Affection-Seeking

My dear New College alum, most dog-forward friend Colleen Powell just adopted a dog, a cute, smallish (about 40 lb) pit bull, Josephine (named, as I understand it, after Jo from Pride and Prejudice—Colleen, please correct me if I'm wrong.).

(Colleen, could you please give me a picture of Josephine to add here? I would love to do that; I'd be happy to edit the post.)

Colleen was very specific about wanting a dog that was smart, but not so smart that they would cause trouble in order to be rewarded/incentivized to stop the trouble, as with a treat. 

Catherine (as always the subject of my blog posts) is a very smart dog, with her own approach. (Assertiveness, maybe a bulldog thing.)

She craves affection. Perhaps it's because of, or part of, our bond. As I say a lot, I would not have adopted a bulldog—but she adopted me. That's how I wound up adopting a dog from our neighbors across the street. I dogsat Catherine during the day 5 days a week, for almost a year before I adopted her. (Perhaps I needed the dog sitting more than Catherine did.)

So this afternoon, after breakfast [sic[, Catherine growled, as usual, telling us she wanted to go outside and poop. When we came in, I sat down again. As she came down our front hall, she was growling, and barked softly a couple of times. Then, when I could see her, she looked at me, and barked. Not an angry bark, not a guarding bark, but a happy bark. (I know her well enough to know this.) Not softly. 

She doesn't do this at meal times. She just guilts us. And when we feed her from the table (yes, I know, but it's fresh fruit, or peanut butter—I always check the AKC website first) she'll growl a little, then give up. 

So anyway, Colleen, count your (secular) blessings. 

(Capitalization, punctuation, and other errors due to using speech-to-text dictation, and inability to edit on my phone with one hand on Catherine, throughout.)

New Begging Behavior

 Catherine has developed a new behavior.

Begging at the table

We do feed Catherine dog-appropriate human food from the table. A surprising number of things are okay: Pineapple, banana (she loves it!), mango… (mango?), and, of course, peanut butter, when I make my daily PB&J.

She does beg for food, dog-appropriate or not. I don't mind discreet begging, but I've been dissuading her from growling or whining, with a stern "No!" and further words to the same effect, in a slightly milder tone. She's been listening, too. This dog either understands my words or is preternaturally attuned to my tone and focus.

Something different

Lately she's been behaving. She'll sit up and look at us, in the pitiable way that says she's being starved, and can I please, sir, have more? Then she lies down at our (my, usually) feet.

Today, after a bit she went to her bed behind me at the dining table and sat. (She has two beds. She is a czarina, after all—in her own right, mind, not as second fiddle to a male.)

She started growling again, looking at me. She wasn't growling for food—I could tell. So, what for? What about? I turned around and petted her, stroking the fur behind her ear. She didn't pull away from me, and started sighing. When she wants something specific, she'll pull away from me when I try to pet her. (Unless I start massaging her neck. Then she waits a moment.)

I stroked her head for a moment, then turned back to the table.

A few minutes later, I heard snoring behind me. She was stretched out on her bed, sound asleep. She was still there, in the same position, an hour later.

She popped up a minute or two ago. She growled, I petted her, she sighed, I turned back to this post, and, no more growling. More or less the same behavior. And, once again, asleep.

What am I to make of this?

I have thoughts, opinions. But in adopting Catherine, a seven-year-old bulldog big for her her breed (allowing her to adopt me, really; all I did was treat her in the style to which she was entitled)—I went way past beginner dog owner, through intermediate, advanced, and into expert. I get by by consulting her fan club—a Facebook Messenger group of selected, tolerant dog-forward friends, and by paying very close attention to her wonderful veterinarian. (Her vet, despite some worrying recent lab tests, has been happy with how she's doing.)

Anyway, I have my opinons, about what she's begging for, why she's begging.

But I'd love to hear from my more dog-forward friends.

Please post comments! (Log in—I really want to know who you are!)

Thanks for reading!

Late-Night Adventure

I take Catherine out at around 11:30, for the last time at the night. I take her on longer walks when its cooler—we're both pretty sensitive to heat. Usually, when she needs to go, even if she needs to poop, she does it in our mulch-filled atrium. We do her major exercise, collaborative with me, indoors.

Last night, she went into the mulch, she went over to Poopsville—what I call the corner she prefers—and then walked out, facing towards our front gate. 

