A Golden Jin posted 12/24
A while back, I was sitting in the field with my dog. We were listening to the birds and watching clouds go by when he turned to me and said, “This is very romantic.”
I said, “This is what?”
“Romantic and, very nice.”
I leaned back on my elbows and thought about that for a second, decided I needed some clarity. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing big really, just that this is nice, us sitting here together. Romantic in the sense that this is a really good moment, sort of wallowing in the art of the day together.”
“The art.” I said, “Okay.” I’d never really thought of romantic or art as having these sorts of meanings but I guess I could wrap my head around it. I think he meant the beauty of the moment and that thought slowed me down just a little. The art or the romance or the beauty of the moment all sounded good, really good, but all of those have this hinted background statement lurking behind them, some kind of appeal to connect to a deeper, heartfelt goodness and I am usually not that big on feeling stuff.
“It is nice Buddy.” I agreed and scooted toward him a little. Pointing up, I asked him, “What do you think that cloud looks like?”
Jin looked where I’d pointed and tilted his head, first one way and then the other. “I see a giraffe riding a tricycle.”
I’d been thinking more along the lines of two lawn gnomes on a teeter totter but now that he had pointed out the giraffe thing, yup, there it was.
Jin is a ninety-pound Golden Retriever. Jin is short for Temujin which was Genghis Khan’s original name. Temujin became a mighty warrior. Our Jin is a lover through and through but somewhere in his heart, there is definitely a mighty warrior too.
“I’ve been thinking about stuff.” Jin told me, just as I noticed a small cumulus cloud that was starting to look like an angel smoking a doobie. I could even make out the halo if I squinted a little.
“Okay.” I said and reached over to wiggle his right ear.
He twitched his leg just a little while I messed with the floppy, silky thing, that would make a good mitten.
“I don’t think I’ve got it sorted out just yet though Bobby. Can we talk more in a few days?”
“Okay buddy.” I told him and I switched ears. I tried to not giggle at his lightly thumping foot and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that my name is Chris.
A few weeks passed before Jin brought the subject up again. We were out in the barn and I was stacking some bales that we had just brought back from Debbie and Larry’s place. Jin had been basically just milling around, sniff checking the world and conspicuously not chasing the cat. I wasn’t expecting any conversation out of him but enjoyed his company anyway.
“Hey Bobby,” he said, pretty much out of the blue, “is now a good time to talk?”
“Sure buddy.” I answered. I set the bale of alfalfa down. The bales were about eighty pounds and I was happy to have the excuse for a breather and besides, it gave us a place to sit, which I did. I had plunked the alfalfa turned seat cushion close enough to the rest of the stack to have a nice back rest, which I also made use of. I watched Jin climb up next to me and settle in. He kind of leaned against the stack behind us and a little bit against me at the same time. His weight felt comforting. I reached over and ran my hands through his thick, soft fur. “Let’s hear it.”
He turned a little bit towards me so that we could look straight at each other, a sort of mano-e-doggo thing. He has beautiful and unusual light golden eyes.
“Well,” my dog said in a conversational tone, “It’s just some thoughts I had.”
“Thoughts about being on our farm?” I picked my words carefully. I’ve never been sure he actually knows that he is a dog. There is a reason we call the grand barn that we built for the dogs and horses The Equine Shrine and Dog Palace and I see how he might not realize that I am his master.
He nodded his head, gave in to a brief bark at the cat and said, “Yeah, mostly.”
“Okay buddy, shoot.”
“Well, it’s about how good it feels to be with the pack. That is where we live.”
I pictured a mound of warm dogs, “In a dog pile?” I wasn’t exactly following.
“No Bobby.” He said looking down his long nose with those beautiful eyes, full of patience. “In our feelings, we live in our feelings.”
“Okay, Jin. I get that, dogs live in their feelings.” Oops, I’d said the D word out loud, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. I was thinking that it would be obvious that dogs live in their feelings because (ignoring the current evidence to the contrary) dogs can’t talk, so of course they live in their feelings. They don’t have the higher and superior intellectual functioning of us human beings.
Jin kept looking at me with a hint of that wonderful Golden imperturbability glowing out of him but there clearly was another undertone lurking there too. I suspect he was trying to determine how stupid I am or am not.
“Not dogs Bobby. People, that’s where people live too, in their feelings.”
I had a bit of a mental sigh right there, a little invisible flabbergasting, “With all due respect Jin, people articulate their thoughts and live in a clear zone of logic and reason where we sort through the relevant facts of any given situation and choose our individual, cognizant, intellectually reasoned, responses. That is where we live.”
“With all due respect Bobby, you are really full of shit.”
I stopped to considered these few things. One of course, was what my dog was telling me. I generally accept it as a fact that I am full of shit but had thought I hid it well. At the very least, I never thought that my pets would be aware of that unfortunate truth. Of course, the idea that a reincarnation of Genghis Kahn was telling me anything did cross my mind as being somewhat unusual too but mostly though, I just wondered why he calls me Bobby.
“I guess maybe I have to think on it a little more, to figure out a better explanation.” Jin said, as if having a sudden mind change. He hopped off of the bale to sauntered over and sniff the cat’s butt. The cat can be weirdly patient about this activity. He is large and well-armed and the dogs really don’t mess with him besides an occasional fly by lick or, like now, a butt sniff. I suspect he secretly likes the attention. Space aliens seem to be fascinated with all things proctological, maybe cats are too. Whatever the focus of their common interest, they have it all worked out. I stood, groaned a little at some brand-new aches, and hoisted my eighty-pound sofa up to do that sort of dead lift and throw combo that that all farm people use to get a bale on top of a stack. I kept at it and finished with the load and then left the barn to do other farm stuff and to think about what my dog was trying to tell me.
