Reflecting on Sidney Gish’s “No Dogs Allowed” as an anxious and awkward 20-year-old

Your morning begins with a day-old cup of coffee. The bitter taste of hardwood and ruthlessly closed doors. You scrub the floorboards of your mind, try to rid yourself of the stench of your second overdue assignment, the third class missed, the fourth job rejection you received. You fail. You look at yourself in the mirror and barely recognize anything. Your thick, messy curls are pooling on your face. Your skin has grown to be cratered and cracked. The only familiar thing, it seems, are the nightmare circles under your tired eyes.

You can’t conceive how you are going to push through today. To drown out your thoughts, you put on your headphones. Your phone starts chiming: “Teaching a-a-a-a parakeet to talk is fun / But the old method took time / This record was specially designed to teach (to teach) / Any of these parakeets to talk” (1). And there is something about imagining yourself as a cheeky parakeet, learning to talk for the first time. It summons the all-too-familiar awkwardness of talking to your friends and makes it into something new. Instead of zoning out at the slightest “Hello?” and “How are you doing?” you remember the parakeet, slow down, and smile a little.  You stop tumbling down the rabbit hole of irrational fears, stop worrying about whether your friends secretly hate you. The absurdity of the image brings your insecurities to a halt. Allows you to exist in the moment.

You keep walking to campus, nodding your head to, “Two-faced bitches never lie / And therefore I never lie / Diagram this sin triangle for me tonight” (2). Inherently, you know that you are not “two-faced” and horrible for existing; you will never reach the level of hypocrisy that makes the world go around. Still, it is nice to reconcile with the twoness of yourself. The anxiety, the nagging double consciousness. What does it mean to understand your worth outside the expectations of others? What is a personality? The song answers, “What is your personality? / It’s the way you get along with other people around you” (3). You swallow the bitter realization. Your neatly decorated, gleefully glazed personality is not even your own. It is just another tool meant to help you fit in. It is a tool that has gone dull too, since it doesn’t make you feel any more likable. Just when you thought that people had taken enough from you, they take more.

So you try to understand how they do it. Yes, you study “Good Magicians” (4). You watch people take advantage of your people-pleasing tendencies, and study the subtle ways in which they ask you to orient your life around theirs. But most importantly, you watch how “Just with sleight of hand” people make the “whole room vanish” (5). You watch them exist in the center of everything and feel comfortable doing so. Internally, you are begging and pleading for them to “Take [your] greatest fear[s],” your anxieties, your fear of social interaction, and “make (make) it (it) disappear” (6). It doesn’t work.

You still think that there is a lot to learn from others. You have been studying people for your entire life. Picking up their likes and dislikes. Collecting their gestures and habits like postcards and coins. There is beauty to be found in the ways in which you reflect and resonate.

“On my phone, I got a list / 

Of food I ate and people I kissed,” (7)

But there is also an underlying sense of discomfort.

“And because of this I’m losing weight / 

And batting my eyes like siren bait / 

Just like a hate-watched series / 

I catalog life dearly.” (8)

You are almost like a ghost hanging over your head, watching yourself. All you need is a momentary slip-up, any indication that you are less than perfect to reaffirm your negative beliefs about yourself. Perfectionism is your worst enemy. “Unfortunately” you are “[your] own dog, [your] own fur companion” (9). You take yourself on a walk every day and in moments of insecurity you “give [your] head to the leash” (10). But you are also learning. Personal growth is never linear. Sometimes, you are able to let go, despite it all.

“I’ve called Persephone / 

By the name purse-a-phone / 

And Greek goddesses aren’t what /

You grab when leaving home.” (11)

The best way to battle everyday life as an anxious and awkward 20-year-old is to “mispronounce” and “mis-accent” (12). Allow yourself to make mistakes. Take life less seriously, and embrace the embarrassment. As Sidney Gish’s No Dogs Allowed comes to an end your thoughts are muddled and confused as ever. Yet, you feel a little bit more grounded in your own body, a little bit more comfortable with the uncomfortable.

“Attention passengers, we’ve now reached our destination. We hope you enjoyed the flight, now have a nice day” (13).

Article by Irem Kurtdemir

Featured image courtesy of Sidney Gish

1. “Bird Tutorial,” No Dogs Allowed. (2017) 
2. “Sin Triangle,” No Dogs Allowed. (2017) 
3. “Sin Triangle,” No Dogs Allowed. (2017) 
4. “Good Magicians,” No Dogs Allowed. (2017) 
5. “Good Magicians,” No Dogs Allowed. (2017) 
6. “Good Magicians,” No Dogs Allowed. (2017) 
7. “Mouth Log,” No Dogs Allowed. (2017) 
8. “Mouth Log,” No Dogs Allowed. (2017) 
9. “Impostor Syndrome,” No Dogs Allowed. (2017)
10. “Impostor Syndrome,” No Dogs Allowed. (2017)
11. “Persephone,” No Dogs Allowed. (2017)
12. “Persephone,” No Dogs Allowed. (2017)
13. “Impostor Syndrome,” No Dogs Allowed. (2017)