{"id":5752,"date":"2020-01-26T14:56:25","date_gmt":"2020-01-26T22:56:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/?p=5752"},"modified":"2020-01-26T14:56:26","modified_gmt":"2020-01-26T22:56:26","slug":"dogs-reigning-in-my-mind-part-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/meditations\/dogs-reigning-in-my-mind-part-19\/","title":{"rendered":"Dogs Reigning in My Mind (Part 19)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

Rocky trained with Butkus, his bulldog,\na gift from Adrian, and that was his secret weapon against Apollo\nCreed. I once knew an old dog who lumbered himself down to the ocean\nevery morning at dawn. I would pass him on the trail and my dogs\nalways left him alone. One day the\nold dog wasn’t on the trail and I later found out from his owner that\nhe died on the beach. In the Terminator<\/em>, only dogs can\ndetect the terminators. That’s true in true life as well, once you\nidentify the terminators in your life. A dairy farmer once threatened\nto kill Sonny because she would occasionally meander over to his\nproperty because of her crush on his cattle dog. Had he done so, I\nwould have spent a considerable amount of time fucking his life up,\nall non violently of course. He would have never known what hit him.\nIn the movie John Wick<\/em>, Keanu Reeves plays a hitman who begins\nhis reformation into a decent human being when a Russian thug murders\nhis puppy and then he kills everyone evil in site. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the course of writing this book\nabout dogs, I often pick up Dog Years <\/em>by\nGerman novelist Gunter Grass, continue reading, and try to make sense\nof it as a novel and dog book. So far, and I am nearing the end, I\nhave failed, but intuit in these pages of dense and elliptical prose,\nthat something profound about dogs lingers there. I find it\nimpossible to summarize the contents of Dog Years<\/em>,\nso this riff from the inside jacket will have to suffice: \u201cThe\nVistula, with its cargo of history, runs through their exploits. So\ndoes the dog Senta, who will whelp Harras, who in turn will sire the\nblack shepherd Prinz, the Fuhrer’s favorite dog…the Dog\nYears<\/em> are now in full swing;\nthey lead right into the war, up to the moment when Prinz deserts his\nmaster because even a dog can have enough…\u201d Hitler was so awful\nhis favorite dog deserted him. But that’s not what happened in real\nlife. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, what about\nthe song \u201cDog Years\u201d by Rush? It is both a preposterous and\npoignant rock song about dogs, but really more about humans. The\nlyrics go:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In\na dog\u2019s life
A year is really more like seven
And all too\nsoon a canine
Will be chasing cars in doggie heaven<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nIt\nseems to me
As we make our own few circles \u2019round the sun
We\nget it backwards
And our seven years go by like one<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nDog\nyears\u2014It\u2019s the season of the itch
Dog years\u2014With every\nscratch it reappears<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nIn\nthe dog days
People look to Sirius
Dogs cry for the moon
But\nthose connections are mysterious<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nIt\nseems to me
While it\u2019s true that every dog will have his\nday
When all the bones are buried
There is barely time to go\noutside and play<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nDog\nyears\u2014It\u2019s the season of the itch
Dog years\u2014With every\nscratch it reappears
Dog years\u2014For every sad son of a bitch
Dog\nyears\u2014With his tail between his ears

I\u2019d\nrather be a tortoise from Galapagos
Or a span of geological\ntime
Than be living in these dog years<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nIn\na dog\u2019s brain
A constant buzz of low-level static
One sniff\nat the hydrant
And the answer is automatic<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nIt\nseems to me
As we make our own few circles \u2019round the\nblock
We\u2019ve lost our senses
For the higher-level static of\ntalk<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nNotice the\nmention of Sirius. Rush got dogs. Rush worshiped Sirius. God is Dog.\nDog is God. \n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rocky trained with Butkus, his bulldog, a gift from Adrian, and that was his secret weapon against Apollo Creed. I once knew an old dog who lumbered himself down to the ocean every morning at dawn. I would pass him on the trail and my dogs always left him alone. One day the old dog […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5753,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[203,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bonnie-and-clyde-files","category-meditations","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5752"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5755,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5752\/revisions\/5755"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}