We picked it all up again on the way to the lake a few days later. Jin was sitting in the front seat of my Sprinter. His large head was blissfully out the window. With his ears and lips flapping in the wind, he looked like a really fast gargoyle. While he was engaged in speed sniffing the world, I, with my superior intellect, was testing the aerodynamic qualities of my left hand. I made the wing fly up, got it too steep, stalled it and my arm dropped down. I made it fly again, stalled again and again and again, all endlessly entertaining. Eventually Jin brought his head in from the breeziness, leaned down and nosed the up button for the window and then turned to me, “You want to talk some more Bobby?”
“Sure buddy.” I said and tried to guess if I could bend my short nose down far enough to make my window go up that way too. Giving up, for the likelihood of crashing, I just used my finger to push the button in the normal human way. “Tell me more.”
“Okay,” my dog said and settled himself deeper into the seat. He leaned against the door and sighed. “When you think about how you humans live, you think that you all run your lives based on the logic and reason that you told me about before, but I don’t think you do.”
Hmm, okay. “So, what do you think we do?”
“The same as everybody else, you live in your feelings.”
“And, by everybody else, you mean… dogs?”
Jin nodded his head and looked down his long nose at me. “Yeah, everybody Bobby.” That definitely smacked of a “like duh” tone. He paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts. After a time, he went on, “You humans have the God-like ability to do math. That ability translates into a capability to conceive of data and facts and learn how everything in the universe functions! Math is real, facts are real, data is real. Your scientific method is amazing! Your smart phones and access to the internet is truly magic of the highest order and elevates you to some crazy new level and it all completely messes with your heads. You still live in your feelings and you can’t tell the difference between feelings and facts. Your beautiful human intellect blinds you!”
I was thinking that, in that context, the word “Humans”, seemed very broad and possibly overly inclusive. The, “Have the ability to do math..,” part, seemed very optimistic indeed but none of that was relevant to the current conversation. I stayed out of the weeds and stuck with the present thread.
“Whoa, hold on buddy. Doesn’t it strike you as completely contradictory to claim, within just a few sentences, that we humans have the ability to see so much and that somehow blinds us?”
I had never realized, at any point in my life before this, that a dog can look condescending.
“What is a beautiful thing?” He asked patiently.
“A beautiful thing?” I looked around. It was a clear day and both the Olympic Mountain range and Mount Rainier were quite visible. I pointed those things out. “The mountains.”
“Why are they beautiful?” He asked me.
“I don’t know. They just are.”
“Got data to support that claim, that they are beautiful?”
I could clearly see where Jin was going with this. He didn’t understand. “Jin, Beauty is not the same as facts. One is subjective and has no supporting data and the other is objective and proven and is entirely supported by data.”
“Okay.” He nodded and I was pretty sure I’d made my point.
We drove in silence for a while. Eventually he spoke again and when he did, it was very soft, almost hard to hear.
“Which category do feelings fit in?”
My poor dog just doesn’t get it. For humans, feelings are just things that get carried along with you despite your existence as a superior intellectual being. We humans live in facts and data and manage our feelings well with the understanding that the left over, animal part of us, is just along for the ride. I didn’t answer. I was only thinking about him though, I didn’t want to burst his bubble or anything. I would think of a good answer later.
We got to the lake and Jin scanned the world for interesting smells while I unloaded the kayak and got it shuffle-carried to the launch area and ungracefully plopped into the water. Jin and I both put on PFD’s and got into our seeable-from-space, orange boat. I pushed us off from the beach and we paddled off to track down the secret lost monsters of Clear Lake. We paddled aimlessly for an hour or so. The day was sunny and awesome and, other than monster finding, we were completely lacking an agenda. We just trusted luck and corrected to whatever heading seemed appropriate for that three to five second segment of time.
Other than enjoying the sun, the beauty of the lake, the birds, the clouds drifting overhead and each other’s company, the trip was a bust. We didn’t find monsters but we did discover some monster residue. We collected that forensic evidence, several floating beer bottles, and tossed it all into the bottom of the boat for further analysis later, or a recycle receptacle, whichever came first.
We eventually discovered that the shoreline of the lake serendipitously began and ended at exactly the same spot and, since that conveniently happened to be at the exact spot we had launched from, we took the opportunity to beach the boat. We reversed the whole cumbersome process, me grunting and staggering and Jin checking the olfactory inventory of the area for smells that had arrived since we’d been here last. Gravity had not reversed itself during our absence and getting the kayak, up and out of the water and up and onto the racks was not as easy as the other direction had been and it hadn’t been easy to begin with.
After I donated the Monster’s beer bottles to the recycle can, I got the boat lashed and ready for road travel and Jin and I sat down on some soft grass between the parking area and the launch ramp. We spent a little more time switching between monsters scanning and enjoying the beautiful area and I couldn’t help but watch him as he took in the scenery. He rarely tells me about what he is seeing but watching him watching makes it all feel more significant, better. After a little longer he looked over at me with those amazing golden eyes. His gaze seems to be coming from a bright and shiny place a long way away. There are little dark flecks in the surrounding gold that I imagine, are whole galaxies.
I sighed a little and Jin sighed a little too. “Okay buddy, time to go. You’ve got shotgun.”
He chuffed at that. I wasn’t sure if that was a “Duh.” Chuff, or maybe meant “When is it my turn to drive?”
“Hey buddy,” I said a few days after the lake trip. I had been throwing the ball for him in the yard. We had walked back into the barn to put the shoulder saving ball thrower away. Jin was still panting pretty hard and it took him a second to catch his breath.
“What’s up Bobby?”
Weirdly, something tumbled in me just then, some subtle, unknown and ethereal thing echoed in my guts. I have no idea at all what the source was and I didn’t like that it had a hint of being not good. I brushed it off though, mostly because there was no logical reason to give validity to some stupid unformed feeling. I also didn’t forget it.
Hearing that phrase, from my ten-year-old golden retriever and best friend, would someday become one of the most cherished memories of my life. Thinking of him saying, “What’s up Bobby?” does, and always will, make me smile, or cry. I tell myself that someday I will correct him and let him know that my name is Chris, but not today. For today, I am very happy to be, for whatever reason, Bobby.