This meant she wanted to go on an adventure, as call it, at 11:45 at night, only wearing a collar, when she's supposed to be walked only with a harness—because of her multifocal osteoarthritis (that is, arthritis in every joint including in her spine).

She won't let me put her harness on at night, probably because she's tired and in more pain than earlier in the day. She gets 300mg of gabapentin and 150mg of tramadol three times a day—a lot of pain meds. She also gets a newish monoclonal antibody "biopharmaceutical" called Librela, specifically for her osteoarthritis. Librela is a miracle drug. Before Librela, she was hobbling. I don't know what quality of life she would have right now. Now, though, she walks normally, can exercise, and even rush across the street—with one of her beloved treats as inducement.

Also, I wasn't wearing a shirt, and I didn't have those treats. I often need them to get her moving back to our house. Catherine loves me, and often does what I want… but I leverage how food-motivated bulldogs are. She's on very short rations—a svelte bulldog lives longer, a big priority here.

So I went in, put on a shirt, grabbed the adventure trip "belt bag," locked the door, and we set off.

Except, Catherine then didn't want to go. She sat right at the open gate, and looked at me. I talked to her, as I usually do. I said, "Catherine. it's up to you but you need to poop." She sat. (She had "dropped anchor," as my very dog-forward friend Colleen puts it.) And no harness, so no boosting. Reaching under and lifting her, a big rescue-dog no no, with her. I said "Come." I used the beseeching tone of voice that usually gets her going. 

Finally, I had to use the high value treat—the only one one of those I had—to get her out of the gate and going. 

So we went out. We walked around in the rain-soaked grass and pooped. (Well, she pooped.)

Then, sort of as usual, she insisted on being bribed to go back in. I only had one high value treat left in the belt bag. I didn't want to use it. so I grabbed three pieces of kibble, and said "This is the usual exchange rate—let's go." She went. 

I put the poop bag on the poop disposal depot—four bags, it'd been a busy day; I kept not having time to dump them. And we went inside.

Uneventful, huh? 

This dog, I tell you.

(Written late last night while I was sitting and petting her, and edited and posted tonight—all on my phone! Sketch of Catherine by talented law librarian comrade and friend Mary Whisner.)

Self-Protection versus Crating

Not all dogs need to be crated to feel safe when they're alone.

Catherine the Great—our dog, dog of my heart—protects herself. She doesn't need crating to feel safe; she would just resource-guard her beds.

She was rescued by her previous guardians at three. (How they gave us both the gift of honoring the stronger bond she and I have is another story.) She's fine defending herself. She's reactive, and she used to be about protecting her bed. She must be used to protecting herself—or trying

.

But a few months ago, something changed. She let me start petting her in her bed, even when she just woke up, and sit with her on her bed.

Things changed even more a week ago: She wanted me to pet her last thing at night, sometimes to sleep.

This was the position she got in, and was in just after midnight this morning, right before I got up to go to sleep.

This is our bond.

(A very short memoir photoessay about a very important nonhuman person in my life. I started something, I made mistakes, typos (that I fixed, some after posting), and, I finished it,: the 2 Rules of Writing, from the excellent namesake Facebook group. Speaking of freeing restrictions and safety: I do some of my best writing on my phone, often on FB, with its awful virtual keyboard, without even using voice transcription. Like this.)

(The metatextual commentary, very much in character for someone who tried to write an explicitly hypertext honors baccalaureate thesis… in 1994.)

(Written on Facebook, turned into a blog post, and published, all in about twenty minutes. Creativity, good for depression. Who knew?)

This Dog, I Tell You

I was walking Catherine the Great (now part of our family: introduction, recent update) one evening when my neighbor friend, David, walked by. He's a tall Black guy with an extremely impressive Afro. We struck up a friendship as we've kept seeing each other in the neighborhood. I see him walking through our neighborhood a lot in the evening, because he takes Tri-Rail up from his job at a university in Miami-Dade County. 

Catherine does not like David. I'm not entirely sure why. She doesn't seem to have a problem with Black people in general, and she seems to have a problem with some white people just the same. Catherine started barking in that menacing, guard-dog way she has. I would not want to mess with this dog when she's behaving like that.

