Tears of the Dog // Out on the Dunes

 "The tigers have found me

and I do not care."

- Bukowski

Three Vietnamese children are playing in a large puddle that has formed on the slip road. Caused by the heavy rain earlier today, yesterday, and the day before that, going back for as long as I can remember. I can’t remember the last time the sea was calm enough to swim in. They are all wearing red Manchester United shirts, they must be cheap here. Everything is cheap here unless you have that strange, but all too common desire to make it expensive. The youngest of my two dogs, Cohen, is on the lead. You have to catch him when you can, the trick is not to give up. Don’t allow that nagging sense of failure to seep too deep. He’s young and relatively stupid, eventually he will blunder. If you don’t get him on the lead then he won’t come home, and if he doesn’t come home he’ll wander the courtyard barking at everyone that walks by. His bark is much older than he is. The three boys take turns to say hello to me in English. I choose to ignore them, I might be deaf, or perhaps my existence has been so sheltered that I’ve never heard and understood the word ‘hello.’ Truth be told, I’ve just grown to not like hearing it come my way. Usually, I make an effort for children, but I am tired and my tonsils are swollen. 

Huxley, my eldest dog keeps pressing against my leg. He’s making sure he’s safe. A bigger dog is following the bitch on heat that is with us. Huxley whines and almost trips me up a few times. About an hour before this, I was sat on the floor with Huxley and the bitch on heat. I’ve named her Jessica. She’s not mine. One of many strays. The strays here seem relaxed around me. They’re happy to walk by my side and be petted. I can rough play with them. I can push them away and tap their noses disapprovingly when I need to. They’re not afraid of me, and I’m not so worried about a dog bite. The way I see it, I’m comfortable striking anything as hard as I need to in order to prevent injury to myself or something I love. Should I strike anything too hard, well that’s no longer my responsibility. 

Of course, the dogs don’t understand this, but the dogs have never tried to bite me. I think we walk together with a mutual respect. An understanding. They take me away from the human world, and I bring a small isolated slice of it to them. Huxley and Jessica were dealing with the drama of post-canine-coitus. They were stuck together just off the beach we’d been walking along. By the time I could see them Huxley was laying still on the ground, his dick locked firmly inside Jessica, who was on all four of her feet. Meanwhile, another one of the stray dogs was trying to mount the precarious link between the two of them. From where I was, a few metres down the road, Huxley looked perfectly still. Too still to be alive. A young Indian girl was pointing at them and calling to one of the security guards from the hotel. Five or six people watched as I approached. 

Huxley was lying on his side, the back end of him held off the ground by Jessica. He had submitted. Maybe to pain, or maybe to helplessness. I sat down with them. Stroking them both. Usually, it takes the dogs a few minutes to become unstuck, but I sat there for a good ten, keeping them both calm. I am not a vet. Nor have I studied how to separate two sexually bound dogs. After studying the link between the two of them, I put Huxley onto his hind legs so that he was in the original mounted position. Thus, undoing any of the twists caused by Jessica’s barrel rolls that she seems to be under the impression will help her in these particular circumstances. Then I pinned Huxley between my legs and held Jessica still. I looked up. It’s a strange thing to be watched doing. It was hard to gauge what any of them were feeling. I didn’t care. It has become increasingly difficult to care about such things. Eventually, the dropping of a pool of water marked their separation. I turned my back on the bystanders and continued walking.

It’s important not to attach human emotions to the animal kingdom. Most animal owners are guilty of it at times. We’re all guilty of it at some point. It’s hard not to imagine that the persistent mosquitoes in the room at night aren’t somewhat malevolent, and that is a tiny flying black speck. There are things that my dogs do that I might do to another person if I wanted to piss them off and give them the impression I have no respect for them. They ignore me when called, refuse to come inside, they wake me up at 6 a.m. even though they know I’m sick. Cohen barks at people, and the more those people seem to be afraid, the more he barks. Cohen is around 6 months old I would guess. I found him wandering the dunes covered in fleas. His stomach was swollen and he looked like he’d been put together using all the unwanted parts of the litter. Leave him there to die or take him home and say goodbye to what’s left of those uninterrupted hours of sleep. Now he’s older and healthy, he still doesn’t look like much of a threat, so it is hard to sympathise with startled passers-by, frozen, after being forced to look up from their handheld digital world. I’ve watched men run away and leave their girlfriends standing alone, paralysed, not knowing what to do. Perhaps I should make room for past traumatic experiences, but as I mentioned, it has become increasingly difficult to care about such things. 

