The Way of the Dog Read Online Free PDF

folder, of some soft material, leather or vinyl, while the one she carries on her bicycle has a hard case, it is a hard black box with a hinged top and a latch. Professor Diamond has (at least) two briefcases. Perhaps she transports the thin leather one inside the hard plastic one, to protect it when riding her bicycle.
    The cleaning is infernal. Moll has found a vacuum cleaner somewhere and drives it around the house with furious energy. And every day she discovers fresh bits of money. Fearing thieves, I divided my hoardings, hiding them in several places, and long ago forgot where the stashes were. To escape the noise, I go outside and sit on the front steps. I carry my blanket with me, wrap it around my shoulders in the early-morning chill.
    Weekday mornings the neighborhood is at its most bizarre and alienating, as if someone had kicked an anthill. They pour from the nest, rushing and tumbling into the street, mandibles masticating the last crumbs of breakfast, antennae waving. They tear out of driveways. They climb into cars at the curb. They adjust their mirrors, their radios, their headsets. They file down the sidewalk toward the bus stop at the corner. Buses swoop in, doors flop open, they push inside, the doors flap shut, the buses pull away, roaring. Diesel smoke curls and drifts in the street. They are excited, grim, resigned, hopeful, in a terrible rush, burdened with backpacks, briefcases, wires hanging from their ears. Arms swinging, heads jutting, eyes locked on the future. On days like this one, when the weather is fine, they form a happy crowd , it seems to me, hunched in my blanket on the steps. They remind me of the happy dwarfs in the Walt Disney movie, I expect them to burst into song. Most days, I am struck by how intense they seem, how eager , how at home in the workday world. At those times I feel intellectually very distant from these people. I have no instinctive feeling for that world. Nothing in my past has equipped me to understand it.
    Surrounded by such people I sometimes think of myself as the last sane man.
    When I used to encounter those people—meaning people of that type—at a neighborhood get-together, some supper party or afternoon lawn party, when I was still going to those occasionally, forcing myself to attend, when I still knew a few people here, though I hated going even then, their first question, posed within minutes of meeting me, was always, “Well, and what do you do exactly?” Or words to that effect, as if they were actually interested in the sort of activity that occupies me for hours every day, when what they really meant was, “And where do you get your money ?” “What is your job ?” People of this type always imagine that the answer to this question will tell them who I am exactly, whether I am an alien type , in which case they will lose interest in me, or someone like them , in which case they will, emotionally speaking, sidle up to me. They never begin by asking me about anything that might actually say something about who I am. The question about how I make a living is the primary thing, they are compelled to ask it, compelled to define themselves, define each other, in this purely external way by whatever mind- and soul-killing activity they have been forced into by material circumstances, though less by actual material circumstances, by an actual dearth , than by a pervasive ideology of accumulation , I have always thought. They have to define themselves in this way or admit that what they do day in and day out is in fact going against themselves, that in fact they are actively destroying themselves in the process.
    They base their identities on work, on their jobs or their professions, especially their professions, or else on their hobbies, which are themselves just forms of pseudo work. I am alone in having no work, I am not even retired from work, which means that for them I have no clear identity, no definable personality, I am disturbingly ambiguous.