Fred Aiken Writing

fattish dog

my dog is fat,
and doesn't understand what i'm saying
about eating right or living healthy or dieting;
and i don't understand what he's doing half the time,
like eating feces from other animals
or barking at his own reflection,
which seems odd since i too will sometimes
stare at myself for hours at a time
wondering if i'm good or bad,
contemplating whether i need a suit, or should i shave,
while my dog goes around in circles,
pacing, as he is thinking very intensely and can't make up his mind
on where to go, before suddenly squating and oozing
out what appears to be a some sort of gelatin coming from his backside,
which is then proceeded by my dog flapping his ears,
wagging his tail, 
all in the hope that i will reward him with a treat
for his transgression,
and though i've tried to cut back on how many treats i feed my dog
because he's so damn fat,
i still can't help but stare into those deep amber orbs
attached to those chubby cheeks
in which a hurried pant and pink tongue hang from his slack jaw,
and it is in those moments that i no longer
care about those admonishing stares from neighbors that mean mug 
me and my dog as we walk down the street,
judging us for our weird body shapes, respectively,
so i feed my fat dog another treat that he doesn't need
because i don't care if we're a blight on society's perception
of what a dog and a dog owner should look like,
and while this might not
be how i thought my life would be like,
i go to the pantry and grab a oreo treat for myself,
while thinking, i hope my dog doesn't have diabetes

i asked a nightmare a question

pleading with a nightmare is like politely asking the bubonic plague to leave
through the front door;
it's simply not within its nature,
it permeates and deepens and makes mincemeat out of marrow,
until the nightmare becomes a reality
that stays with you wherever you go,
a little memento
to remember,
like a piece of chewing gum stuck to the side of your head
to cover up a bullet hole leaking all over the desk

A Year and Now

Daily writing prompt

Is your life today what you pictured a year ago?

View all responses

Pretty much, but I feel that’s mostly because not much has changed in my life in the past year. I still have the same job I had last year. And I still pretty much do the same sorts of things, like read, write, and play chess all day.

I suppose I’ve gotten to that point in my life where I don’t really aspire to radically change my life all that much within a year’s time. In fact, I kinda enjoy the consistency of how I live nowadays. There’s a simplistic freedom in knowing what to expect from day to day, month to month, and yes, even year to year.

Granted, that’s not to say that I don’t have aspirations for each year. Because I certainly do. And with regards to those aspirations that I had hoped to accomplish, well, I suppose I’ve fallen short on a good chunk of them.

At the beginning of the year, I had set out to try and re-learn playing the guitar, become more proficient in spanish and start learning portuguese, and to write more consistently each and every day. I want to say that I’ve become fairly proficient in my spanish studies, but nowhere near as fluent as I had hoped to be.

I bought a $50 guitar last year in the hopes that would motivate me to learn how to play, but I can confidently say that it has remained in the corner of my office space without being touched once. Except maybe to vacuum around and under it.

With regards to writing more, well, I guess it depends on what day of the year you look at. Some days I was incredibly productive and kept on task, while other days the little ADHD bug kept me thoroughly distracted all day and so I barely wrote my name to various work documents much less an entire paragraph of some story I was working on.

I suppose being in my thirties has made me sort of shy away from making major aspirations within a year’s time. I feel like it’s best to do incremental things within a year, but major projects and goals tend to take much longer, maybe a decade or so. In a way, that makes not fully accomplishing what I set out to do in a year not seem so bad, while also giving me a little bit of wriggle room to flesh out what it is I’m trying to do.

I really hate the idea of constantly having to reinvent myself, or do something dramatically different. I kinda felt like that when I was younger and in my late teens and early twenties, and the feeling was exhausting. Sometimes stasis is the best place to be, since even a tortoise can finish a race.