Dog Days

Ugh. It’s been a crazy few days.

Murray, my dog, is old. He’s been old for a while now but he’s always seemed very youthful still. So much so that my husband and I would joke about how the vet must have guessed his age wrong by a few years.

But over the past couple of weeks he’s become old. Really old. It was so sudden yet so gradual. One day he came stumbling down the hall like he was crazy drunk. He shook it off and seemed fine. A few days later it happened again. Then on Sunday it happened again and this time it didn’t go away.

We left him his Kong full of treats on Monday morning before we headed off to work, as we always do and which he always devours immediately, but when we came home, it was still full. We called his vet and brought him in and she said all signs point to a brain tumor.

We were thisclose to putting him down, he was in such bad shape.

But I didn’t want his last day to have been spent home alone, so I brought him home for the night to have one last goodbye. But, oddly, he started acting a little better. He ate some food. He tried to play.

So now, 2 days later, he’s still the same. He’ll eat sometimes. He’ll get a little playful sometimes. He walks, but crookedly. His balance is all off. I guess at this point we just wait and see.

But, of course, this all happens a week before my big Stone Arch Festival show. That’s just the way things seem to work. 2 weeks before we leave for London, the sewer pipe breaks. 1 day before my Turf Club show, my dad has to have emergency surgery. Now, Murray. Not that any time is a good time for any of those things to happen, but come on. As always before any show, I begin to panic at all possible signals that I might be getting sick. This stress only ends up causing me to feel like shit. My body finds really weird ways to manifest stress into some physical form. I’ll get muscle spasms, hives, chest pains, headaches, toothaches…just about anything. So today I woke up with a painful – what I think is – a cut in the back of my mouth on the back of my upper gum. It hurts when my tongue brushes against it and it seems to be making it slightly difficult to swallow. Obviously the cut is real and not some fearful delusion of mine, the difficulty swallowing is probably stress related.

I find myself counting down the days until the show - both out of excitement and out of impatience. I just want it to get here so I know that I’m well and will be able to perform at my fullest ability. It’s almost like I can’t fully enjoy the thought of the performance until the day of when I know that I’m not sick. It’s really no way to go about things.

We had band practice last night and I’m feeling pretty good about the songs. We’re going to try something new with one of them that I’m very excited about.

But since I’m stressed and being stressed to me equals being sick and it’s been a while, let’s take inventory of what’s playing on the iPod while I get some work done today with another 25 songs.

1. “Strange Loop” – Liz Phair
2. “Home and Somewhere Else” – Mimicking Birds
3. “My Love” – Lykke Li
4. “Billy” – Haley Bonar
5. “True Blue” – Madonna
6. “All & Everyone” – PJ Harvey
7. “Signing Up For This” – Erica Russo and the Good Sport
8. “X-Ray Man” – Liz Phair
9. “New Yorker Cartoon” – Jenny and Johnny
10. “Northern Lad” – Tori Amos
11. “Just Like the Movies” – Regina Spektor
12. “I Don’t Know” – Lisa Hannigan
13. “Pawn Amerkia” – Rank Strangers
14. “Isobel” – Bjork
15. “Past in Present” – Feist
16. “My Night with the Prostitute from Marseille” – Beirut
17. “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” – They Might Be Giants
18. “Goodnight Movies Goodnight Moon” – Rank Strangers
19. “Get Over It” – Solid Gold
20. “Wendybird” – Haley Bonar
21. “Just So” – Agnes Obel
22. “Cosmopolitans” – Erin McKeown
23. “Black Sand” – Jenny Lewis
24. “Ripchord” – Rilo Kiley
25. “I Didn’t See It Coming” – Belle and Sebastian

I’ll get back to the 30 Days of Music countdown tomorrow.