With Huxley and Jessica now separate, Cohen, who is not on his lead at this time, and the other stray I previously mentioned both take turns to try and mount Jessica. She doesn’t manage to walk far before one of them is on her back. Huxley is somewhere else sniffing the ground as he walks ahead of a wagging tail. This goes on for about two kilometres. Jessica becomes increasingly aggressive to the two dogs. First barking at them, then snapping, then attacking them. The dogs persist, wagging their tales, oblivious to Jessica’s wishes. But then, I have to admit, that I am oblivious to Jessica’s wishes. To me, Jessica is a walking attempted-rape victim and Cohen and the other dog are two loutish sex offenders. I am certain that the dogs don’t have the thought processes or experiences to make such likenesses, but the scene still disturbs me. I walk closer to them, onto the dunes. 

With every coital attempt, I call out to Jessica, if she stays by my side I can push them away. But she wants to run, chase things, be a dog, not a bitch on heat. With every attempt, I feel an increasing hatred for Cohen and the other dog. This persistent desire to have one’s way with absolute disregard for any affected party or parties. It echoes into my human experience and triggers my human reactions. This is the main reason I detached from the human world. Its impact is never entirely avoidable, but you can certainly lessen it by being around them as little as possible. Since my bike accident, since I stopped drinking, and as I get older, or maybe all of the above, I find my intolerance for it growing. I am at the point, where my reactions now concern me. 

I walk amongst them worrying that something is going to happen that will flip the proverbial switch. Anything that has the slightest shade of not being able or willing to show consideration for the living world around it/them. I am no longer able to find stillness beside it. And while you might argue that each incident deserves to be rated individually on a scale of intensity and disregard, I see it all as an echo of the greatest human flaw. The group of people playing loud music in a residential area, the drunk man shouting obscenities at a woman, the unsolicited messages, the group of people shouting while in the company of a scared dog that can’t run anywhere, the gym user who leaves his weights on the equipment after they’ve finished. All of these might seem forgivable to you, but it echoes the same human behaviours that commit rape and steal. It exists within the idea that one’s needs must be met, no matter the effects they might have on those involved. “My own path might just as well be made easy and more suitable, even if it inconveniences and even causes harm to those who cross it.” Fuck that. 

This is where I must stop. Talk of potential legal action. Because people will only ever measure the world as they see fit. It seems I have found myself in a world where most -not all- seem to… Well, no. No one thinks they should get away with anything. They don't think. In most cases they simply lack the awareness to comprehend what they might be doing wrong. And before anyone who knows me says “Jamie, come on man, your twenties and most of your thirties weren’t exactly clean living.” I get that, and perhaps that makes it the trigger it is today. Perhaps it is all just what has to happen in the moments before we realize something greater than we already know at the time. But then, what teaches us that lesson? What did I say at the beginning…

“I’m comfortable striking anything as hard as I need to in order to prevent injury to myself or something I love. Should I strike anything too hard, well that’s no longer my responsibility”          

That’s kind of where I’ve arrived watching the dogs do what dogs do. I have found myself crying many times on those dunes because I do not want to feel angry, and I don’t want to feel as if I could hurt someone, or that I should. But, at the same time, I don’t want to sit on my hands and allow people to act the way they think they can, without repercussion. Because, if you are to allow that to happen then you allow that behaviour to repeat and replicate. I believe John Stuart Mill said something on the matter. I am pushed and I am pulled. It just seems that every time I step away from that place. That place where I look out over the sea. The only noises are the dogs, the wind, and the waves. Every time I step away, it is there… ‘The dogs’ disregard one another. Taking. No longer looking around. No longer feeling. The heliocentric revolution is fully reversed. Prices are hiked, and innocence is forcefully taken. No one considers how futures might be shaped. You act just like the dogs. You bark when you want to. But you don’t have the excuse of instinct. You are human, whatever that amounts to now. You are human and you act because you are selfish and shortsighted. If a moment with honest self-reflection was allowed instead of dipping into diversion and distraction, you would be disgusted. 

Out on the dunes, Cohen and the other dog continue to take it in turns. For a moment I imagine picking one of them up and throwing them hard at the ground. My eyes water. I never imagined feeling so much sadness, but here it is. Perhaps it is madness that makes the world look this way. Perhaps what I see is what I see, but I should be more forgiving. I don’t know anymore. I stay away when I can, but you keep pushing. You keep coming at me with your noise and disregard. I feel like everyone else must just take it, otherwise, there would be riots, and that makes it worse. To suffer in silence. Maybe to even become so numb to it that a life full of unnecessary suffering is accepted as what life is. Back in my apartment, Cohen approaches me as I’m writing this. It is two hours past their dinner time, but I wanted to get this out of me, uninterrupted. Echoing that greatest human flaw, to take what I want at the expense of others.