My body commanded itself to drop onto my knees right then, and to wrap my arms completely around Jin and put my face in the thick fur of his ruff. I can’t say he smells good, not in the conventional human, I-have-the-over-powering-smell-of-cologne-on sort of way. In a, the world is right way though, Jin smells wonderful. He’s got a hint of horse poo and definitely some hay that he had wrestled the other dogs in and underneath all of that, just plain dog goodness. He tolerated my hug for quite a while and then turned and looked at me with those wonderful golden eyes with all of those universes in them and wagged his tail a little and asked again, “What’s up Bobby?”
I let go and straightened myself up. “You do know that humans live in their intellect?”
Jin’s tail drooped just a tiny bit. That change was subtle, maybe just the breeze or a muscle tic. He walked a very few short steps toward a garbage can about a foot from me, lifted a leg and peed on it. He then trotted out of the barn and into the yard. After a second, he apparently spotted one of the other dogs and poured on the coals, switching to an all-out run for some much needed, tumble and play.
Jin and I had a fire outside one evening. We were in the back yard, sitting about fifty feet from the creek. The sound of it tumbling through the woods was soothing and atavistic. The moon was full and the flickering fire gave us a connection to all of the many humans and dogs that had sat at fires in the eons before us.
“Do you think dogs and humans are really that different?” I asked.
Jin was, as is his habit, sitting in a chair beside me and watching the fire. I never get out just one chair for myself. He doesn’t always sit in the chair I set out for him, but most times, he did.
There was no answer for a long time, but he finally spoke softly. “I think the big difference is that same thing we talked about before, that you, as an entire species, don’t seem to realize that you live in your feelings.”
“And dogs never live in facts?”
Jin shook his head. “We don’t have facts. Facts require articulated ideas. Articulating ideas requires words to articulate them with. No words, no facts. We live in our feelings.”
“And you are really convinced that we live in our feelings?”
He nodded. “That is your real estate too.”
Real estate? Oh, “Reality? Our feelings are our reality too?”
A chuff and a nod.
“Then I still don’t get the problem.” I didn’t. I get where he might think that we are messed up, us spending time on our phones “researching” things and shopping on-line and ignoring each other. But he obviously didn’t get how much that benefits us.
“As I see you, not just you Bobby, but you humans, you don’t realize that you aren’t all connected with yourselves inside your heads.”
I’ll have to process this a little, but I think my dog just told me that I, not just me, but all of us human people, are crazy. Argh, why can’t I just leave my dog to his delusions. “Okay, what are you even talking about Jin? Are you saying that all humans have multiple personalities?”
He watched the fire for a while but finally turned to me and nodded.
“Like, we are crazy?”
He shook his head. “Not crazy. I think you don’t know that all of you are that way. None of you seem to know that the parts inside you don’t talk to each other.”
I might have just started getting a glimmer of what he was talking about. I hadn’t found any agreement with his point of view but, I might have just started seeing what that point of view was.
“Are you saying that humans have a feeling part and a thinking part and those parts don’t always communicate?”
I often give Jin praise. Sometimes it’s training praise, I want him to feel good about something so he will repeat that behavior, and sometimes it’s just because I love him and want him to feel good in general or just plain old appreciation bursting out of me. Right then, Jin leaned over and gave me a long, slow lick across my arm. This wasn’t uncommon for him, I just wasn’t sure if that was training lick or not.
Okay, I guess my dog thinks I’m on the right track. “You think that we have a feeling part and a thinking part and they don’t talk to each other?”
Definite head nod, exaggerated by the long nose.
“And that this lack of internal memo sending causes us grief?”
“Yes.” Followed by a chuff. I don’t know the translation for the chuff.
I was starting to get his picture. “So, it’s like we have to co-rulers, a king and queen, Yin and Yang or something, one is thinking and one is feeling and they don’t talk to each other and it fu..”, I try to not swear around my dog although, I’m not really sure of the why of that. “It messes us up?”
Jin seemed to ponder that for a moment and then nodded.
I spent some time thinking about all of that over the next few days. Jin was telling me that humans were messed up because we have a thinking half and a feeling half and the two don’t link up well. That does make some rudimentary sense. I’ve always felt that the benefit of any sort of counseling therapy is simply in hearing yourself talk. I think there’s a lot of “Oh shit! I didn’t realize I felt that way. Why didn’t I say so!” moments to be had in psychoanalysis.
But I don’t really buy it as a major factor in human unhappiness. I am intelligent and intellectual and I live in my intellectual side. I love science, believe in data and reason and I follow my rational thoughts. Those are the things I live by and my emotions follow where I lead them.
I was working in the barn one day. I had the door open on the north side where we have a parking area. I had set up a table and was soldering on some wiring project that I can’t remember now, maybe for my van. Jin was laying, sprawled out on the gravel, sleeping in the sun. There is an apartment in our barn and our tenant’s car is parked there. Our tenant got into that car and, focused on the car parked to her right, drove over Jin. I was soldering and then Jin was screaming.
There IS an intellectual part of me that had just shifted into some crazy overdrive. Internal bleeding. I had looked up just in time to see the tire rolling over Jin’s middle. His middle, his organs. There had to be internal bleeding. Somebody in the statistics department of my brain threw down a calculator and crunched some numbers. The odds say that organ damage is very likely. To remain here is to have no chance at all. I’ve got to pick him up, even at the risk of further harm and get him to the emergency vet. This calculating took less time than it took for the chair I had just vacated to hit the floor sideways behind me. I ran to my friend and dead lifted him and then ran, with him screaming, across the lawn to my car. He continued screaming as I drove off, leaving my devastated tenant, crying in the driveway.
