Riding with the Queen

So here is my co-pilot,my navigator,my passenger, my eyes-on-the road,my riding companion,
my girl, my queen,Pepper.
She loves to watch the road ahead.Not for her the traditional dog position with head stuck out of the window.She is up-front and ears back.What you can't see is the lake of drool that falls from those chops as we motor along.I have taken to putting a plastic bag over the seat and console because I was getting embarrassed as people climbed into the passenger seat only to see suspicious wet patches and puddles of mouth water pooling. So here we are off to park for a walk and a sniff and a poop and bark and a wag and lolling of tongue.Nothing could be better on a nice day.And while we were there check out the wicked wild life we found in a stream that feeds into the park's big lake. Snapping Turtle.

Big enough to pull down a duckling and mean enough to have a go at the parents too. Of course Pepper didn't notice. Too busy getting a sniffing high from a bunch of weeds growing at the edge of the stream.That Turtle was looking a little hungry though. Wonder if he's be ambitious enough for dog?

mad englishmen and dogs again

It was 90 degrees.Fahrenheit. 90 degrees. I didn't know my tongue could loll out so far.
But when it's 90 degrees and you have no sweat glands and a guy pulling on your leash like its
a brisk day in April your body does weird things. I like a good walk.I do. And when he got out the going-in-the-car leash I was all for it wagging my tail and everything. But man when I got out of that vehicle it was like walking into a fire.I was all ready to wrap it up after five minutes.Poop,pee,sniff sniff sniff ok I'm good let's go.But oh no. Mr Madman has to do the full thirty five minute loop and inch by inch that tongue of mine was sliding out and flopping from side to side. He wasn't the only idiot out there with a dog.There were others and I'll remember them.I'm goiung to give them a good growling at next time I see them. How I made it back I do not know.I do know I left a lake of drool all over the console of his car.Not that its going to stop him. The weather tomorrow is due to be as brutal as today and I know he's going to want to do it again. I shudder at the thought. Not that he looked like a cool dude out there.He was sweatin' ugly I tell you. Red face,patches on his t-shirt,perspiring big blobs of sweat water. Yuck. But better than seeing him with his tongue out I guess. Oh my goodness am I ever going to cool down. It was 90 degrees.I can't believe we went out in it.

sleeping dogs lie.

I'm tired. I'm very very tired. Can't you see that I'm tired? I'm also hungry. I know that I ate the whole bowl of food you put out an hour ago but that was an hour ago and now I'm hungry.I'm just too tired to do anything about it. So I'm just going to lie here until I see you move towards anything that could be food and then I'll get up but until then I'm just going to stay right here.This rug is really comfortable.And cool. It's very humid outside and rainy and yucky. I like it better here in the air conditioning.I think i might close my eyes now and dream about those dogs we passed in the park yesterday.Those two big ones.One was a German shepherd and the other was a Malamut. Both of them
combined wouldn't make a half-wit. They thought they were so big and bossy and bark bark bark. Pricks. They were typical dogs.Oh look at me pee up against this tree.I would have barked back at them but I was so tired after walking in that heat and then it was going to rain and thunder.I was glad we were heading for the car while those two jumped up fur bags were just starting out. I hope they got soaking wet. Nothing like seeing those kind of dogs soaking wet.They look pathetic.So anyway,I'm going to snooze a bit now.But if you go to make a sandwich I'll be right there.But right now I'm just going to close one eye.Just one eye. Because I'm sooooo tired.

