Woof

There’s a dog on this street, close I believe, who barks at the same time every morning, in the same cadence, for the same amount of time. He or she has a routine. Routines are comfortable for mammals, secure, promote a sense of continuity and continuity a sense of wellbeing. I can hear the dogs bark, distinctive of other barks, the way you might know the difference between Swahili and Japanese or one dogs bark from another. I would like to meet this dog, put a face to the bark. It’s a solid bark, deep, penetrating, authoritative, but not angry or fear driven.

I know when to look out the window, the bark is consistently between 750 and 8 (I could narrow that down but I don’t look at a timepiece when the barking starts, I’m curious enough too, just not organized enough to.) and I have looked for the dog. It sounds like it’s right across the street, but I know that dog, an aging collie, her bark is higher pitched and comes in sets of two and even that is infrequent. Perhaps it’s a dog who walks each morning behind the bark yard fence (which I can’t see) where the collie pees before mom goes to work for the day. The other dog, who’s owner is consistent with walking, passes by at the coincidental but convenient time, and wants to convey the same message to the collie every morning, like “Why you so stuck up? Can a canine get a bow wow out of you every now and again?” Or something less intimate and more aggressive. I recognize barks, I don’t speak dog.

There is a book of short stories by Spencer Holst named after one of the longer stories; The Language Of Cats. You should read it or read it again. Despite the events in the story the language of cats, I would like to speak dog, Hebrew and Swiss in that order. I have a feeling the Dog language is more complicated than barks. Every living creature on this planet out-evolved millions of others. Most of them didn’t need to evolve a spoken language to survive. Creatures like Sturgeon didn’t need to evolve much at all, though they aren’t for shit out of the water. Good thing they live on a planet with a lot of water. That seems to happen to Sturgeon at lot; their world and environment hasn’t changed in millions of years.

I seem to have misplaced the gist. I like dogs. I like the way they smell, the way they run, I like that dogs and I get along for the most part. Sure, there are some that just don’t like me, less, per capita, than people or other mammals, though me and squirrels, racoons and bears have never had problems, the former I see several daily. An unspoken gist of this entry is that it has no orphans. I’ve just deleted the latest batch, a habit I should get into. I’m a bit of a packrat, and littering the digital anti-social media floors beats mussing up my own hard drive. Some of the orphans are important ideas I want to be reminded of, but, for the most part they are small chunks of writing I was too bored to finish.

An entry about a singular and consistent dog bark is hardly ablaze with action and interest, but, you know, I like dogs. Have a day, y’all, have a day.