I drove as fast as I could reasonably go, faster really. I was not being safe and if the odds department in my head was still crunching numbers, the office mail boy wasn’t carrying any memos. Jin’s screams were quieter now but when I reached to the back seat and caressed him, he calmed, quieting almost completely. I don’t think he was really conscious right then, just somewhere in between and still, my touch, our connection, mattered. Periodically, just to avoid crashing, I had to use two hands to drive. It seemed extremely clear that Jin was aware of the absence of my hand and I did everything I could to break that contact as little as possible.
By the time we got to the emergency vet, Jin had gone back to another place, the place where he had been before finding me and where, in the universe, our truly precious things are kept, safe and sacred. His whimpers had gotten quieter and then they had stopped. The thinking part of me knew what had happened in the back seat of my car. My friend had been unable to hang on, even with the strongest love, he had to let go. The feeling part of me had abdicated his half of the throne for a while.
I buried my friend in the field, right where we used to watch clouds together. I put down the shovel and sat, without him. Although I will never know why he called me Bobby, I am so very glad I never corrected that mistake. The field wasn’t as soft and the clouds were just clouds. I see, we do live in our feelings and all of the facts won’t change that. There is magic in our lives, so much magic, all it takes is perspective. Jin showed me that, every day, through his patience and his amazing, undefined, non-factual love and unexplainable goodness. My touch quieted his pain. That’s all the magic I need and all of the facts in the world will never change that.
So, I do believe. I believe in my talking dog and in Santa Claus. The fact that parents drag themselves out of bed in the middle of the night, eat some shitty cookies and set things out for their kids, isn’t any different than knowing the sky is blue because of the way the sun’s light gets altered by the molecules in the air. The sky is blue and Santa is real and Jin talked to me in so many ways.
We humans are fractured, we have a very dual nature by being able to reason and still living in our feelings and we do live in our feelings. The art, that we so seldom seem to master, is in the conversations between the two parts. I truly believe that good mental health requires that we sometimes have the intellectual side take the emotional side by the hand, give ourselves a few hugs and have a nice soothing talk. Sometimes too though, the intellectual side should just shut up, smile and let the emotional side jump in the mud puddles.
This story is an amalgam of things that have really happened. Jin was very real and very loved and died in his sleep at ten years old. He is buried in the field where he and I used to sit and watch clouds. Jin’s passing was on September ninth 2019 and on September tenth, a golden retriever puppy was born in Boise Idaho. That puppy’s name would later become Sam. We drove 500 miles to pick up another dog that we had picked out over video calls with the breeder. Sam picked us instead.
Sam did get run over, almost exactly as I described. The better part of reality was, the tire went over Sam’s hips and not his organs. The blood I found all over the car turned out to be from my knees when I had dropped to pick him up from the gravel. Sam underwent several surgeries to pin his pelvis back together and had a very long and arduous convalescence. He and I lived on the floor for a few months and there was a lot of concern that he might have to have a leg amputated but, in the end, he is 100% and watching his flowing, energetic beauty when he runs like the wind is the best thing ever.
The actual trip to the emergency vet and then to Seattle for the first of those surgery’s happened just about as I described too but without any dying although the terror that he might do just that never left my head for that entire drive. His response to my touch was exactly as I wrote.
That is the most important part of the story. Even between the emergency vet, where Sam was heavily sedated and Seattle, to the veterinary surgery center, Sam was whimpering and obviously in a lot of pain and my touch made a very obvious difference. That touch, connection, is everything.
I very much believe that we do live in our feelings, that our feelings are our reality and magic is in all of us. Watching the sunrise, and believing your dog can talk to you can live right alongside hard science and logarithms and the periodic table of the elements. We just need to learn to coexist, with ourselves. Our feelings are not wrong and they are not facts. The thinking side of you processes all kinds of shit and comes to a lot of conclusions about what you should do but those conclusions aren’t always right. The feeling side of you feels all kinds of things and also recommends actions, also not always right. Sometimes, to process through and find the right path, means that the feeling side needs some calm reassurance from the thinking side. The feeling side is where we live. Let’s learn to enjoy that.
A while back, I was sitting in the field with my dog. We were listening to the birds and watching clouds go by when he turned to me and said, “This is very romantic.”
I said, “This is what?”
“Romantic and, very nice.”
I leaned back on my elbows and thought about that for a second, decided I needed some clarity. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing big really, just that this is nice, us sitting here together. Romantic in the sense that this is a really good moment, sort of wallowing in the art of the day together.”
“The art.” I said, “Okay.” I’d never really thought of romantic or art as having these sorts of meanings but I guess I could wrap my head around it. I think he meant the beauty of the moment and that thought slowed me down just a little. The art or the romance or the beauty of the moment all sounded good, really good, but all of those have this hinted background statement lurking behind them, some kind of appeal to connect to a deeper, heartfelt goodness and I am usually not that big on feeling stuff.
“It is nice Buddy.” I agreed and scooted toward him a little. Pointing up, I asked him, “What do you think that cloud looks like?”
Jin looked where I’d pointed and tilted his head, first one way and then the other. “I see a giraffe riding a tricycle.”
I’d been thinking more along the lines of two lawn gnomes on a teeter totter but now that he had pointed out the giraffe thing, yup, there it was.
Jin is a ninety-pound Golden Retriever. Jin is short for Temujin which was Genghis Khan’s original name. Temujin became a mighty warrior. Our Jin is a lover through and through but somewhere in his heart, there is definitely a mighty warrior too.
“I’ve been thinking about stuff.” Jin told me, just as I noticed a small cumulus cloud that was starting to look like an angel smoking a doobie. I could even make out the halo if I squinted a little.
“Okay.” I said and reached over to wiggle his right ear.
He twitched his leg just a little while I messed with the floppy, silky thing, that would make a good mitten.
“I don’t think I’ve got it sorted out just yet though Bobby. Can we talk more in a few days?”
“Okay buddy.” I told him and I switched ears. I tried to not giggle at his lightly thumping foot and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that my name is Chris.
