Canis lupus familiaris

She that is called Daisy

She that is called Lola

Daisy is a murderer.  I keep an eye on her.  She makes feeble attempts to keep it under wraps, but her obvious blood lust constantly betrays her.

Lola is entirely too needy, although she cloaks this personality trait in the garb of pacifism.  Reach for her, and she rolls over and puts her hands up.  "Non violence non violence!" her eyes seem to plead.

They are both quick to offer reassuring licks to the hand, arm, leg, or face.  This would be more endearing if they didn't spend all day eating turds out of the cat box.  

They are not my children.  They are my dogs.  I try not to get that sentimental over them, because they are essentially ridiculous creatures, whose well-being is constantly being undermined by their lack of common sense.

I recognize that young people often acquire pets as a way of testing their parenting mettle.  This decision may not be made consciously, but owning a dog or cat certainly taps into a primitive nurturing instinct.  Either that, or it reassures one that such an instinct does not exist within them.

I try to find it.  To hold it, and caress it.  I welcome Lola onto the arm of my chair for closeness and companionship, and just when I feel a tiny pulse in the primitive adoration part of my brain, she turns her face to me, eyes dewy with affection, and exhales a deep slow cloud of utter despair directly into my eyes, nostrils, and mouth.  A logical conclusion of eating dog food, dirt, garbage, and feces is breath that could daze a moose.  I can't begrudge her this breath.  It makes perfect sense.

I try to relate to my dogs.  I sit with them, and discuss the news of the day.  Daisy's ears flare up like the bat I'm convinced had some role in siring her.  She cocks her head from side to side, not unlike the anchors on the local news, as if to let me know that she knows what I'm going through.  That somehow, deep inside, she gets it.

And then she suddenly starts chewing on her genitals.

Both dogs have a way of sneaking underfoot, most often while you are transferring a massive steaming pot of pasta from the stove to the sink.  You yell at them to go away, and they do for a moment, but then soon come crawling back in meek supplication, apologizing by repeating the original offending action ad nauseum.

I have spent 19 days of my life standing outside, waiting for Lola to defecate.  Seriously, I calculated it.  She labors over it - the spot - the magical spot - where she must place her little fetid pile.  She spins, and spins, and spins, and spins towards the inevitable release.  She begins to crown and then, suddenly, it reenters her body like an elementary school bully slurping up the line of spit they are dangling over your helpless face as she reconsiders her placement.  "Nope, not good enough, but I think that spot over there...oh boy!!!"  And the entire process begins again.  As I stand shivering, ankle deep in snow, wondering how my life ever came to this.

Daisy has a brilliantly calculated and sadistic habit of gauging her speed of forward locomotion by the level of emotion humans are focusing on her.  It works in precise reverse proportion.  The faster I want her to go, the slower she moves.  If I loudly suggest her forward motion, she slows to a full stop and lays down, utterly defeated.  It is genius.

When I am fully dressed, warm and ready to face a trip outside with them, they evacuate their waste quickly and efficiently.  When I am dressed only in shorts and a t-shirt, shoeless and shivering, hopping up and down on the porch at 6am in the dark, imploring them to make a quick resolution, they immediately run as fast as they can down the driveway, towards whatever oblivion lies in store there.

When they find decaying food in a pile of garbage on the ground, they bury their heads and feast as fast as they can without regard for taste, texture, or even general suitability for consumption.  When I toss them actual fresh doggy treats, they appraise them only fleetingly, ultimately ignoring them, standing steadfast and staring up at me as if to say, "Really?  That's all you got?"  I suppose there is no point feeding sirloin to a creature that considers feces to be gourmet cuisine.  "In the mood for Mexican?  There's a little chihuahua just moved in next door!  German?  Well, there's that one-eyed German Shepherd down the road.  Are you in the mood for a road trip?"

There is a certain undeniable surreal humor to being a dog owner.  In the right light, it can be hilarious to feel your life slowly slipping away as you focus all of your mental energy on willing a dog to poop.  And to feel a real and palpable elation when you finally spot it start to make its slow, steaming descent from the dog's body towards the ground.  

I need to keep reminding myself of this.  I need to remember to laugh, long and loud and clear.  Ha ha ha.  There.  Better already.

Mostly I view my dogs with a sort of cautious wariness that borders on nausea and unbridled dismay.  And, if it's true that pets are often a subconscious preparation for children of the bona fide and human variety, I feel that my chances of being an exemplary parent are bleak.  If finding a small, dry canine butt nugget in the middle of the floor is enough to make me light-headed with a black and fathomless despair similar to the feeling I get while watching golf on television, how could I possibly handle finding the walls smeared in shit by a little Picasso (Poocasso?) in training?  

And unlike dogs who retain a certain childlike innocence throughout their lives, humans have a way of progressing beyond the diapers phase and towards all manner of more grown-up delights.  Such as furious teenage rebellion, drug experimentation, dicatorship, genocide, murder, and worse - sex!  It's like they say, "the dependent you know is preferable to the one who will eventually steal your car and dehumanize the populace of a small Asian nation."  Could I handle being the father of the next Pol Pot?

I guess, in that light, I am pretty fortunate to have two small dependents that merely shred the flesh of my leg in furious, desperate displays of greeting every time I walk through the door rather than having a son that literally shreds people's faces like Freddy Krueger.  That have voices like ice picks sent straight through my ear into my brain, rather than having actual ice picks that they plunge into the chests of men they have tied to the bed in light S&M play, like Sharon Stone.  That are of a species in which it is perfectly acceptable for females to have full and unrepentant beards, and that chase their tails with abandon rather than chasing lovers down the street with a chainsaw.

