Some guy-type buddies of my youth lived for a time in a veritable garden spot that they lovingly, if misguidedly, referred to as The Ranch. If you’ve ever been to the South and taken a drive down a country road, you’d have spied out in the middle of a field an old abandoned shack. This place was an absolute hovel. I have no idea if they even paid rent; there’s an excellent chance they were merely squatting. But it suited them just fine. They held huge wild parties, thinking themselves to be invisible out there. I guess they didn’t believe anybody would think it curious that there were a couple hundred cars parked around this shack in the middle of nowhere.
Anyway, a stranger came to their door one day. He was singularly unattractive — very little hair covering his hideous sore-wracked skin, just generally ratty and nasty looking. But, as is often said of the unbeautiful of the world, he had a great personality. He came to be known as “FunkDog,” because he was, in fact, a dog, and he was really funky. He came around regularly, and the boys would feed him and talk to him, but no one could quite bring themselves to actually touch him. And so they started this thing of petting FunkDog with a small stick. He would come and sit at a respectful distance, I guess knowing himself to be unclean, and eagerly await being petted and scratched with his stick. That image always just made me want to bawl, and now I think I know why.
I think FunkDog being petted with his stick is a perfect metaphor for what can happen to any of us in this life if we don’t pay attention. In any area of our lives, things can go from great, to not so hot, to down righy unspeakable, and do it so gradually that we keep downshifting our expectations to correspond with our current situation. We settle for less and less and tell ourselves, “It’s not so bad,” until finally one day we wake up and we are, in effect, hairless and scabby, just hoping to get petted with a stick for a little while. You can forget what it used to feel like to feel good about life; feeling rotten — or just a low-grade funk — seems normal and therefore acceptable. I just don’t believe that any of us are meant to be petted with sticks. If some area of your life sucks — do something else. Life is too short — and too long — to spend it being miserable. Life may indeed be short, but it is, for a fact, wide. It is high time we started settling for more.
-Jill Conner Browne
The Sweet Potato Queens’ Book of Love