A few weeks passed before Jin brought the subject up again. We were out in the barn and I was stacking some bales that we had just brought back from Debbie and Larry’s place. Jin had been basically just milling around, sniff checking the world and conspicuously not chasing the cat. I wasn’t expecting any conversation out of him but enjoyed his company anyway.
“Hey Bobby,” he said, pretty much out of the blue, “is now a good time to talk?”
“Sure buddy.” I answered. I set the bale of alfalfa down. The bales were about eighty pounds and I was happy to have the excuse for a breather and besides, it gave us a place to sit, which I did. I had plunked the alfalfa turned seat cushion close enough to the rest of the stack to have a nice back rest, which I also made use of. I watched Jin climb up next to me and settle in. He kind of leaned against the stack behind us and a little bit against me at the same time. His weight felt comforting. I reached over and ran my hands through his thick, soft fur. “Let’s hear it.”
He turned a little bit towards me so that we could look straight at each other, a sort of mano-e-doggo thing. He has beautiful and unusual light golden eyes.
“Well,” my dog said in a conversational tone, “It’s just some thoughts I had.”
“Thoughts about being on our farm?” I picked my words carefully. I’ve never been sure he actually knows that he is a dog. There is a reason we call the grand barn that we built for the dogs and horses The Equine Shrine and Dog Palace and I see how he might not realize that I am his master.
He nodded his head, gave in to a brief bark at the cat and said, “Yeah, mostly.”
“Okay buddy, shoot.”
“Well, it’s about how good it feels to be with the pack. That is where we live.”
I pictured a mound of warm dogs, “In a dog pile?” I wasn’t exactly following.
“No Bobby.” He said looking down his long nose with those beautiful eyes, full of patience. “In our feelings, we live in our feelings.”
“Okay, Jin. I get that, dogs live in their feelings.” Oops, I’d said the D word out loud, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. I was thinking that it would be obvious that dogs live in their feelings because (ignoring the current evidence to the contrary) dogs can’t talk, so of course they live in their feelings. They don’t have the higher and superior intellectual functioning of us human beings.
Jin kept looking at me with a hint of that wonderful Golden imperturbability glowing out of him but there clearly was another undertone lurking there too. I suspect he was trying to determine how stupid I am or am not.
“Not dogs Bobby. People, that’s where people live too, in their feelings.”
I had a bit of a mental sigh right there, a little invisible flabbergasting, “With all due respect Jin, people articulate their thoughts and live in a clear zone of logic and reason where we sort through the relevant facts of any given situation and choose our individual, cognizant, intellectually reasoned, responses. That is where we live.”
“With all due respect Bobby, you are really full of shit.”
I stopped to considered these few things. One of course, was what my dog was telling me. I generally accept it as a fact that I am full of shit but had thought I hid it well. At the very least, I never thought that my pets would be aware of that unfortunate truth. Of course, the idea that a reincarnation of Genghis Kahn was telling me anything did cross my mind as being somewhat unusual too but mostly though, I just wondered why he calls me Bobby.
“I guess maybe I have to think on it a little more, to figure out a better explanation.” Jin said, as if having a sudden mind change. He hopped off of the bale to sauntered over and sniff the cat’s butt. The cat can be weirdly patient about this activity. He is large and well-armed and the dogs really don’t mess with him besides an occasional fly by lick or, like now, a butt sniff. I suspect he secretly likes the attention. Space aliens seem to be fascinated with all things proctological, maybe cats are too. Whatever the focus of their common interest, they have it all worked out. I stood, groaned a little at some brand-new aches, and hoisted my eighty-pound sofa up to do that sort of dead lift and throw combo that that all farm people use to get a bale on top of a stack. I kept at it and finished with the load and then left the barn to do other farm stuff and to think about what my dog was trying to tell me.
We picked it all up again on the way to the lake a few days later. Jin was sitting in the front seat of my Sprinter. His large head was blissfully out the window. With his ears and lips flapping in the wind, he looked like a really fast gargoyle. While he was engaged in speed sniffing the world, I, with my superior intellect, was testing the aerodynamic qualities of my left hand. I made the wing fly up, got it too steep, stalled it and my arm dropped down. I made it fly again, stalled again and again and again, all endlessly entertaining. Eventually Jin brought his head in from the breeziness, leaned down and nosed the up button for the window and then turned to me, “You want to talk some more Bobby?”
“Sure buddy.” I said and tried to guess if I could bend my short nose down far enough to make my window go up that way too. Giving up, for the likelihood of crashing, I just used my finger to push the button in the normal human way. “Tell me more.”
“Okay,” my dog said and settled himself deeper into the seat. He leaned against the door and sighed. “When you think about how you humans live, you think that you all run your lives based on the logic and reason that you told me about before, but I don’t think you do.”
Hmm, okay. “So, what do you think we do?”
“The same as everybody else, you live in your feelings.”
“And, by everybody else, you mean… dogs?”
Jin nodded his head and looked down his long nose at me. “Yeah, everybody Bobby.” That definitely smacked of a “like duh” tone. He paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts. After a time, he went on, “You humans have the God-like ability to do math. That ability translates into a capability to conceive of data and facts and learn how everything in the universe functions! Math is real, facts are real, data is real. Your scientific method is amazing! Your smart phones and access to the internet is truly magic of the highest order and elevates you to some crazy new level and it all completely messes with your heads. You still live in your feelings and you can’t tell the difference between feelings and facts. Your beautiful human intellect blinds you!”
I was thinking that, in that context, the word “Humans”, seemed very broad and possibly overly inclusive. The, “Have the ability to do math..,” part, seemed very optimistic indeed but none of that was relevant to the current conversation. I stayed out of the weeds and stuck with the present thread.
“Whoa, hold on buddy. Doesn’t it strike you as completely contradictory to claim, within just a few sentences, that we humans have the ability to see so much and that somehow blinds us?”
