Dogs Raining (reigning) in My Mind Part 3

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The other day Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Crystal Blue Persuasion” came on the radio. As the song played, I rewrote the lyrics into a shelter dog song. I rather like how it turned out.

Look over yonder
What do you see?
A dog imprisoned,
Most definitely

A new day is coming, ooh, ooh
People are changing (finally)
Ain’t it beautiful, ooh, ooh
Crystal dog persuasion

Better get ready to see the mutt
Love, love is the answer, ooh, ooh
And he’s not all right

So don’t you give up now, ooh, ooh
So easy to find
Just look to your shelter
And open your mind

Crystal dog persuasion, mmm, mmm
Canine vibration
Crystal dog persuasion
Crystal, dog persuasion

The Grinch’s dog Max is my favorite cartoon dog and the brandy-drinking St. Bernard in a Warner Brothers cartoon is second. I like Ziggy’s dog and The Underdog, too, the latter an unassuming shoeshine dog who transforms himself into a superhero when the call arises. In my youth, I would become The Underdog and save this and that, and now here in middle age, I have become one again, but not a superhero, although mostly invisible, but a man trying this time to save himself with the help of real underdogs. Perhaps I need to don a costume.

Whenever I encounter a Trump supporter with a dog, we talk only about dogs and get on well. What is the secret sauce of that? The cutest dog in cinematic history is the white puppy in Apocalypse Now, the one Lance rescues from a Vietnamese junk after American soldiers killed everyone on the boat my mistake. The puppy later accompanies Captain Willard and Lance (the latter soaring on LSD) on a spooky mission. One of my favorite dog scenes in movies occurs in WC Fields’ The Poppy, a bizarre opium-hazed comedy that features a stray terrier rescued by Fields accompanying him into a bar, sampling some whiskey, and then talking to Fields! Fields sells the dog to the bartender for $20 and the dog never talks again. The greatest inspirational speech employing dogs (mutts) as a metaphor was delivered by Bill Murray in Stripes. What’s with the phrase, “capitalist running dog”?

Dogs held in animal shelters receive better succor than the men and I did in a county jail on the Oregon Coast. They wouldn’t even let in shelter dogs for us to pet when that petting might have saved a few of the inmates. They did, however, let ministers in to preach. I have a fundraiser idea for an animal shelter: hold a dog and cat-themed craft fair in around the shelter and require all vendors to sell only dog and cat-themed crafts! A dog made it into space before a human. Why wasn’t there a dog on Jim Kirk’s Enterprise? Spock desperately needed one. He would have learned everything important about being a human via a dog. What is the greatest piece of art depicting a dog? Years ago, I met a large old man living in a house along a river who had a weimaraner. He owned two Lincoln Town Cars, one that he drove alone and the other he drove with the dog. The weimaraner had chewed up the entire dash and all the upholstery in the dog Town Car and it was the strangest-looking interior of an automobile I have ever seen. I once met a man on the beach while walking with Sonny, who turned out to be a former Mafioso who was now in the witness protection program. He invited me to his house for whiskey and to meet his old dog. We talked of dogs and his previous life and drank whiskey and the more he drank the more Italian he sounded. He told me he trusted me because of the way I cared for my invalid husky.

It occurs to me that I have dog treats in all the pockets of my coats and corduroys. Winston Churchill described his fits of deep depression as his “black dog.” I don’t understand the reason. Black dogs are the antithesis of depression.

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Dogs Raining (reigning) in My Mind Part 2

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If a dog dies of neglect in a back yard, does the neighbor hear the sound or was the television turned up too loud? In the movie Wall Street, Gordon Gekko utters many immortal lines such as “greed is good,” and “you’re not naive enough to think we live in a democracy are you?” But his golden line for immortality is, “If you need a friend, get a dog.” Whenever I find myself driving behind a dog or dogs untethered in the back of a moving pickup, I immediately turn so I don’t have to watch such obscene treatment of dogs. I once berated a neighborhood boy into crying after he told me his untethered puppy died jumping out of the back of a moving pickup. I played with the puppy and let that kid have it. I desperately wanted two jobs this past year: grant writer for a homeless shelter and grant writer for an animal shelter. I was denied both jobs because of my crime. The animal shelter wouldn’t even let me walk the dogs. I was deemed unfit to help homeless humans and homeless dogs. There should be a word for this type of exclusion and perhaps one day I’ll invent it when I see a homeless man walking with his dog. Those without a dog can cast the first stick to a shelter dog. Tramps like me, baby I was born to dog.

The saying goes: over time, a long time, a dog and a dog owner’s faces begin to resemble one another. It might have been incredibly, Rainier Maria Rilke in his 1910 novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. He wrote:

Of course, since they have several faces, you might wonder what they do with the other ones. They keep them in storage. Their children will wear them. But sometimes it also happens that their dogs go out wearing them. And why not? A face is a face.