Doggie down

She looks like a Damien Hirst art piece doesn't she?  #25 Mondrian goes to the dogs.
The poor girl is a victim of her medication. It seems like so many humans, dogs can have
seasonal allergy issues too. Living in a swampy jungle with all kinds of flowering seeding and
spore-throwing plants she got an attack of the itchies which started her licking her lady bits until they
were red raw. After a few Benjamins spent at the vets she is now on a course of Prednisone and the effects are quite dramatic. Had I bothered to google it I wouldn't have been so surprised but she immediately started eating like a horse,drinking bowl after bowl of water and peeing like the boy statue in that Belgian fountain. To offset the potential for rapid weight gain I've been walking her long and regularly which results in what you see in the picture above. Collapse. That is until someone,anyone touches a bowl,opens a drawer or the fridge door or heaven forbid tries to prepare or find food for themselves.Like a zombie brought back to life  she then leaps into an animated frenzy followed by a
visual attack of the brown eyed guilts beamed straight to your heart when you don't give her more food.
Its a look that looks pitiful and at the same time menacing.Like she's thinking `I'll wait until you're asleep and eat your heart right out of your chest you mean bastard!' Not that i believe she's really thinking that. At least I hope not. Hmmmm! Looking at the side effects of Predisone I do see that behavioral change is one of them.Unexpected behavior change at that. The rest of the side effects read like human drug side effects ,leaky discharge,erections lasting more than four hours and death. Not really. Well I guess yes to death. When did medicine become so life threatening? Uh-oh she's waking up. Where did I put those doggie snacks?

Driving Miss Crazy part 2

 I have created a car monster. Pepper is now addicted to traveling in my car. She recognizes  the harness I use to lock her onto the back seat and goes into a tail-wagging frenzy if I even touch it.
She leaps into the car and stands up on the front console like a Star Trek captain.The whining and
strange yowling has subsided only to be replaced by a waterfall of drool. Unfortunately for me she doesn't understand that I might need to use the car for things other than transporting her. So now I am forced to sneak out or be faced with doggy disapproval staring out of the window at me.And when we do go walking my previously tireless companion now has a limit of a half hour and no longer. At that time she starts pulling me in the direction of the car.If I decide to keep walking then she puts her brakes on and has to be dragged,claws scraping on the ground,which makes all the little kids in the park point at me like I'm a dognapper.And if I happen to be busy during the day and have no opportunity to take her out she will literally dog me around the house or sit near me with a weary chin on the ground expression until I cave in and go get the harness. I see people driving around with dogs and their pets all seem to like sticking their heads out of the window. That's what all dogs are supposed to do.And very cute. Why can't mine be cute like that? No she wants to be in the driving seat. I have created a monster.

Parking mad

 Pepper and I love parks. She adores the interesting smells on twigs, blades of grass, tree trunks. And she loves dropping a pee every 20 paces and a humungous poo just when

a nice lady is walking by. I love it for the nut balls I get to see. One day it was a guy

practicing juggling. throwing 6 and more balls in the air and dropping most of them. Continuously.A sort of Cirque de failure and quite entertaining.

Then on another day a buff young man and his girlfriend were acting very suspicious and I thought they were here for a mid-day make-out session but on my second occasion of walking past them I saw they had tied a thick rubber rope between two trees and were practicing tight rope walking. They were more successful that the juggler but not by much. And then there was the lady with the dogcart. She had a Doberman the size of a small horse harnessed in this little trap and was teaching the dog to respond to the reins before jumping in and trotting around the parking lot. And speaking of the parking lot there is the gentleman above who either has a very heavy chair that he can’t move any further than he has or he truly prefers sitting in the lot and not the park. A bugaphobe perhaps? Grass allergies? A love of asphalt? He’s not that far removed from the great British sunbather who sits along beach promenades the world over in all kinds of weather and wears a knotted handkerchief on his head for sun protection. When I see minor eccentrics like I see in the park I get all nostalgic for when I lived in Manhattan and would walk through Central Park which was more like central casting for `unusual’ people. I recall a woman with cat on a leash standing with her upraised arm beside the tree in whose branches little kitty has climbed and was now soundly sleeping .Then there was the red faced man with the boa constrictor which looked a little too tightly wound around his neck.There was the old woman with 2 Cockatoos on her shoulder who swayed like hula dancers maintaining their balance as she shuffled from garbage can to garbage can. And then there was the man with the Shetland pony causing one guy to ask me `what kind of dog is that?’ The sights didn't always involve animals.I remember being surprised by a man high up above me in a tree playing a violin.And by an older woman walking on her hands through a busy crowd and nobody giving her a second look.Or the time I saw a character dressed as Christ carrying a prop cross and being followed by three guys dressed as roman soldiers.Again nobody even blinking except me. My new park may have a lesser league of eccentrics but without them it just wouldn’t be worth the walk. And Pepper agrees.