I had never realized, at any point in my life before this, that a dog can look condescending.
“What is a beautiful thing?” He asked patiently.
“A beautiful thing?” I looked around. It was a clear day and both the Olympic Mountain range and Mount Rainier were quite visible. I pointed those things out. “The mountains.”
“Why are they beautiful?” He asked me.
“I don’t know. They just are.”
“Got data to support that claim, that they are beautiful?”
I could clearly see where Jin was going with this. He didn’t understand. “Jin, Beauty is not the same as facts. One is subjective and has no supporting data and the other is objective and proven and is entirely supported by data.”
“Okay.” He nodded and I was pretty sure I’d made my point.
We drove in silence for a while. Eventually he spoke again and when he did, it was very soft, almost hard to hear.
“Which category do feelings fit in?”
My poor dog just doesn’t get it. For humans, feelings are just things that get carried along with you despite your existence as a superior intellectual being. We humans live in facts and data and manage our feelings well with the understanding that the left over, animal part of us, is just along for the ride. I didn’t answer. I was only thinking about him though, I didn’t want to burst his bubble or anything. I would think of a good answer later.
We got to the lake and Jin scanned the world for interesting smells while I unloaded the kayak and got it shuffle-carried to the launch area and ungracefully plopped into the water. Jin and I both put on PFD’s and got into our seeable-from-space, orange boat. I pushed us off from the beach and we paddled off to track down the secret lost monsters of Clear Lake. We paddled aimlessly for an hour or so. The day was sunny and awesome and, other than monster finding, we were completely lacking an agenda. We just trusted luck and corrected to whatever heading seemed appropriate for that three to five second segment of time.
Other than enjoying the sun, the beauty of the lake, the birds, the clouds drifting overhead and each other’s company, the trip was a bust. We didn’t find monsters but we did discover some monster residue. We collected that forensic evidence, several floating beer bottles, and tossed it all into the bottom of the boat for further analysis later, or a recycle receptacle, whichever came first.
We eventually discovered that the shoreline of the lake serendipitously began and ended at exactly the same spot and, since that conveniently happened to be at the exact spot we had launched from, we took the opportunity to beach the boat. We reversed the whole cumbersome process, me grunting and staggering and Jin checking the olfactory inventory of the area for smells that had arrived since we’d been here last. Gravity had not reversed itself during our absence and getting the kayak, up and out of the water and up and onto the racks was not as easy as the other direction had been and it hadn’t been easy to begin with.
After I donated the Monster’s beer bottles to the recycle can, I got the boat lashed and ready for road travel and Jin and I sat down on some soft grass between the parking area and the launch ramp. We spent a little more time switching between monsters scanning and enjoying the beautiful area and I couldn’t help but watch him as he took in the scenery. He rarely tells me about what he is seeing but watching him watching makes it all feel more significant, better. After a little longer he looked over at me with those amazing golden eyes. His gaze seems to be coming from a bright and shiny place a long way away. There are little dark flecks in the surrounding gold that I imagine, are whole galaxies.
I sighed a little and Jin sighed a little too. “Okay buddy, time to go. You’ve got shotgun.”
He chuffed at that. I wasn’t sure if that was a “Duh.” Chuff, or maybe meant “When is it my turn to drive?”
“Hey buddy,” I said a few days after the lake trip. I had been throwing the ball for him in the yard. We had walked back into the barn to put the shoulder saving ball thrower away. Jin was still panting pretty hard and it took him a second to catch his breath.
“What’s up Bobby?”
Weirdly, something tumbled in me just then, some subtle, unknown and ethereal thing echoed in my guts. I have no idea at all what the source was and I didn’t like that it had a hint of being not good. I brushed it off though, mostly because there was no logical reason to give validity to some stupid unformed feeling. I also didn’t forget it.
Hearing that phrase, from my ten-year-old golden retriever and best friend, would someday become one of the most cherished memories of my life. Thinking of him saying, “What’s up Bobby?” does, and always will, make me smile, or cry. I tell myself that someday I will correct him and let him know that my name is Chris, but not today. For today, I am very happy to be, for whatever reason, Bobby.
My body commanded itself to drop onto my knees right then, and to wrap my arms completely around Jin and put my face in the thick fur of his ruff. I can’t say he smells good, not in the conventional human, I-have-the-over-powering-smell-of-cologne-on sort of way. In a, the world is right way though, Jin smells wonderful. He’s got a hint of horse poo and definitely some hay that he had wrestled the other dogs in and underneath all of that, just plain dog goodness. He tolerated my hug for quite a while and then turned and looked at me with those wonderful golden eyes with all of those universes in them and wagged his tail a little and asked again, “What’s up Bobby?”
I let go and straightened myself up. “You do know that humans live in their intellect?”
Jin’s tail drooped just a tiny bit. That change was subtle, maybe just the breeze or a muscle tic. He walked a very few short steps toward a garbage can about a foot from me, lifted a leg and peed on it. He then trotted out of the barn and into the yard. After a second, he apparently spotted one of the other dogs and poured on the coals, switching to an all-out run for some much needed, tumble and play.
Jin and I had a fire outside one evening. We were in the back yard, sitting about fifty feet from the creek. The sound of it tumbling through the woods was soothing and atavistic. The moon was full and the flickering fire gave us a connection to all of the many humans and dogs that had sat at fires in the eons before us.
“Do you think dogs and humans are really that different?” I asked.
Jin was, as is his habit, sitting in a chair beside me and watching the fire. I never get out just one chair for myself. He doesn’t always sit in the chair I set out for him, but most times, he did.
There was no answer for a long time, but he finally spoke softly. “I think the big difference is that same thing we talked about before, that you, as an entire species, don’t seem to realize that you live in your feelings.”
“And dogs never live in facts?”
Jin shook his head. “We don’t have facts. Facts require articulated ideas. Articulating ideas requires words to articulate them with. No words, no facts. We live in our feelings.”
