Eat Your Own Dogfood (at least, that’s what they told me)

Back in the day, when I was a young Netscape geek who built web demos to show off things like the amazing new “font color” tag in early iterations of Mozilla, my boss used to say, “Dogs eat dogfood. Eat your own dogfood!” In normal humanspeak, this means that you need to actively use and experience the product that you make.

Unfortunately, I seem to be having a hard time eating my dogfood. I, a fiction writer, cannot seem to read fiction right now. Don’t know what it is. I’ve come to a grinding halt in my big reading smackdown plans (you’ll notice I couldn’t even bring myself to capitalize “smackdown”) because I can’t seem to get more than 10 pages into a novel. It’s not that the material isn’t interesting, per se. It’s more that my mind keeps wandering:

Should I go to Marrakech in September? … I really need to get my eyebrows plucked … Is it possible I’m the only person who thought The Dark Knight was more bloated than a corpse in seawater and featured more unnecessary false climaxes than a bad porn flick? … I should go to the gym. No, really. I really should go to the gym… Why is it so hard to spell “misspell” correctly? …

Perhaps I’ve developed some kind of disorder. Something only writers get. Something more than an ailment but less than a disease. A phobia. Maybe I’ve got a phobia. No, that’s emphasizing “fear” more than warranted. This is more like a non-fatal illness. Or maybe it’s more like a serious disturbance or an irregularity. A anomaly! But can you “develop” an anomaly? Nay, I think an anomaly just is.

You know, now that I think about it, perhaps my inability to focus on fiction is just a symptom of a much larger problem: I have monkey brain. Monkey brain, meaning the never-ending cycling of the brain in thought.

I mentioned a while back that I flunked my meditation class. Meditation is sort of the antithesis of monkey brain; it’s the art of thinking about nothing, but in such a way that it has meaning. Anyhow, I paid 25 dollars to meditate with a group in Soho and got about 12 dollars worth of peace of mind. At most. Actually, that’s got to be a total overstatement. Let’s calculate. The session was two hours. If I thought about exotic travel, the pluck-worthiness of my eyebrows, action movies and porn, gym class and spelling for half of the experience (which I don’t think is an overstatement), and then accidentally fell asleep and was out cold for half of the remaining time, that really leaves only 6 dollars worth of relative Zen. And since some of that 6 dollars was spent being worried that I’d snored or drooled, we’re really down to, oh, 3 dollars and some change. All because of monkey brain.

It’s suddenly so clear to me now! Monkey brain! Monkey brain is holding me back from achieving my true potential in life! Monkey brain is the reason I cannot read in my own genre!

You know, speaking of travel, in some foreign countries, dogs eat monkey brains for dogfood. And if I can unravel the metaphors and analogies mixed in with that dish, I’m sure I’ll be halfway to a cure. Okay, maybe not halfway. But at least 3 dollars and some change closer.

(In the meantime, I’ll try diving into Bill Bryson’s Walk. Bears, yes. Monkeys, no.)

Liz