I once asked participants in a faces-themed writing workshop a question. Did my face resemble Sonny’s. I asked because virtually everyone in the class had either met Sonny or seen her face as a photograph accompanying my books, columns and posts about our madcap adventures down Oregon Coast beaches. She once had the most famous dog face in Oregon. She had more words written about her than any dog in the history of Oregon and here I am, still going strong. A brief silence ensued after the question. I got nervous. I couldn’t predict my reaction. I asked a question of an an audience that I didn’t know the answer. You’re not supposed to do that in legal matters or in literary venues. The answer must be known. Who wants to ask questions when the answers are already thought to be known? Most people. I found that out. Does anyone want to look like their dog? Is it a sly compliment or a veiled insult? Then Susan spoke: “Yes, your face did…it was the eyebrows.” I felt overjoyed when I heard this. A “dog face” is an old military term to describe a US Army infantryman. I have no idea of its origin, but I guess I sort of like the ring to it.

Dogs don’t stray from conversations with their phones. A stray dog can help a human astray find direction. The only video slot machine I will play is the husky game. I’ve never won. I used to play tennis with my dogs. We went through a lot of balls. Jim Harrison is the greatest American writer on the subject of dogs but he never wrote a dog book. His characters often cooked for their dogs. After reading this, I often barbecued steaks for my dogs and only the best cuts, too. Is there a great rock song about dogs? Harry Nilsson wrote “Me and My Arrow” and it’s a great song, but not really a rocker. The Rolling Stones wrote a song called “Bitch” but it is not about a dog. There is rock band in Port Orford, Oregon called Antique Dog but their eponymous 1999 CD strangely does not contain a dog song. Blake Shelton’s “I’ll Name the Dogs” is the cheesiest, phoniest country music song in recent memory. Why does the woman get to name the babies and the man gets to name the dogs? Why not get drunk on sangria and throw up a telephone book and see where it opens? That’s more country than this song. I wrote a country western song called “I Had to Put My Dog Down, Wish it Had Been My Ex Girlfriend.” (A true story.) It’s a sure fire hit for Taylor Swift and she is welcome to record it. All share of my profits will go toward animal shelter dogs. I also wrote a story titled “Christmas Jack” where a neglected boy steals a neglected dog off a chain on Christmas Eve. It would make a great animated film.

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Dogs Raining (reigning) in My Mind Part 1

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John Steinbeck wrote: “I need a dog pretty badly. I dreamed of dogs last night. They sat in a circle and looked at me and I wanted all of them.”

I’ve been dreaming of dogs a lot lately, almost every night. Here is some of what I’ve been dreaming. Dogs rain (reign) in my mind:

Dogs apprehend for merriment: humans apprehend for profit. Dogs don’t desert humans in crisis; humans desert humans in crisis. If a dog’s face adorned a unit of US currency, who is that dog? If a dog’s face did adorn a unit of currency, we will have become a much better nation and possibly not end up intestate. Dogs can detect cancer in humans, but not the cancer that humans’ metastasize into the natural world. Dogs do judge—but only people who neglect or beat them. Humans don’t need a reason to judge. Humans snort and shoot meth; dogs provide succor for meth humans. President Obama’s biggest policy mistake was not adopting a shelter dog. He could have changed the course of modern American dog history by taking the First Lady and the girls to a DC shelter and having the girls pick out an abused mutt. Instead, he got a fancy breed and didn’t use his bully pulpit. He didn’t play politics when he had the winning hand of a straight dog flush and was the only player at the table. General George Washington returned General Howe’s dog to him after the dog escaped during the battle of Germantown. Washington included the following note to Howe: “General Washington’s compliments to General Howe. He does himself the pleasure to return to him a dog, which accidentally fell into his hands, and by the inscription on the collar appears to belong to General Howe.”

It occurs to me that I have dog treats in all the pockets of my coats and corduroys. Winston Churchill described his fits of deep depression as his “black dog.” I don’t understand the reason. Black dogs are the antithesis of depression.

Sonny always went nuts when she heard Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker,” I used to dance with my dogs, but to one song only: the opening track of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, “Rocks Off.” As a kid, I had a dog who shit in the house one time in his life; it was on a Zenith floor console during the President Ford’s State of the Union address. I met a dog in an Oregon tavern who fetched cans of Hamm’s for humans from behind the bar, but only Hamm’s. Budweiser was out. I once saw a team of two dogs pull a man in a wheelchair into an Oregon Coast tavern. He ordered three hamburgers and they ate them right there. There is a tavern dog on the Oregon Coast who fishes for salmon in the middle of a creek. One time, he caught a steelhead and brought it up to the kitchen and the cooked it up for supper. There is a large poodle who sits on a stool in an Oregon tavern and salutes you with his paw when you enter. The best illustrated logo utilizing the image of a dog I have ever seen is from the Mad Dog Country Tavern in Newport, Oregon. In the design, a long-eared goofy mutt with his tongue hanging out is driving a speed boat with his left paw and hoisting a frothy mug of beer with his right. I used to rake leaves with my childhood dog and then we played football in the piles. He would follow me to grade school in the era where kids walked to school. Sometimes he would wait for me all day, but usually he went home. I had a woman break up with me because I had three big dogs. I had a woman suggest that my dogs could sleep in the truck when I came for an overnight visit; that was the last I ever saw of her. I had a prominent dog psychic contact me and say Sonny had contacted her out of concern for my welfare. I had dogs that would fling themselves against the garage door when I came home. I never had a girlfriend do that. Snoopy was an aspiring novelist who always began his novels: “It was a dark and stormy night. A shot rang out.” I used to read my manuscripts to my dogs. I never did that with a human. I once intervened in a domestic dispute but only for the sake of a dog. Abortion protesters never have dogs, at least that I have observed. I rarely saw homeless people with dogs 20 years ago. Now practically every homeless man or woman I encounter in the city and country has a dog. Why the change?

