Before You Get A Dog, You Can't

Academic Achievement Was Something I'd Always Sought As A Form Of Reward. Good Grades Pleased My Parents, Good Grades Pleased My Teachers; You Got Them In Order To Sew Up Approval.

To A Drinker The Sensation Is Real And Pure And Akin To Something Spiritual: You Seek; In The Bottle, You Find.

Around The Time I Began Starving, In The Early Eighties, The Visual Image Had Begun To Supplant Text As Culture's Primary Mode Of Communication, A Radical Change Because Images Work So Differently Than Words: They're Immediate, They Hit You At Levels Way Beneath Intellect, They Come Fast And Furious.

A Lot Of People, Quite Frankly, Think Intense Attachments To Animals Are Weird And Suspect, The Domain Of People Who Can't Quite Handle Attachments To Humans.

The Real Struggle Is About You: You, A Person Who Has To Learn To Live In The Real World, To Inhabit Her Own Skin, To Know Her Own Heart, To Stop Waiting For Life To Begin.