Driving Miss Crazy

There she sprawls in the sunshine all relaxed and sleepy and butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. But just an hour before she was a very different animal. A crazy beast on wheels. And here’s the reason. I have a leash that clicks into my car seat belt lock so I can drive her places safely. Or so the theory goes. However the leash is a little too long or the distance from my back seat to my front seat is too short I don’t know. All I do know is that when she is clipped in she can stand on my car’s console and be right there at my shoulder. And that’s exactly what she does criticizing my driving by whimpers and mini yips and impeding my driving by leaning on me and licking my face. I don’t know if you have ever had a full facial dog licking while driving at 40 miles per hour but I can tell you its a little hazardous. The speed cop we passed didn’t look too impressed but thankfully he stayed in barracuda mode and let me go by. Every time I turned Pepper leaned on me and at 70lbs that’s a significant weight making my steering the slightest bit wonky. And then it’s more howls yowls and doggie equivalents to having a nervous Nellie passenger telling you to slow down, slow DOWN, SLOW DOWN!

The weird thing is that on our return journey –we had been to the park for a walk-

she just hunches down on the console and makes no noise at all and my face stays

unlicked. Crazy are the ways of the hound.

Dog walks man

Sometimes I am the Homo Sapien or as David Bowie put it The Homo Superior. Other times she is much more Sapien than me, and way more Superior.

I can explain.

I’ve been able to get Pepper to the local park several times recently and do a little more intensive walking. I felt it would be good for both of us. We were both very unused to this level of exercise. At first I was walking her into the ground and when she came home she would just collapse in a heap. But recently she has taken a one hour route march around the park in her stride. While I have been feeling the pain she has been unwilling to get in the car at the end of her walk and instead wanted to go around one more time.At least one more time. Walking with Pepper in the park is now man versus mutt in a battle till the first one drops. It started off as a stop go stop go stop go kind of thing with Pepper

peeing and spraying every five feet and at the end of it I couldn’t believe there was a drop of urine left anywhere in her body. Now while she still goes into a sniffing frenzy for the first twenty minutes or so she soon calms down and goes into hard core walking mode.

At first any and all other dogs got her back up and her bark on. Now when she’s in the walk state they are all invisible to her.Now when we come back its me who collapses into a heap and falls into an achy snoring coma. She slurps up her bowl of water and wanders around waiting to get back in the car.

This dog was definitely made for walking.

K-wow

Some mornings when we’re on our walk I imagine Pepper and me deep in conversation about stuff. A dog’s eye view of stuff and my view. What was on tv last night. What that woman on the corner has put out for trash. What the weather forecast is. This was one such chat we had this morning.

`So what’s like then? You know, a job? What’s it like?’

‘Well, it fills up your day and you go to it and they pay you money.’

`And what do you do at this job? Do you chase things?’

`My tail sometimes.’

`Here,are you trying to be funny?’

`No I was being like well I was trying to use it as a metaphor because I don’t actually have a tail.’

`So you chase your arse then?’

`It was a common figure of speech for going round in circles’

`What’s circles?’

`Really?’

`Nah I know what circles are. I know geometry.’

`Dogs don’t know geometry’

`What’s a dog?’

That’s what us humans call you dogs. We call you dogs. Or dawgs!  You aint nothin’ but a hound dawg.’