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Talking to Mr. Seal

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As I walked along the seashore, a harbor seal appeared, bobbing, undulating, head up, head down. He was so close I could see his whiskers. For half a mile, I waved and yelled, “Hello, Mr. Seal!” as he paralleled my course. At times, I thought he might make landfall and perhaps inspect up close a mammalian species that was clearly dumber than seals because it didn’t return to the sea as part of its mammalian evolution. I do love those mammals who returned to the sea to live. They are fascinating.

I kept walking and waving and talking to the seal. Was I losing my mind by engaging him? Or finding it? What does it say that a 53-year old man in considerable existential distress thought talking to a seal in the ocean a sound idea at preserving his mental health? That’s what goes on these days. Talking to gulls, seals, eagles, herons, elk, coyotes…and yes, otters. I’ve had an otter encounter recently. It might be of significant Oregon historical significance as sea otters find a way to make their return to the Oregon Coast. Naturally, the wildlife biologists thought me deluded.

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Oregon Tavern Age: Silence

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It was me and the bartender, a bartender whose face and short black hair style reminded me of a flapper. Port Orford was deserted on a weekday in the winter of 2013 or was it 1923? Time often becomes timeless in OTA country.

I ordered a beer and the bartender met me with a glacial (not the global warming kind) expression and didn’t say a single word. The utter indifference was utterly charming. A stone-face flapper.

A storm was raging outside of Pitch’s East and sending a creek of rain down the streets and sidewalks. It also knocked out the internet and dish and cable and telegraph. That meant: No jukebox. No television. No video lottery. No noise of any kind, except rain battering the windows.

I sat near the window, sipped the porter, and wrote in my spiral notebook. Perforations leaked onto the chipboard floor.

The bartender looked highly suspicious of me. Seeing someone writing in longhand in public, let alone a bar, does unnerve some people, perforations falling to the floor, too.

At one point, she came over to me and pushed in a stool. It was clearly a pretext to spy. Maybe she thought I was from Yelp. Right, in long hand.

I was actually writing a letter to my father and thinking of how my father would only eat and drink in restaurants and taverns with one-syllable first names: Mac’s, Art’s, Flo’s, Sam’s, Vern’s. His sole exception was Buddy’s, but that was simply an acceptable derivation of Bud. He took me to all those joints. He used to play the gray games in OTA country before the state put the mob out of business and went into the gaming business for itself. I never got to see OTA country without video lottery games and gewgaws and tax collecting for the state and that anguishes me.

The bartender was trying to activate the dish and dial up a game show or action movie. Then the video lottery would boot up and start playing classic rock riffs, such as “Walk Like an Egyptian.” Then someone would enter and crank up the jukebox with some hair metal. Jesus. Jesus drank.

I began to pray to the one true god in OTA country—the Hamm’s bear.

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Kindness/Gratitude Writing and Publishing Workshop in Astoria

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(Season’s greetings readers. I will take a break from the blog until the New Year. Thanks for reading and making contributions to support the effort.)

Writers:

At one of our recent workshops, I proposed the idea of producing a small print publication with a specific non-fiction theme. The idea was warmly received and we tentatively settled on kindness/gratitude after some stellar writing and sharing on the topic.

I want to propose a kindness/gratitude writing/publishing workshop Saturday, Feb 3 from 10-2 in Astoria. At the workshop, I wold run us through a series of prompts/readings/discussion topics and a process for making editorial decisions about the publication (e.g. naming it, size, color, etc).

Basically, it would work like this: participants would write their pieces (approximately 200-300 words in length), email them to me, I would edit, email it back for a final revision, and then the pieces are returned to me. Then I (or someone else with better skills) will design the publication (probably a two-page, front/back, 11” by 14” broadsheet), have it printed, and then we all distribute a thousand copies in our various communities or wherever we go. We could even hold a little event to publicize the release. I envision the publication coming out in the spring.

The cost of the workshop/publishing venture is $80 and that includes the printing cost for the publication. We need about 10 paying people to make this project fly and have enough voices in the publication to provide the desired variety of perspectives. If you cannot attend the workshop but still want to participate in the project, I can email the prompts and work with you that way. The writing has been so wonderful and unique this past year and deserves a larger audience. Let me know if you want to join and of course, if you want to recruit a writer friend to join us in this endeavor, by all means invite. Email me through the blog or at my email address and let me know if you want to join this project.

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