“And you are really convinced that we live in our feelings?”
He nodded. “That is your real estate too.”
Real estate? Oh, “Reality? Our feelings are our reality too?”
A chuff and a nod.
“Then I still don’t get the problem.” I didn’t. I get where he might think that we are messed up, us spending time on our phones “researching” things and shopping on-line and ignoring each other. But he obviously didn’t get how much that benefits us.
“As I see you, not just you Bobby, but you humans, you don’t realize that you aren’t all connected with yourselves inside your heads.”
I’ll have to process this a little, but I think my dog just told me that I, not just me, but all of us human people, are crazy. Argh, why can’t I just leave my dog to his delusions. “Okay, what are you even talking about Jin? Are you saying that all humans have multiple personalities?”
He watched the fire for a while but finally turned to me and nodded.
“Like, we are crazy?”
He shook his head. “Not crazy. I think you don’t know that all of you are that way. None of you seem to know that the parts inside you don’t talk to each other.”
I might have just started getting a glimmer of what he was talking about. I hadn’t found any agreement with his point of view but, I might have just started seeing what that point of view was.
“Are you saying that humans have a feeling part and a thinking part and those parts don’t always communicate?”
I often give Jin praise. Sometimes it’s training praise, I want him to feel good about something so he will repeat that behavior, and sometimes it’s just because I love him and want him to feel good in general or just plain old appreciation bursting out of me. Right then, Jin leaned over and gave me a long, slow lick across my arm. This wasn’t uncommon for him, I just wasn’t sure if that was training lick or not.
Okay, I guess my dog thinks I’m on the right track. “You think that we have a feeling part and a thinking part and they don’t talk to each other?”
Definite head nod, exaggerated by the long nose.
“And that this lack of internal memo sending causes us grief?”
“Yes.” Followed by a chuff. I don’t know the translation for the chuff.
I was starting to get his picture. “So, it’s like we have to co-rulers, a king and queen, Yin and Yang or something, one is thinking and one is feeling and they don’t talk to each other and it fu..”, I try to not swear around my dog although, I’m not really sure of the why of that. “It messes us up?”
Jin seemed to ponder that for a moment and then nodded.
I spent some time thinking about all of that over the next few days. Jin was telling me that humans were messed up because we have a thinking half and a feeling half and the two don’t link up well. That does make some rudimentary sense. I’ve always felt that the benefit of any sort of counseling therapy is simply in hearing yourself talk. I think there’s a lot of “Oh shit! I didn’t realize I felt that way. Why didn’t I say so!” moments to be had in psychoanalysis.
But I don’t really buy it as a major factor in human unhappiness. I am intelligent and intellectual and I live in my intellectual side. I love science, believe in data and reason and I follow my rational thoughts. Those are the things I live by and my emotions follow where I lead them.
I was working in the barn one day. I had the door open on the north side where we have a parking area. I had set up a table and was soldering on some wiring project that I can’t remember now, maybe for my van. Jin was laying, sprawled out on the gravel, sleeping in the sun. There is an apartment in our barn and our tenant’s car is parked there. Our tenant got into that car and, focused on the car parked to her right, drove over Jin. I was soldering and then Jin was screaming.
There IS an intellectual part of me that had just shifted into some crazy overdrive. Internal bleeding. I had looked up just in time to see the tire rolling over Jin’s middle. His middle, his organs. There had to be internal bleeding. Somebody in the statistics department of my brain threw down a calculator and crunched some numbers. The odds say that organ damage is very likely. To remain here is to have no chance at all. I’ve got to pick him up, even at the risk of further harm and get him to the emergency vet. This calculating took less time than it took for the chair I had just vacated to hit the floor sideways behind me. I ran to my friend and dead lifted him and then ran, with him screaming, across the lawn to my car. He continued screaming as I drove off, leaving my devastated tenant, crying in the driveway.
I drove as fast as I could reasonably go, faster really. I was not being safe and if the odds department in my head was still crunching numbers, the office mail boy wasn’t carrying any memos. Jin’s screams were quieter now but when I reached to the back seat and caressed him, he calmed, quieting almost completely. I don’t think he was really conscious right then, just somewhere in between and still, my touch, our connection, mattered. Periodically, just to avoid crashing, I had to use two hands to drive. It seemed extremely clear that Jin was aware of the absence of my hand and I did everything I could to break that contact as little as possible.
By the time we got to the emergency vet, Jin had gone back to another place, the place where he had been before finding me and where, in the universe, our truly precious things are kept, safe and sacred. His whimpers had gotten quieter and then they had stopped. The thinking part of me knew what had happened in the back seat of my car. My friend had been unable to hang on, even with the strongest love, he had to let go. The feeling part of me had abdicated his half of the throne for a while.
I buried my friend in the field, right where we used to watch clouds together. I put down the shovel and sat, without him. Although I will never know why he called me Bobby, I am so very glad I never corrected that mistake. The field wasn’t as soft and the clouds were just clouds. I see, we do live in our feelings and all of the facts won’t change that. There is magic in our lives, so much magic, all it takes is perspective. Jin showed me that, every day, through his patience and his amazing, undefined, non-factual love and unexplainable goodness. My touch quieted his pain. That’s all the magic I need and all of the facts in the world will never change that.
So, I do believe. I believe in my talking dog and in Santa Claus. The fact that parents drag themselves out of bed in the middle of the night, eat some shitty cookies and set things out for their kids, isn’t any different than knowing the sky is blue because of the way the sun’s light gets altered by the molecules in the air. The sky is blue and Santa is real and Jin talked to me in so many ways.
We humans are fractured, we have a very dual nature by being able to reason and still living in our feelings and we do live in our feelings. The art, that we so seldom seem to master, is in the conversations between the two parts. I truly believe that good mental health requires that we sometimes have the intellectual side take the emotional side by the hand, give ourselves a few hugs and have a nice soothing talk. Sometimes too though, the intellectual side should just shut up, smile and let the emotional side jump in the mud puddles.
