guff

Woof

I tend to bark. A lot.

Sorry, but I don’t mean in any metaphorical or other similistic cover. When I say bark, I mean it plain, just as your pet dachshund might perform it at the screen door to the back yard. So it should be understood in its simplest manner when I speak of it: as the kind of vocalization one tends to expect primarily from the four-legged canine class.

Why do I bark?

Well, I could say to be unusual, appear off the wall, seem a little zany, become an object of discussion around the water cooler. But maybe it emerges from a long-time, Zen-drawn awareness that there are a lot of things I want to say, but have no words to properly formulate them to a point where others will catch my meaning. Early into those weird moments when a thought reaches the rarest of events and perfectly distills within my prefrontal lobe, yet can find no way to make it all the way to my vocal chords — just before the unresolved gesticulation of hands ends in an embarrassing dance movement unpunctuated by verbal expression, I decide an announcement of some sort is still in order.

It can also act as a release, a tiny but generous EST moment. There’s a large repository of channeled angst within all of us that reaches an exit point through the use of our voice. Many tend to let it out by way of the screaming guttural of obscenities or through standard workplace verbal abuse to underlings. But I think an as yet undiscovered territory is the raw power behind the well known but little understood animalistic yawp. It’s nothing less — when done right — then a palette cleanser, the welping aspiration tossing out all the built-up repressions and terrors and aggravations in our daily lives. Amazing when one can find that in a simple wordless cry.

So I bark.

And on occasion when I do, a listener or two seem to understand what I’m about. Just barely. But never the dogs. Oh no, they won’t give me the time of day when it comes to my linguistic skills in their tongue. Their loss.