantsdowno said...

Will there be an award for gayest sentence this year?

Dave said...

i meant physically-- i walked up the hill. and al, that gives me an idea for the sequel to this sentence . . .

Clarence said...

Kevin, hilarious. Of course Dave took the high road.

Clarence said...

And as our Colorado friend Jason says, never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Dave's chronology of the events is jumbled (Continental Divide was pre-Boulder) but any good storyteller/blogger arranges history to suit the story.

We needed a break from each other not merely from a long drive from VA to CO, but also from a drive to and from Aspen -- including the harrowing jaunt up to the Divide -- as well as time spent with Noelle in Denver, time in a chicken coop with Hightower, time spent braking golf clubs in The Simulator, and just time being hung over every morning neither adjusting to altitude very well nor drinking less. Also, we were a little perplexed as to how we would top our toasts from Jason's first wedding.

There are quite a few potential sentences to extract from just the car games we played while stuck in a Subaru with each other for a week.

Clarence said...

. . . But Dave was right, I did hit a wiffle ball off the continent. Sort of.

Dave said...

i was actually just trying to lure igor and his photographic memory into commenting, so i could remember the trip better. my memory is crap (aside from the maount of catfish i caught and ate at college) and so i will use igor's reminders for future content-- especially the notebook and the toast.

A New Sentence Every Day, Hand Crafted from the Finest Corinthian Leather.