I sat down next to her on the asphalt, and she laid down next to me. I got her attention away from David, talked to her, sternly but in a normal tone of voice, and told her that she should stop barking, because David was a friend of mine, he wasn't going to hurt me, and he wasn't going to hurt her. (I'm not even sure I told her that David wasn't going to hurt her, because I don't think it would have mattered.) I didn't try to discourage her from defending me in general, mind you: I was very direct with her, saying that David was a friend of mine.

She stopped barking and calmed down, immediately. I could tell from her relaxed body language that she was no longer in guard-dog mode. (I didn't even see if her hackles had been up; when she's in guard-dog mode, they're obvious.)

So I asked David to move closer. He did. (I have to thank him for trusting me, and Catherine, but I did tell him that I had Catherine by her regular leash, the short leash I keep on her harness because her harness has no handle, and directly by her harness.)

He approached, and kept approaching. He came up to a couple of feet away from Catherine and me. Catherine acted the way she would when someone she was okay with walked up to her—completely chill.

I asked him to give her one of her high-value treats, and he agreed. I handed him the bag. He took one out, and brought his hand pretty close to Catherine. Catherine did her usual springing-for-a-treat thing— not menacing, but faster than you would think an 8-year-old bulldog could do. It didn't faze him. That was all Catherine did. All.

After I sat down and talked to Catherine about David, her whole affect changed, like night and day. I've often said that one reason we bonded is that I sat on the floor with her and talked to her from the first day she was at our house, when I was dog-sitting her. Early in our acquaintance, I bought a legless chair. It has a little padding and a back, and is designed to sit on the floor. it's a little cushier than sitting on the tiles. I've spent a lot of time in that chair. (Other than her paws, It's Catherine's favorite object to lick in the house… other than me. I don't think that's a coincidence.)

Catherine has done similar things, but not this dramatic a change. When she barks at someone behind our house, sometimes, I'll let her barker a few times. Listening to her low menacing bark gives me a twinge of atavistic fear—and a bit of Schadenfreude for a hypothetical burglar. Then, I sit on the floor with her, and tell her it's okay, she protected the house, she doesn't have to worry about anything. She calms down immediately.

Either Catherine understands English, or she's preternaturally in tune with my tone. (Not everyone's, I think. She doesn't pay attention to Becky nearly as much or as well, even though she has known Becky as long as she has known me.)

I love this dog. Her previous guardians offered to let me adopt her when they were moving away. They could see that I had a better bond with her than they did. Becky was unsure if it would work out or whether she was on board with this, I cried over this dog, not as an attempt to influence Becky, but at the thought of losing Catherine. 

When I was a kid, I cried a lot, as kids do. My parents made fun of me. As medical parents, they said that my tear ducts were connected to my kidneys. (I'm sure that came from my father. Long story.) So, I don't cry. Not "I don't cry easily," I don't cry at all. I cried over this dog. Becky said in the almost 27 years we've been together, she'd never seen me cry.

So, you can see my love and concern for this dog. I've known for a while that she loves and cares about me. 

But I am continually amazed at just how deep that bond goes… in both directions.

As I have said a lot, for any number of reasons, on any number of occasions, "This dog, I tell you."

Catherine the Great

I've been calling her "the bestest bulldog in all the land" for quite some time--indisputable.

I've recently added "the best of all possible bulldogs." (Vicki-Marie Petrick appreciated that encomium, perforce.)

Her title: Supervisory Chief Associate Bulldog. (She even has email addresses: A real one, and a forward-only short enough to fit on her name tag.)

(Paw on knee, hand on paw, chin on hand,)

We adopted Catherine, about a year ago.

(Talk about burying the lede.)

Speaking of total chaos: She couldn't have come into our lives at a better time.

(Re-)Introduction

Hi.

Mitch Silverman here.

(I love this caricature. Drawn by Doug Shannon, of EvenToons--website out of order. I've taken the liberty of replacing Thomson-Reuters orange with Pantone 287--New College of Florida blue. The color of classic New College of Florida, not its putrid remains. Which is why I'm linking to the Novo Collegian Alliance webpage instead.)

Reintroducing myself, with not much of an introduction,

I'm going to post what I want here.

It's total chaos here. I'm under a lot of pressure, and there is no happy happy joy joy to be felt hereabouts. 

But if you think I'm vaguebooking, or you want "the ressst of the story," as it were...

go elsewhere.

As for more of an introduction: Later, perhaps.

A Covenant with Death

To quote William Lloyd Garrison on slavery in the Constitution:

The Second Amendment "…is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell."

