Grammer #02.

Gestures are all that I have; sometimes they must be grand in nature. And while I occasionally step over the line and into the world of melodramatic, it is what I must to in order to communicate clearly and effectively. In order to make my point understood without question. I have no words I can rely on, much to my dismay, my tongue was designed long and flat and loose, and therefore, is a horribly ineffective tool for pushing food around my mouth while chewing, and an even less effective tool for making clever and complicated polysyllabic sounds that can be linked together to form sentences. And that’s why I’m here now waiting for Denny to come home - he should be here soon - lying on the cool tiles of the kitchen floor in a puddle of my own urine.

I’m old. And while I’m capable of getting older, that’s not the way I want to out. Shot full of pain medication and steroids to reduce the swelling of my joints. Vision fogged with cataracts. Puffy, plasticky packages of Doggie Depends stocked in the pantry. I’m sure Denny would get me one of those little wagons I’ve seen on the streets, the ones that cradle the hindquarters so a dog can drag his ass behind him when things start to fail.

As you read this book, try to stand apart from yourself. Try to project your consciousness upward into a corner of the room and see yourself, in your mind’s eye, reading. Can you look at yourself almost as though you were someone else?

Each of these maps is based on the stimulus/response theory we most often think of in connection with Pavlov’s experiment with dogs. The basic idea is that we are conditioned to respond in a particular way to a particular situation.