They are not my children.  They are my dogs.  

Viva la perros!  

Lies

I went through my Woody Allen phase in high school.  Over the course of about two years, I probably watched about thirty movies he wrote, directed, or was somehow attached to.  I didn't love all of them, but I loved enough of them that I would (and still do) defend the artistic merit of his oeuvre to those legions of people who "hate Woody Allen."

In the 80's, those haters would have based their feelings on his work itself.  It's an acquired taste, and I certainly understand it's not for everyone.  But by the time I made it to high school, Woody Allen had entered the Michael Jackson "I hate his entire body of artistic work because of the decisions he has made in his personal life" arena.  I didn't have lots of people clamoring to take this cinematic journey with me - mine was a solitary appraisal. 

The mid-90's wasn't a particularly bitter or dark period in Allen's filmography, although it can logically be assumed that in his life things were a mess.  He truly seemed to bury himself in his work, never relenting from his usual one or two films per year schedule.  Although I haven't seen it in years, one of the movies that sticks with me the most from this period is 1997's "Deconstructing Harry."

The film is one of the most furious of the director's career, a personal examination of life versus art, and one of the finest dissections of the artistic process and the solace it can provide its creator.  Often described as a cross between Allen's own "Stardust Memories," Fellini's "8 1/2," and Bergman's "Wild Strawberries" (which the film's structure is an obvious allusion to), it manages to transcend these inspirations and become something that (especially for the usually guarded Allen) comes across as very raw and personal.

"Harry's" ultimate conclusion is that the main character functions better in art than in life, and what is art but a carefully wrought illusion; a sort of refinement and distortion of truth?  And isn't a distortion of truth also known as a lie?  Art cannot help but lie.  Even art based on truth - based on personally experienced events, cannot help but be viewed through the fun-house mirror of human perception.  

It seems that the line between art and life has blurred to the point where they are interchangeable.  If a film like "Harry" is one man's refinement of his own emotions towards an ultimate goal of catharsis, carefully guarding the truth and constructing his house of cards with slanted fragments, things like Facebook (or this blog) are the exact same beast, taken out of the realm of Hollywood and existing within the lives of wholly average people.

We have been given a chance to artfully arrange other people's perceptions of our lives in ways hitherto impossible.  Some of us worry about it more than others, but even the "edgy" revelations that sometimes populate the everyday digital realm are little more than elements within the facade we so carefully construct around ourselves.  I could post on Facebook a carefully edited picture of myself and it would convey a certain aspect of who I want people to believe I am.  But is it not just another card in my carefully constructed house of lies?

Inevitably, the house of cards comes tumbling down, and we are left exposed.  It is within these shocked moments that the true character of any person really exists.  We either boldly and nakedly, with nothing left to hide, pour everything forth in a mad rush of truth, or we (more commonly) frantically scramble to pick up the pieces and start rebuilding our walls.  We deny, and we lash out.  Some of us commit suicide.  

The early 90's were years of scandal for Woody Allen, and those things, seemingly put to rest, have recently been unearthed, the wounds opened anew.  Like back then, it boils down to the word of two people, one claiming, the other denying.  They can't both be telling the truth.  One of them is lying.  Boldly, solemnly, "aww shucks I can't believe this is happening" lying.  As is always the case in these situations, the only people who will ever know the truth are the two people directly involved.  

When it is revealed that the quiet man down the street has been collecting human bodies in his house, feasting upon their flesh, and making decorative furniture coverings out of their skin, it is the common thing for people to say, "I had no idea!  He seemed so normal!"  But at this point in my life, I am beyond the point of being surprised by such revelations, as my understanding of human nature is that it is almost completely founded on illusion, both the ones we present to others, and the ones we present to ourselves.

This understanding only escalates my inherent lack of trust in people.  I try to overcome it, and it's not to say I don't still enjoy people - I am fascinated by the shards of truth that reside in the artifice, and I enjoy trying to ferret them out and put them together.  It's impossible, but I can't help doing it.  

It's also why I have never been one of those people who "hates Woody Allen."  I still enjoy his work, and support his right to make it.  There are always a thousand different angles to the truth, and any one person's perception of it cannot hope to encapsulate them all.  If I chose to completely avoid people with horrible secrets in their hearts, or skeletons in their closets, I would never be able to leave my house.

If art and life are one and the same, I suppose it seems fair and logical that both are open to critical evaluation.  But I have to stop short.  Everyone has the right to create art and send it out to the world - art that they control, that they are able to polish and which reflects the particular sentiment they are trying to convey, however powerfully or successfully.  That is the province of the gifted, to create art that helps us better understand ourselves and the world.

But life, however carefully and artfully we try to arrange it, has an all-too-human way of failing us.  Of slipping out from between our fingers when we least expect it.  As Bob Dylan said, "Even the president of the United States sometimes has to stand naked."  And when that happens, some of us point and laugh, some of us reject the situation outright through heady condemnation, and others of us are overwhelmed by waves of empathy.  We allow the person the courtesy of their dignity, as we would hope others would do the same for us.

For it is not only emperors and presidents that sometimes have to stand naked.  Sometimes, so do we all.