`We don’t call you humans.’

`No.? What do you call us then? Woof I guess.’ Pretty much every thing is  a woof to you.’

`Smeg. That’s what we call you. Smeg.  And we are K-wow from the royal house of

Wolfen. Ok Smeg, would you be good enough to pick my feces up now, there’s a good chap.

Frankenpepper

 

I have created a monster. The dry food that is and has been Pepper’s every day every meal ever since she was a pot bellied little puppy has been left untouched of late.She no longer rushes to scoff it down. She would sniff it and then shoot me a disparaging look before slinking off with a theatrical sense of disappointment. At first I didn’t respond. I’d leave it there until she was so hungry she had to eat it and I ignored the baleful stare I would get as I put food in my mouth. In the end though I caved in and to perk up her food I started adding scraps of uneaten chicken or beef or pork  chopping it up fine and mingling it in. For a while it was a genius move. Pepper was back eating with gusto and every meal ended with an empty bowl. Then she started siphoning out the added meat and leaving behind the dry food. And I chop that stuff up pretty fine so she must have the eating skills of an anteater. Now she’s started turning her nose up at some of the meat I’m adding. Turkey? OK if it’s just cooked . Day old? No thanks. And now every time I sit down to eat she’s like the starving face of a famine victim staring up me crying pitiably.I’m thinking of going cold turkey again. Or no turkey. No anything again.But I have this dream that I fall asleep and while I sleep she gnaws the flesh off my arm.When I wake up I have this bony skeleton arm dangling. And she looks at it and I see her lick her lips.I have created a monster.

Dog Sense

There’s something odd about the way Pepper is wired. If my neighbor opens his garage door an inch she goes instantly from a snoring sleep to a barking frenzy to protest his audacity.

If a deer is standing right outside the front window munching his way through my plants

like it’s the salad bar then she just carries on snoozing. My next door to the next door neighbor has an evil looking pudgy cat that I admit I would love to toss rocks at and it makes Pepper go off like a box of rockets. The other day we were taking a walk when a fox crossed the road in front of us and it was as though it was invisible. Stink bugs. She loves Stinkbugs. And with the weather slowly warming up more and more of them are emerging. They come from the back of the fireplace or the chimney or I don’t know where. She sees one and oh my goodness its like she’s found a long lost toy. She sniffs it and then tries to suck it up and flip it in the air. I end up scrambling with tissues to delicately pick it up and release it outside before it explodes into a cloud of horrible stench the way Stinkbugs do. Pepper then starts whining like I’m Mr. Cruelty throwing away her plaything. Her idea of what is a plaything is definitely a little wonky. When we out walking last week she found something in the grass that she started to prod and push and I thought great she’s found fresh deer poo a frog or a snail or something like that. It was actually something not like that at all but an 18-inch snake and a not too happy 18-inch snake at that. I yanked Pepper’s leash just in time to see the serpent hissing madly and slithering off into a pile of leaves. Her box of misfit toys lies untouched and only the fabric bone gets Pepper time. One time a bird flew into the house and led us on a merry chase all over until I cornered it and captured it by throwing a towel. As I carried the trembling thing to freedom Pepper was running alongside me jumping up and down trying to snatch it back. As it flew off with nary a glance backwards Pepper watched it with ever-increasing sadness. She gave a deep sigh looked reproachfully up at me and took herself off to go dream of my neighbor’s garage door.

Park n bark

The weather was unseasonably beautiful last weekend so we made a spur of the moment decision to jump in the car and go for a long walk at a nearby park.

Pepper always acts weird in cars. She is so excited to get in and then a few minutes into the ride she starts giving out a strange quiet but high pitched whine almost like she’s crying and I can never tell if it’s a happy whine or an unhappy one. I open all the windows on a theory that cabin pressure is uncomfortable for her even though we are flying at an altitude of maybe three feet with no turbulence in sight.