This story is an amalgam of things that have really happened. Jin was very real and very loved and died in his sleep at ten years old. He is buried in the field where he and I used to sit and watch clouds. Jin’s passing was on September ninth 2019 and on September tenth, a golden retriever puppy was born in Boise Idaho. That puppy’s name would later become Sam. We drove 500 miles to pick up another dog that we had picked out over video calls with the breeder. Sam picked us instead.
Sam did get run over, almost exactly as I described. The better part of reality was, the tire went over Sam’s hips and not his organs. The blood I found all over the car turned out to be from my knees when I had dropped to pick him up from the gravel. Sam underwent several surgeries to pin his pelvis back together and had a very long and arduous convalescence. He and I lived on the floor for a few months and there was a lot of concern that he might have to have a leg amputated but, in the end, he is 100% and watching his flowing, energetic beauty when he runs like the wind is the best thing ever.
The actual trip to the emergency vet and then to Seattle for the first of those surgery’s happened just about as I described too but without any dying although the terror that he might do just that never left my head for that entire drive. His response to my touch was exactly as I wrote.
That is the most important part of the story. Even between the emergency vet, where Sam was heavily sedated and Seattle, to the veterinary surgery center, Sam was whimpering and obviously in a lot of pain and my touch made a very obvious difference. That touch, connection, is everything.
I very much believe that we do live in our feelings, that our feelings are our reality and magic is in all of us. Watching the sunrise, and believing your dog can talk to you can live right alongside hard science and logarithms and the periodic table of the elements. We just need to learn to coexist, with ourselves. Our feelings are not wrong and they are not facts. The thinking side of you processes all kinds of shit and comes to a lot of conclusions about what you should do but those conclusions aren’t always right. The feeling side of you feels all kinds of things and also recommends actions, also not always right. Sometimes, to process through and find the right path, means that the feeling side needs some calm reassurance from the thinking side. The feeling side is where we live. Let’s learn to enjoy that.
2016
I walked out and sat down with the dogs for a minute. When I came back in I looked up it was 2019. Like the expansion of the universe, I feel like my life is tearing by at an ever increasing rate. There's some magic happening there, but not the good Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny kind. The color is leaching out of everything, wrinkles are popping up, everywhere, and I have long since recognized that the concept of baldness is a myth. Nobody ever told me it was a freaking hair migration and worse than that, on the trip between my formerly luxurious head and my ears, ass, toes, back and everywhere else on my body, that the hoard of roaming hairs would propagate like crazy? When the cat crept out of the bag on that well kept secret and I took an inventory of the new crop virtually sprouting from my, ears, I couldn't help but wonder why all of the secrecy and thought that maybe a little transparency from my older friends would have blunted the shock. Then again, when I stopped to think about my grandparents for instance, I could only thank God that I was spared the details.
2018 brought retirement in June and an apartment in the barn. That was a lot of work and really shitty pay. 2019 has so far, conjured up a a trip to West Virginia to bring home a SuperCub which is just too cool.
So, I'm obviously crappy at writing here but there is a good side to that, I've been writing elsewhere! Book one "Side Road to Nevada" is done and available in it's current e-version from amazon. Side Road turned out okay. Definitely not great but okay. A weird aspect of story telling on this scale that I had not expected, is how hard it is to gauge how your material is being received and perceived. That was surprisingly difficult. The thing is, win lose or draw, I like writing! Okay, really, I love it. To be able to create, on every level, a universe with whole people and events and crumbs on the floor is just too cool. So, Side Road will get rewritten at some point, for now I just want to work on Cycle Seven and another short story, as yet un-named (it's about a conversation between an old farmer/pilot and Genghis Khan who has been reincarnated as a Golden retriever).
I would like to think that I learned a ton from that experience and possibly, that I've improved. I am currently on what I hope is book one of a trilogy. "Cycle Seven" is also lightly science fiction and basically introduces your new friends, the characters and sets up where the rest is going, all to shit.
Dusty, a very bright young red head from Idaho gets recruited to a new university started by a rich philanthropist where he can pursue his science outside of the demanding world of academia. What he discovers is, a star that is the twin to ours that has an "event" which, from 1.7 million light years away, looks scary. The scary part is that our sun seems to be on a parallel path and what Dusty infers, from his programming is that, it isn't going to be good. He also discovers that Dr. Anderson, the founder of the university is a fake and cheerfully steals his students brilliant ideas...
The other thing I'm doing is rebuilding the Skywagon. The paint you see on that photo up there? It's all gone as are the radios, seats and everything else that won't make it completely dissolve when removed. It's getting a "bush" style makeover with new radios, cables and a complete inside and out corrosion removal and re-coat.
I will try and update here at more reasonable intervals, like less than a year.
Chris Allen
I would like to think that I learned a ton from that experience and possibly, that I've improved. I am currently on what I hope is book one of a trilogy. "Cycle Seven" is also lightly science fiction and basically introduces your new friends, the characters and sets up where the rest is going, all to shit.
Dusty, a very bright young red head from Idaho gets recruited to a new university started by a rich philanthropist where he can pursue his science outside of the demanding world of academia. What he discovers is, a star that is the twin to ours that has an "event" which, from 1.7 million light years away, looks scary. The scary part is that our sun seems to be on a parallel path and what Dusty infers, from his programming is that, it isn't going to be good. He also discovers that Dr. Anderson, the founder of the university is a fake and cheerfully steals his students brilliant ideas...
The other thing I'm doing is rebuilding the Skywagon. The paint you see on that photo up there? It's all gone as are the radios, seats and everything else that won't make it completely dissolve when removed. It's getting a "bush" style makeover with new radios, cables and a complete inside and out corrosion removal and re-coat.
I will try and update here at more reasonable intervals, like less than a year.
Chris Allen
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