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.