Dogs Raining (reigning) in My Mind 9

What’s with the phrase, in the doghouse? I’ve never understood it. I suppose it means a human is consigned to an outdoor doghouse, removed from the warmth of the parlor and cigars and cognac, and doesn’t get to enter into corporate decision-making that ruins the world. I’ll take that doghouse any day of the week over a playpen where someone barely human human (with his non-sidekick dog at his side) writes code for programs and apps that enrich corporations and deepen our collective dehumanization.

The 2008 film Wendy and Lucy is indisputably the saddest dog movie of all time where the dog doesn’t die. In the film, a homeless woman, Wendy, loses her dog, Lucy, and Lucy is eventually picked up by animal services and taken to a shelter, where she is adopted. Wendy eventually tracks Lucy down at her new owner’s wonderful home, and decides to leave Lucy there because she’ll have a better life. Interestingly enough, a woman, Kelly Reichardt, directed this film, which makes perfect sense, because certainly no man could with the level of emotional skill that Reichardt did. I want her to direct the film of this book.

Years ago, a woman wrote a harrowing account in the New Yorker of adopting a vicious dog from an animal shelter. Basically, the dog ruined her life. A short time after the adoption, her female partner moved out of their New York City apartment, she couldn’t have anyone over because the dog would try to maul anyone who did, she struggled with the leash when she took it for a walk, her career went down the drain, and she verged on a total nervous breakdown. Her partner, friends and family begged her to have the dog euthanized because all attempts at training and loving the dog had failed. She refused. She was certain she could heal the dog. She would not give up on a dog that had suffered extreme torture at the hands of human beings. I no longer recall how the story ended, but it felt like the woman made it more about her than the dog. She had transformed herself into a tortured human being (probably dredging up some horribly latent personal trauma) but was in fact sententiously torturing the dog with her human doggedness to act with kindness to save a sentient being. The ultimate act of kindness she could have administered was putting the dog down so it could rest in peace at long last. The dog’s last breath would have finally brought her the compassion every sentient being deserves. To euthanize in this case was to save a sentient being.

I once was waiting naked in bed waiting for a woman with green fingernails and green eye shadow to join me. It was to be our first time having sex. She was changing into something playfully pulled from her closet. I imagined it as something sexy, perhaps even green-colored to match the rest of her aesthetic. She came out wearing the maroon jersey of Michael Vick, the professional football player who ran a dog fighting operation and killed his dogs with pistol shots to the head. I got up, got dressed, and walked out. I can’t recall if I said anything. Perhaps I barked. Raymond Carver wrote a poem called “Your Dog Dies” that really isn’t about a dog dying. It’s about a poet writing a poem about writing a poem about a dog dying. The poet is writing and then hears the hectoring scream of a woman but keeps writing and the poem ends with him wondering how long can this go on. Carver’s poem is a pithy masterpiece of the, “I’m-writing-about-dogs-but-it’s-really-about-how-menacing-humans-are” school of dog writing. I like to believe my book about Bonnie and Clyde does not belong to that school. A curious thing about me: I don’t have a tattoo of a dog on my body. I do have one of a cougar and geese. Strange.

I am writing this in the Year of the Dog, my year of the dog. This is no accident.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)