At the park she goes into a sniffing frenzy. It’s like she’s been dropped into the worlds

biggest collection of smells and she’s in sensory overload. She’s so excited her bladder and bowels can’t take it. Mr. Pickup is always on duty with a roll of hot pink bags.

She’s so excited she pays no attention to people. On our neighborhood walks she always

gets barky when strange people come into her view. Here in the park she’s also about 80% unaware of other dogs. Only when they notice and react to her does her back suddenly grow a hump of stand up fur to indicate she’d like to show some pooch or other who’s the top dog. She is so happy to be discovering new and different smells that she is marking territory like crazy. A drop of pee here drop of pee there. Here a drop. There a drop. It’s a wonder she’s got any left. Probably doesn’t. Probably just spraying pee scented air now. And then its time for home. Again she eagerly leaps into the car and off we go. 2 minutes later its wheeeeee! Whhhhhhheeeeeee! All the way home. And there she drinks a whole bowl of water and fall fast asleep.

Toy Story

Toys have a very short life with Pepper. To be told by Santa that you are destined to be

an indestructible play-bone for my little princess is to be told you are going on death row with a grisly death coming your way quicker than you ever imagined. She has had the toughest of the tough and rendered them to rags spilling their foam guts everywhere in a matter of minutes. Her toy box as of now is a pitiable sight that is the toy equivalent of a battle field hospital tent during the Crimean War. If they could speak we could never sleep for the heart-rending groans of the torn and tattered bodies that gave themselves in service so gallantly. Last week her longest living indestructible squeaking bone gave up the ghost at last. In a frenzy of chewing scratching tearing and stretching the weakened fabric fell like the walls of Jericho. Pepper is never gracious in her victory. Honor would be to allow these victims a quick and merciful consignment to the trash. She is however a dog without honor. She rips out their entrails gleefully and parades their lifeless carcasses around and around like Achilles gloating in the death of Paris. When what is left of the toy is taken from her and placed in the kitchen trash she takes up a position in front of the trash drawer and cries. These are not cries of mourning and regret. They are the cries of an enemy who wants to dig up your grave and build a cage with your bones as Warren Zevon once sang. If re-incarnation is our way of journeying toward the light of spiritual perfection please don’t let me come back as a chew toy for Pepper. That fate is reserved only for the baddest of the bad.

Pepper le Phew

Oh what fearful beasties roam around the walls of my nighttime home?

I know we’re in for trouble when the garage door rises and Pepper shoots out like a half starved greyhound out of the traps snarling and barking with the hairs along her back standing up like bristles ( add Rhodesian Ridgeback to the lineage) and pulling the leash so hard I can hear her chest wheeze and my arm is wrenched painfully out of its socket. Of course I can’t see a damn thing but she obviously does and it demands to be intimidated by her. Usually it’s a deer that lopes off into the woods just far enough to be safe but near enough to piss Pepper off mightily. One night it was a Raccoon that sauntered up a tree to do the same thing. Tonight I couldn’t figure out what it was.

It could have been Sasquatch for all I know or illegal hunters. They have been known to wander a little too close to the house, which is both dangerous and criminal.

Pepper wouldn’t give it up. 

She was whining and growling and growl-whining. Eventually I pulled her away and off we trotted to do the usual business of the night.As we came back and got within 10 yards of the garage I had no problem figuring out what it was. The smell was unmistakable. Skunk. Great! My neighbor had his previous dog, an old lab, skunked pretty good one time and told me what a pain it was to get the smell out with tomato sauce. I think he said sauce; it could have been tomato juice.

Whatever, it took a trip to the supermarket and lots and lots of the stuff. As we walked in

through the hazy cloud of Skunkus Butjuicious I thanked heaven that I wasn’t driving to some 24 hour Kwikee Mart. And you’d think that her majesty with her super-refined canine nose gear would be pained by the smell. The opposite. She looked like she smelled roses. Dogs are strange beasts for sure.

Dishing on the dawg

I’ve said that Pepper is a princess of indeterminate lineage. A sniffer, a shepherd, a hunter, and now 

I have discovered another limb on her family tree, a dishwasher retriever. Like Pavlov ringing a bell all I to do is open the dishwasher door and she’s there in a snap with her tongue darting in and out like an ant-eater as she goes after any and all food fragments. I worry that one of these days I’ll decapitate her by slamming the door on her head in my hurry to stop her eating leftover curry or onion gravy. She can be asleep like a log in another room but between the click of the handle and opening of the door she’s there alert and in full food siphoning mode. Ever since going hard core on the food issues and trying to keep her to prepared dog food she has become extra attentive to any human food opportunity. If I take a knife out of the kitchen drawer she appears in anticipation of a food moment. It’s the same when I open the fridge door or anything wrapped in tinfoil. Its not as though she is suffering. Her weight hasn’t changed. But she’s still pissed off about the food thing. Often she will ignore the kibble all day and then eat it out of desperation at bedtime. Now that the American Kennel Club has recognized the Tree Walking Coon Hound how long before the Bosch Goal Hanging Grub Hound gets its day in the arena?

Dogmatism

When little hair took me out this morning he tried having an existential discussion

comparing and contrasting Utopia, Dystopia and Erewhon. His point of view was,

and it may have been triggered by the brutally cold weather we had over the past

few days, that Utopia was always sunny and warm where Dystopia was always bleak

mid-winter. I had to agree that dystopian movies like 1984 or the Hunger Games or The Lion, 

the Witch and the Wardrobe do have a grey leaden look about them that makes you feel cold and uncomfortable in a shivery way. They make me want to seek out the shaft of icy sunlight that warms up as it comes through the front room window and creates a suntrap to snooze in. And one never hears of Hawaiian dystopia its true. The Lotus-eaters were not in some bleak muscovite terrain.  So if Utopia is the opposite of dystopia it would be logical that Utopia would be warm and garden of eden-ish.  Erewhon is difficult to put a finger on. That could be because I don’t actually have fingers. And I’m not that familiar with Samuel Butler’s story. But from the Cliff notes I understand it looks like Utopia but is all FUBAR. While he was prattling on in the god-help-me pretentious vein I was sniffing the traces of a dog-related prowler. Not a wolf. Maybe a fox. Could be a coyote. The urine was a few hours old and I think I have a little cold coming on. I have to be on the alert. Little hair doesn’t get these scents at all. All high and mighty talk but no

great sensory perception. So tell me again how his tribe become the higher order mammal?

Fingers?

A dog's tale

The little hair took me out this morning. I could tell he was cold. As I tasted the wind

and read the scents that lay captured in the ground and on the leaves all he could do was shiver. I do not feel the cold as he does and I was enjoying being out. Now don’t get me wrong, he is not an unpleasant companion on these rambles. I try to be discrete when I excrete but he always makes a fuss about picking it up. I would rather it stay there as a scent beacon to all the animals around her to tell them who I am. I lay down my urine for the same reason but he doesn’t pick that up. Inconsistent behavior. That is the big thing I have observed from living with my little hair family. We of the waving tail race read these signals and get confused. I saw the long horned ones with the white tails staring at me through the trees this morning. If I did not have the constraints of the leash that little hair ties around me I could chase them away. But I am confined to only bark and when I do that he tells me shush. I’m still upset with him about my food. I eat what he puts out only when I know I have absolutely no alternatives. I follow him wherever there is a chance for crumbs or scraps and I will not be made to feel guilty. We who walk on four must get the best whenever we can.I feel the air crisp and blue on my tongue and I know the snow will not come now. I wish I could tell him this but our communication is quite limited. He makes a noise that must be the name he gives me. I recognize it because he says it frequently. It is time for us to return to our home. I know I just woke up but I could use a good nap.