Fooled by Joyful Randomness

🚿On Hose Games and Fun with Flow

“Time with a [dog] is never wasted.”
—Collette*
*blasphemous bracketed swap mine—apologies cat lovers!

There are pros and cons to living with a big dog in a crowded city:

• Pro: An abundance of daily peeMail messages for them to check along curbs, corners, bushes, trash bags and bins, mailboxes, fire hydrants, and planters. Too many olfactory headlines to count!

• Con: All manner of other disgusting things they find in those same planters, such as discarded chicken wings, rat traps, broken glass, bottle caps, candy, empty bags of chips, used needles, human feces, and condoms or their errant wrappers. You name it, I’ve seen it and implored Ryder to “leave it!”¹

• Pro: Abundant socialization with other dogs large and small as neighbors navigate each other along narrow sidewalks. At night, when I’m scared, people cross the street to avoid us, rather than the other way around.

• Con: Concrete sidewalks in general; such a proliferation of rodents scurrying across them that the city appoints its first-ever rat czar;² the guilt of knowing our shepherd isn’t running free in a backyard, or even better on a farm, wearing himself out all day protecting livestock.³

When Ryder is not on shift in his role as Branch Manager™ on a long lead at the park, or playing frisbee in a fenced-in corner, Michael and I have gotten creative with the high-intensity “jobs” we give him at home to help burn off energy. I may not be a billionaire or anywhere close, but I can tell you that at least one member of our household is filthy rich.

New Yorker cartoon by Matt Stevens

Our indoor games have evolved from playing fetch by tossing balls down the long hallway of our apartment, to his vertical jumping for helium balloons on a repurposed jujitsu mat in the living room, to playing water games upstairs on the terrace when it’s nice out. The hose game is one of my favorites—and his too. Just the sound of “wanna-play-with-the-hose?” sends him bolting upstairs.

How it works: I sit at the back corner of our tiny terrace (even having a shred of outdoor space to one’s name in New York City is a rare find and privilege) and I turn on the water spigot.

While pondering and/or listening to a podcast, I run the water back and forth as Ryder chases it along a 10-foot stretch of faded outdoor carpet passed down to us from the previous owners. After this becomes too predictable, I switch to playing hide-and-seek with the nozzle.

I slowly slide it behind my knee . . . then surprise him by spraying the water in random directions from behind my calf. Sometimes I imagine the nozzle is the head of a snake, and I have it look Ryder straight in the eyes. I wiggle it back and forth, zooming toward his nose. This drives him crazy! He cries with anticipation.

I watch the twinkle of uncertainty build in his eyes until he can’t stand the suspense, lunging forward to intimidate my hose-as-snake puppet, gently fending it off with his teeth, goading it to spray the water he knows is in there.

I love being the game master in these moments, controlling the flow, releasing it at uneven intervals along miscellaneous spots along the terrace, and changing the spray’s form by ticking the nozzle head from “center” to “shower” to “angle” and back. The ticking sound builds Pavlovian suspense for him too. What’s next? How to anticipate where it will go, when it will spray, and what patterns the water will make?

In the summer, I play these hose games with Ryder every morning after returning from his morning walk. This year, three years into this particular game and financially parched while navigating my own liminal dry spell, it occurred to me:

What if the universe—or even Randomness Itself for those less spiritually inclined—were playing with me in exactly this manner regarding the flow of money in my business?

Not in a mean-spirited way, but an “I know you love the game” kind of way. I imagine the mystical game master smiling, deciding when to “make it rain” or not, while I run around nervecitedly (as my friend Alex says), pretending it’s all real.

“Get it!” the loving universe tells me. “Jump! Way to go!”

Do I care if this is really what’s going on or not? No.

The thought itself now makes me laugh at myself on a daily basis. When I remember, I become the watcher, noticing how much I effort and chase, and how I stress when I forget that I chose—and continue choosing—to play this wily self-employment game.

This year, given Ryder’s love of balls and balloons, Michael had the idea to up the ante, ordering a battery-powered bubble gun from The Everything Store. The dissolving bubbles delighted our doggie, but not more than the gun itself, which made a strange churning sound while propelling soap orbs into existence.

He just had to have this gun! It made him wild with glee to chase it up, down, and around until he could no longer stand it, excusing himself to flop prostrate near the air conditioner while panting in a state of exhausted bliss.

Some people say that we’re living in a simulation, others that we’re immersed in a multiverse of swelling bubbles bobbing along “an eternally expanding and energized sea” of parallel universes. Ryder believes the hose and bubble gun are in control, and I imagine that I am.

Hah!

What if, instead, we can learn to enjoy our own experiences with these types of random reward intervals?

Not in the late-stage/cannibal capitalism sense, chasing arbitrary status-based goals, or getting sucked into the maw of dopamine-addiction-disaster-slot-machines by way of social media, but in exploring the spiritual and personal growth opportunities from working through financial fears and challenges.

We can devise infinite games at the intersection of life and creative work; trying, at least when we remember, to have some fun with the inherent tensions in securing our livelihood while also seeking aliveness.

I may be panting, out of breath, and in need of regular breaks, but I’m happier playing the money game than sitting on the sidelines. I secretly love the suspense. And I have a feeling—or at least I have fun imagining—that Cosmo (my dad’s term of endearment for the divine) loves watching us play, too.

One morning in September, as I listened to a new favorite song while playing with the hose, we were blessed with a double rainbow that I would have otherwise missed.

🎵 Green, green grass
Blue, blue sky
You better throw a party
On the day that I die

—“Green, Green Grass” by George Ezra x Sam Feldt

Sitting is the new smoking. Laying about the living room is boring. Even the coziest beds are only comfortable for so long.

When Ryder and I are out on the terrace surrounded by blue skies, we are breathing fresh morning air, splashing ourselves with cold water, watching birds and squirrels go about their daily business, and playing our favorite game to satisfied exhaustion.

We are tickled wondering where the flow might come from next, anticipating how much or how little will spray our way today.⁴

How thrilling.

❤️

1. For examples of such random sidewalk detritus, see Exhibit A—a photo I titled “In One Planter” when I encountered it in 2021:

One from this week, after extricating a discarded drumstick dangling out of Ryder’s mouth:

2. Speaking of infinite games: After Mayor Eric Adams appointed this first-ever rodent czar, the New York Sanitation department declared a war on rats, one snippet from the announcement speech became a viral TikTok meme and tshirt, “The rats don’t run this city. We do.” I can’t imagine you’d be interested in this, but for a related read check out Robert Sullivan’s Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants. The post-pandemic return of restaurants and outdoor dining exacerbated the problem—the New York City rat population is now estimated at three million, a 10% increase from a decade ago. That’s one rat for every three New Yorkers 🤯

3. The title of this post is borrowed from Lebanese author Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.

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4. And sometimes, there’s such an embarrassment of riches that you can’t even take it all in: