Doggie Style: A Story Of Canine Lust And Humor

Bear

          Watching dogs mate isn't my favorite activity.  But this was MY dog mating, my Bear, the surprise doggie love of my life.  We acquired Bear in a last-second rescue from a puppy mill.  I've told that story elsewhere. http://bit.ly/evbFda

            Sometimes Fox (that's my partner) takes Bear to the grocery, all eight pounds of him, snugged in a sling. Fox was putting items into her basket when she was approached by a husky woman in her late forties. 

            "He's male?" the woman asked, putting her face near to Bear so she could see his eyes.  She smiled and made kissy sounds.  Bear's lips rose to reveal his teeth, a sign that he did not appreciate being patronized. The stranger retreated a few steps.  "He's got to be male!" she said.

             Fox nodded.

            "Tell me he's still intact, please!", the woman implored.  " I have a female poodle just his size and I would love to put them together.  What do you think?"

            Fox liked the idea, so one thing led to another which led to this:  Fox was out of  town when the lady's dog came into heat. 
          The dog's name was Snickers.  I got  the job  of supervising the mating of Bear with Snickers. Solo .  The phone rang, the heat was on and I was designated the Master of Ceremonies. 

            Bear stands six inches from the ground at the shoulders.  He would never win a blue ribbon or Best Of anything unless it was a dog show run by old beatniks on Quaaludes.

            It's strangely deceiving to describe Bear as tiny.  He has short legs and a round powerful torso.  If I had four of him they could pull a sled through the snow.

               There was a knock at the door.  I pulled the screen back to open.  "Here she is, " said Tammy, our new friend,  and dropped a gangly brown creature at my feet. 
          There was no ceremony, no meeting and greeting as Snickers' owner left her bitch with me.  " Gotta run!  I'll see you tomorrow night around five," she said.  "Good luck." 

            Snickers and Bear had a whiff of each other and without foreplay or so much as a hello, Snickers lifted her tail and accepted Bear's pursuit.

            It was clear from the outset that we had a problem.  Snickers stood nine inches tall at the shoulder.  Bear looked like a sixth grader dancing with a girl who towers over him. 

Snickers and puppies

            So far Bear had been a masturbator.  He loyally and monogamously humped a stuffed toy dog named Greta.  He got it right; he knew Greta's business end.  He pulled at her ear, beat her up a little bit, jumped and humped for a while before dismounting.  Greta was the perfect size and she obeyed implicitly.  Bear would beat her up again, hop on and hump some more.  Bear's humping was so enthusiastic that he literally launched himself into the air.  All four feet left the ground as he banged away.

            When Bear went into this amatory activity, Fox and I had to look away.  Otherwise we would start laughing out loud, and Bear's sense of dignity would have been damaged.  I am not being facetious.  

            Snickers was not Greta.   She was alive. She moved.  She wagged her tail in the air, and the fug of pheromones filled the room with flirty invitation.  Snickers wasn't much to look at.  She was a stringy toy poodle, dark brown, with a long pointed nose.  She growled but we were told in advance that growling was her only means of vocal expression.  There was no explanation why this was so.  It was a simple fact.  It made Snickers seem as if she had a grievance with the world.

            Wonderful.  Bear didn't care.  Bear had the whiff and was panting as he followed Snickers around our front room. They didn't care about privacy. They weren't looking for a hiding place, a love nest or cozy nook where the two could go off and get acquainted.  That isn't the way dog mating works.  The act of copulation must be witnessed.  And, hopefully, repeated as often as possible. 

            Snickers' business end was a little bit too high for Bear.  He was game, oh yes.  He got up on his hind legs and tried to mount the tall girl.  Snickers kept walking in figure eights.  I had the feeling she'd done this before.  In fact, Snickers was a bit long in the tooth.  Snickers was pushing the dog equivalent of forty.  We hadn't known any of this.  Our deal was simple.  We would get one puppy from the litter. 

            Bear tried grabbing her around the waist with his front legs.  Snickers kept her tail up and her parts ready for action, but she wasn't helping poor Bear.  She kept walking figure eights, up and down, round and round.  She dragged the grappling Bear along with her, growling all the way.   

            Bear tried jumping.  He hopped on Snickers' back but the angle was all wrong.  He slid back to the ground without gaining purchase.

            I felt awful for Bear.  His eyes held a bewildered sorrow.  His tongue

hung out and vibrated in rhythm with his panting.  He tried grabbing one of Snicker's hind legs and climbing.  Snickers walked around the room with Bear attached to her svelte but aging body.  I tried not to laugh.  I have learned that Bear is capable of suffering acute embarrassment.

            Is that a stretch for you?  That dogs can be embarrassed?  I've learned that animals have complex emotional lives.  The best I can do is try to understand their feelings.

            Bear was caught between humiliation and lust.  In the hierarchy of instinct, lust wins out.  Bear wasn't going to quit until he reached his goal.

           I tried to help by putting phone books under Bear's legs.  I was crawling around thrusting books, cushions and boxes to elevate him to the action position, but of course nothing helped because the two dogs were in constant motion and weren't about to stop and think things through.  I believe Bear felt a little better, though, because I was making such a fool of myself. 

            It just didn't work.  Now and then Snickers would turn her head to look at Bear and growl.  That was the only sound she knew how to make.  Growl.  I might have hoped for a more supportive partner for my boy, but fate had brought the couple together and fate would determine the outcome.

            I sat at my computer while all this strenuous activity went on under and around my chair.  Bear's energy was faltering.  I was beginning to worry about him. I tried to encourage him to take a break and drink some water.  No deal.  He had been following and trying to mount Snickers for three hours and he wasn't about to quit. 

            That bitch was in HEAT! (Note: My use of the word Bitch is correct.  It's not a word I use, otherwise, not ever.  I think the word has acquired way too much currency in our culture. End of note.)

             I was thinking about ways to end the situation.  I was afraid Bear was dehydrating.  The only way I had to separate the dogs was to lock Bear in the bathroom. I looked down from my chair and noticed that Bear had adopted a new strategy.  He was hopping from foot to foot.  His front paws were on Snicker's flanks and she was still ceaselessly moving.  I wanted to scream at her, Stand still for god's sake!

            Bear's hippity hop from foot to foot had the effect of getting him some altitude.  I don't know how he worked it out but the next thing I knew the two dogs were locked together.

            Nature, clever nature, had designed the female dog's parts to close down on the male's penis and trap it there.  Snickers was still moving in her relentless figure eights but now Bear was being dragged along, fumbling over his own paws.

            Snickers growled.  Bear looked up at me in utter bewilderment.  His tongue hung halfway down his chest, his mouth dripped saliva.  He managed to get himself onto Snicker's back so he could match her strides with his rear legs.  I know he felt ridiculous.  Now and then he would lose his rhythm and drop into an ungainly sprawl.  He was dragged on his back, on his side, as he struggled to achieve a position that gave him a modicum of dignity.

            When Tammy arrived for Snickers around five the next day, the pair had successfully copulated twice.  The second time was easier.  Bear used his hippity hop move and was trapped by Snickers for another ride.

            I could swear, when the whole thing was finished, Bear's eyes pleaded with me to get him neutered as soon as possible.  

            "Listen to me, man," he was saying. "If you want my balls you can have 'em!  Get them off me.  If this is dog sex, I don't want anything to do with this business, ever again!"

            Snickers' litter consisted of two pups, a male and a female.  The girl pup,

Gabe in blue, Kioni in pink

named Kioni, was twice the size of the boy pup, Gabriel.  We didn't want a female, so runty little Gabe became a member of our family.

            At first we thought he might be a special needs dog.  We worried about his body and his mind, but Gabe turned out to be clever and resilient. 

            That, however, is another story.

           

           

             

Cheryl Strayed's WILD: FROM LOST TO FOUND ON THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL

An identity is an infinitely precious thing. Cheryl Strayed's best selling book, WILD, is about building an identity out of flawed raw materials. The book touches us in deep places because all of us are involved in the same struggle. All of us come from flawed raw materials.

In the past, in smaller, more coherent cultures, identity was imparted from that culture and its well-designed rites of passage. Walkabout, Vision Quest, the names are many but the concept, of moving from childhood to maturity, is the same. These passages into adulthood are achieved by ceremonial activity that could be dubbed Initiation By Ordeal. In WILD, Cheryl devises her own initiation, the Ordeal of walking alone for more than a thousand miles on the Pacific Crest Trail.

When she began her long walk in the Mojave Desert, she was grieving the death of her mother from cancer. Cheryl's mother died at age forty five.

The spirit of Cheryl's mother inhabits this book. She isn't idealized, she isn't sainted, but Cheryl makes it clear that her mother provided the structure and the strength to enable her three children to cope and endure. This book, WILD, is Cheryl's love song to her mother. Its pages are Cheryl's way of working with her grief and giving it that alchemical fulfilment: turning pain into understanding.

Cheryl's father figures were at best shaky. The men with whom Cheryl's mother related were often negligent and sometimes brutal. They left Cheryl with a gaping hole in her heart. When her mother died, Cheryl was forced to wear the mantle of orphan-hood, too young. Far too young. Her childhood and adolescence were a confusion of conventional achievements and marginal lifestyles. She was a prom queen. She was dirt poor and lived on remote acreage in Minnesota. She straddled worlds. She was the popular high school girl who liked boys and was liked by boys. She was a thinker who struggled mightily with fundamental questions. Who am I? What am I supposed to do with my life?

The kernel of her desire was to be a writer. She wandered from Minnesota to Oregon and back again. She fell in love and got married to a good man. You know what people say about good men: they're hard to find. Cheryl loved this man but couldn't tame her own WILD side. She cheated and felt ashamed. Then she cheated again. And again. In Portland she met a man who consorted with dangerous diseases. He became Cheryl's heroin partner.

After her mother's shattering death, Cheryl came to one of those fateful forks in the road. After making a string of bad decisions, Cheryl summoned strength from within herself. The shame of her addiction was in conflict with her desire to honor her mother. She made the right decision. She would break off the flirtation with heroin and she would create her own Ordeal By Initiation.

She bought a huge backpack that she nicknamed Monster. She over-packed, weighed herself down with too much of everything and set out on an epic walk. Her feet grew blistered, her toenails fell off, one after another. She fenced with pain, exhaustion, doubt and the desire to quit. She didn't quit. She met people on the trail who touched her most quickened instincts. On the Pacific Crest Trail, you may walk with a person for an hour or a day. That person will be embedded within your psyche forever.

I didn't want WILD to end. I didn't want to leave Cheryl's company. I love this book and though I'm sometimes goaded to envy the success of other writers, I have no such feeling for Cheryl Strayed. She deserves her success.

She's experiencing one of those overnight triumphs that takes twenty or thirty years to prepare. It's my belief that Cheryl blasted a few doors open for other writers. I hope I am one of them. I too have my story, my memoir of my Initiation by Ordeal. I have been hanging on the edge of resignation, just about to give up, heartbroken with discouragement.

WILD gave me courage. WILD pulled me back from the precipice of complete capitulation. If Cheryl can become one of those rare black swans who appear as if from nowhere, so can I.

Your Content Will Resume In 30 Seconds....

Sept 29, 2012

          "Your content will resume in 30 seconds....".

          Over on the sidebar of my G-mail, there's a squib for an internet video.  It's called "Chef Says He Marinated Wife's Body Slowly". Before I can watch this delightful cooking tutorial, I get this pre-video advertisement.  
          This is a new feature in our lives, this pre-content advertisement. Everything I want to see or hear on YouTube, Vimeo, etc, comes spring-loaded with a product placement.  Frequently there is the courtesy of an opt-out click: I can skip it and go right to the video.  Nowadays, however, the "skip this ad" box is increasingly missing, and there's no choice but to wait through thirty seconds of being treated like an infant as the commercial for (chose at least one)Food, Cars, Vodka or Phones, throws its hook into the waters of your psyche.
            I want to see how ubiquitous this practice  has become.  I continue waiting for the cannibal chef video.

          "Your content will resume in 30 seconds."  First I have to watch a commercial from a product called Nautica, and I'm not quite sure what it is: A TV show, a body spray for men or a pitch for ocean resorts.  After thirty seconds of slick pitch I still don't know what the products is and I'm content NOT to know.
          THEN I get the details of the chef/murderer/cannibal. I close the page after about eight seconds.

          There are commercials at gas pumps and commercials on screens at urinals in public buildings.  Some day I'll buy a pair of pants and when I put my hands in their pockets a little hologram will appear at chest height saying, "The contents of your pockets will be available in thirty seconds."

          Monetizing.  I can monetize my web sites, have little ads

in the margins and get paid for every hit on my site.  Make some serious coin, oh yeah.

          I don't even know if this is a problem.  I've been watching commercials since I was a kid.  Our entertainment is funded this way.  It becomes a problem when our INFORMATION becomes funded this way because the funders get to decide what information we can access.

          There was a broadcast yesterday on Fox News, live, of a man blowing his brains out after a car chase.  "Get it off!  Get it off!," the shocked announcer barked, a second after the running man had pointed the pistol at his head and produced a vapor of blood and brain as he died in front of the cameras.  Any fool watching the live action could see what was about to happen.  The guy pulled a gun from his clothing.  He was in a desperate condition.  

          Your content will resume in 30 seconds.  Deodorant soap, aaaaah!  Cut to car chase, suicide, or cannibal chef who has re-visioned the term "eating out", or....any goddam grotesque thing in the world.   30 seconds.  Buy this new cell phone.  It replaces the one you bought last week that is now hopelessly out of date.  Siamese twins challenge courts for right to marry one another.

          This is our world.

          You want it? A fixer-upper, slightly used. 

          Your content will resume in 30 seconds.....but first the commercial: Planet Earth, a paradise in the Milky Way, comfortably nestled in the suburbs, not a black hole in the neighborhood.  Serene, bucolic. The Vacation Worth Having.

The natives are peaceful and friendly.....
          Your content will resume in thirty seconds.

Grandfather Milky Way

I took this photo some time ago.  The tree to the left looks like a troll.  I call him Grandfather Milky Way.  Light emerges from his heart; could be Zodiacal light, or ordinary light pollution,
or both.  The figure and his light give this photo valuable context, not to mention color.  Taken with a Canon 10D, eight minutes exposure at ISO 400. Canon 17-40L lens at 20mm.

The Hunger Games: A View

            I watched this entire movie.  At the end I felt manipulated.  I'd been set up for the sequel.  It wasn't a cliff-hanger.  There was a conclusion, an emotional resolution.  I felt conned, anyway.

            If I see a Harry Potter, it's a given that there's going to be another Harry Potter.  I don't know snarf about this condescending hodge podge called The Hunger Games, except that I'm not going to rent the sequel. 

            Lo and Behold, as I scan the uber-film website Rotten Tomatoes, I see that

there are at least three more Hunger Games films already in the can and awaiting the release date in such fashion as to keep the market sharp.  No overstuffing, no bulimia in these Hunger Games.  The films are scheduled to release one a year, through 2015.

            The Hunger Games books form  a trilogy.  That's natural, that's the way the publishing business works these days.  Write a series: keep them buying the next book.  Keep spinning the story until the Young Adult protagonist gets herpes or joins a cult.  After eighteen years of age, the Young Adult hero/heroine has pubes and periods, and no longer qualifies for the teen discount.

            After watching the film for two minutes I knew that the story called for Revolution, that the Old Order must be destroyed.  Let's get rid of these mincing aristocrats who somehow never get fat in spite of hogging all the food in the world.  Wow, I think. In this future era liposuction has gotten AWESOME!

President Snow and Mr. Funnybeard

            So, in the final scene, the camera lingers on the face of Donald Sutherland, who plays the Benevolent Fuehrer, the grandfatherly President Snow.  He taps his 

lips with his forefinger.  He scowls.  His toady, Mister Funnybeard, had said, vis a vis unforeseen developments in the live-broadcast annual Hunger Game, "Everyone loves an underdog."  President Snow says that he (Mister Funnybeard) wouldn't like the REAL underdog very much if he got close enough to smell his B.O.             

          President Snow sees trouble coming.  The Underdogs are getting restless.  He forces Mister Funnybeard to eat poison berries.  The Beard wasn't tough enough.  Snow needs a bigger nastier villain.  I don't know anything about the books, the plot, the film sequels, NUTHIN'.  But I betcha Mister Funnybeard's replacement is a real gorilla.  My Predictable-Plot-Sensor has sniffed and distilled the corn sucrose and polyethylene glycol in Book One and says, "here she comes in Book Two! A real nasty character!"              

          This movie got critical raves and made tons of money and will continue to bask in its over-ratedness as long as the milk holds out.  Maybe that's because it's filled with such deep philosophical and political observations.  Maybe it has stimulated people to think deep thoughts!

            Here it is: In the not so distant future all the rich people, the one percenters,

have divided the country into twelve districts, with the richest district being, of course, District One, and so forth.  District Twelve is coal mining country, it looks like Appalachia in the 1920's. Freezing, miserable, hungry miners and their families have been so completely intimidated that they send their children to participate in the annual Hunger Games.  It's compulsory but every time a kid enters his or her name into the lottery there's a payoff.  They get a loaf of bread or a flank steak or something like that.  Hence, there are kids whose poverty and family-feeling has driven them to do the name-drop forty or fifty times, or a hundred.  They know that sooner or later their number will be up and they will be called to The Hunger Games.

            The Game is a live televised gladiatorial contest.  There is only one winner.  One survivor.  Two teenagers from each district are turned loose in a giant domed parkland and must hunt one another down.  There are hidden cameras everywhere.   The frog is a camera.  The butterfly is a camera.  The weaponry is strictly medieval. Swords, spears, axes, knives, bows and arrows.  The winner becomes a celebrity and gets all the perks of being a District One Percenter.

            Wow.  Would you let your sixteen year old sign up for this?  You don't have a choice.  Your kid might be irritating as hell right now but that's no way to shut up a teenager.

            The rich kids from Districts One and Two have years of training and are awesome killing machines.  Kids like Kaitness Everdeen, from District Twelve, have grown up in the woods and streams of coal country.  They've learned to trap and hunt to survive.  Kaitness is a wizard with bow and arrow.  She's Bear Grylles, Cody Lundin and Survivor Man Les Stroud dressed like a sixteen year old girl.  Well, she looks more like twenty six but what's one suspended disbelief among so many?

            There you have it, folks.  The Hunger Games.  It's the TV show Survivor with real edged weapons.  Alliances are formed and broken.  Since ultimately you may have to kill your boyfriend to win the game, emotional attachments are thrown all askew.  That's the real cruelty.  You have to stop trusting someone you love.

How heinous!  This crappy system has got to be toppled!  The Revolution will definitely be televised!

            I thought that was going to happen in this movie.  I hadn't reckoned on the sequel, the prequel, the dequel. or the hypnequal.  At the end I just felt ripped off.

            By the way, the movie is dead slow.  Two and a half hours of  Slowwwwww, leavened by five minutes of climactic battle with Cato The District One Killing Machine.

            If Kaitness was so smart, why didn't she recover her preciously limited arrows whenever she shot a squirrel or a pheasant? Stuff like that really bugs me.

            I give this movie one muskrat for the hair dressers and costume people.  They had a hell of a lot of fun.
          Aw, let's give it another half a muskrat for Woody Harrelson doing a great imitation of Woody Harrelson.  The guy's the Nick Nolte of our time.  He's made grunge into a career.

Yanni: An Overview

Last night I channel surfed past a PBS station in time to catch Yanni playing with a sixty eight piece symphony orchestra in  the Pass of Thermopylae.  Holy Shit!  THE Pass Of Thermopylae.

Yanni was standing between phalanxes of keyboards, four on his right, four on his left, and as the orchestra pumped out vigorous empty musical calories, he stretched his arms straight out to either side and played the keyboards.  He threw his hair back, arched his body in a spasm of ersatz passion. 

He was wearing all white. He was crucifying himself gallantly and nobly, ascending in resurrected bliss on a cascade of idiot dramatic crap New Age muzak fit only for hair salons and supermarkets.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not jealous of this man’s success.  Well...yes I am, godammit.  He undoubtedly works very hard.  But the insult of indulging in such silly and obvious showmanship only diminishes his besotted audience.  Showmanship is a wonderful thing.  Especially when it is connected to genuine talent, or profound ideas.  I saw a film of the Count Basie Band and watched drummer Sonny Payne twirl and juggle his sticks while executing a wildly complex drum solo. Sonny made the sticks pass under his legs and around his back, threw them into the air so they landed on the snare drum in perfect time, while holding and stomping on the beat, with the band bellowing. THAT is showmanship.  In Hell, Yanni will be a toothless bald man gesticulating wildly in front of a three piece band of Borscht Belt hacks who can barely wheeze in tune, let alone play music.  He will repeat the same phrase over and over again, “Aren’t I wonderful?” and a thin, bored applause will leak up from a cigarette strewn linoleum dance floor that stretches to infinity.

Sonny Payne with Count Basie

Book Cover: AVOIDING THE POTHOLES

I've spent a while working on this cover design.  I took the RV from another photo taken at Pyramid Lake.  It wasn't our RV, but it was perfectly situated.  It even  had a boat attached, and I'm wondering if I shouldn't include the boat.  In Photoshop terms, that means a bit more work.  I may yet try it, but I'm going for simplicity of composition.  All pics in this cover are mine.  I would love your feedback.