I'm Back and the Dog Has Gone Insane

My whirlwind tour of New York is concluded; look for several NY related posts to come. I feel like I was gone for four weeks not four days, and my feet still hurt. However, let's move on immediately to the present day, where Jackson's sanity, always precarious, has slipped completely over the edge. A warned me over the phone, but I didn't quite believe her. Now, I know the terrible truth.

Jackson has discovered feet and the smell of footprints and he finds them endlessly bizarre and pleasing. This is a difficult thing to describe, seeing as how I think it may be unique in the long and sometimes vexing history of human/coonhound interaction. What it amounts to is this: if you walk around the house in bare feet, which we are wont to do, Jackson becomes extremely excited and follows everywhere your feet went, nose to the ground, tail wagging ecstatically, stopping occasionally to bay and let the world know he's on the scent. When he finally finds your actual feet, he tries to dig underneath them to see where the fascinating smell is coming from. This starts out hysterically funny (especially if you do a little dance, and run around in small circles) but becomes annoying faster than you might think. Or maybe you would think. Because it is. Annoying as hell, I mean. He sometimes tries to dig right through your feet, and that's really annoying. It's almost worth it, though. I need a video camera to document the madness - last night I fell down weeping with laughter. Granted I had been in a cargo van for 12 straight hours with F the curator and, god help me, a CD of Marianne Faithfull singing 1930s German cabaret songs which may be the worst thing I have ever heard, so I was more than a little out of it, but still Jackson managed to drive me from hysteria into an almost catatonic state of helpless laughter.

We should have known it was coming, since a few weeks ago he had a similar reaction to his own feet. He didn't seem to quite believe that they belonged to him, and he chased them all over the couch. It's really hard to describe the sight of a large hound dog on a couch chasing his own feet but it's just as weird as you might think. He dug holes in the futon trying to get to them and when he actually did manage to catch one he couldn't believe it. It's kind of like the way Tyrannosaurus Rex's brain was too small to encompass the notion of his tail - Jackson's brain is apparently too small to encompass his whole body, or anyone elses whole body either. He thinks in small chunks, like kibble, and he's apparently decided in his kibbly brain that feet are some new species of animal: a new species that we're inexplicably keeping as pets. Thank the gods that he got friendlier before he came to this conclusion. If he was trying to kill my feet this would all be less amusing.

All this has led me to compose a little song, roughly to the tune of We Must Find Another Whisky Bar - it goes like this
This is Theo
He is not crazy
He is a good dog, a sane dog, a very sane dog
This is Jackson
He is nutso
A complete whack job, yes complete whack job
Yay for Theo! He is sane! So nice and sane!
Boo for Jackson! He's so crazy!
I tell you he is crazy!

The dogs both like this song except that even as I type this and sing it, I must also shout "Out from under there! You fucking loon! Those are my feet, you weirdo!" which all proves that I am just the ADD poster child queen of multitasking.