(He was referencing Isaiah 28:15: "We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement.")

Lawless Immunity

The SCOTUS immunity opinion—completely unmoored from originalism or history and tradition—is, legally speaking, bullshit—completely lawless.

As a lawyer for 24 years, and before that too, I've had a passionate belief in the rule of law, even in the face of this SCOTUS conservative supermajority's self-dealing, undemocratic decisions.

As a for-instance: Justice Thomas was in favor of Chevron deference in 2005—he wrote an opinion reaffirming it.

As that article I linked to says,

[Harlan] Crow co-founded the Club for Growth in 1999 to promote limited government and overturn Chevron. In 2010, he gave the justice’s wife, Ginni Thomas, $500,000 to start Liberty Consulting, a firm that handles anonymous political donations.

(Crow may have also afforded Thomas some other trifles.)

Now, in 2024, Thomas voted in favor of overturning the Chevron case.

The immunity decision goes farther. It allows a President Trump to commit official treason—invoke the Insurrection Act—a core power—to put "dangerous" Democrats in camps? Sure, why not; his motive doesn't matter.

Lawless? As in, made up from whole cloth.

Lawyer and excellent legal journalist Chris Geidner, wrote about Trump v. U.S. in his excellent Law Dork blog the day the decision came out:

It is a shocking expansion of presidential power to benefit Trump that transforms the presidency — and, with it, the nation.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court’s decision, making those broad pronouncements in Trump’s challenge to the special counsel’s indictment of the former president for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Roberts did so, moreover, with no clear textual support in the Constitution — and a considerable historical record to the contrary.

But let me cite a more authoritative source.

The main takeaway of today’s decision is that all of a President’s official acts, defined without regard to motive or intent, are entitled to immunity that is “at least . . . presumptive,” and quite possibly “absolute.” Ante, at 14. Whenever the President wields the enormous power of his office, the majority says, the criminal law (at least presumptively) cannot touch him. This official-acts immunity has “no firm grounding in constitutional text, history, or precedent.” Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U. S. 215, 280 (2022). Indeed, those “standard grounds for constitutional decisionmaking,” id., at 279, all point in the opposite direction. No matter how you look at it, the majority’s official-acts immunity is utterly indefensible. (Emphasis supplied)

Trump v. U.S., No. 23-939 (July 2, 2024) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting, at 4), https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf

Arthur Schlesinger wrote about the imperial presidency. Nixon started the ball rolling. Every Republican president, starting with him, has been antidemocratic and disrespectful of the rule of law. Trump was the apotheosis—so far, at least.

The next Republican president will be the last American president. The last real, duly elected one, anyway.

This decision feels like a punch in the gut—the emptiness I feel when someone dies.

My dear friend and lawyer comrade Marty Solomon (not the Christian minister) had a contrary view:

Imagine how decent lawyers felt when Dred Scott was decided. Or Korematsu. We have a long history of really screwing up our own law and then taking a long, long time to fix it. To be an American is to learn to live in an ugly, imperfect country, probably your whole life through—yet struggle to maintain faith in your principles and the collective ability to push for change until change comes.

Unfortunately, this decision has the potential to bring the American experiment down around our ears. How would we have fixed Dred Scott if the South had successfully seceded? How would we have fixed Korematsu if the Axis had won? (Trick question: It would have fixed itself, and the group in the camps would have changed places with people outside the camps.)

I've often said that the two biggest stains on our legal system are the death penalty and the Guantanamo prison. (Not to minimize the disaster of racist policing, SCOTUS's ridiculous interpretation of the Second Amendment, the erasure of the Establishment Clause in First Amendment jurisprudence… I could go on.)

But in this case, with this decision, John Roberts and his five unindicted coconspirators stained our legal system in a way that may be its end.

Hard for me, after that, to sustain my faith ("the evidence of things not seen," right?) in the rule of law.

And yet, I feel I have no choice.

Catherine the Great, the Bestest Bulldog in All the Land (Part two...)

Schnorring

In my previous (first) Catherine the Great blog post, I mentioned her penchant for schnorring. Begging. Or, in the honorable sense that I can't help but use with such a sweet, affectionate hound (1), "fundraising." (She is my favorite canine charity. Sorry, Lisa Milot—though Athenspets has a special place in my heart. And may Bagel's memory be for a blessing. Sandra Lawson, a Reconstructionist—as am I—rabbi I follow on FB, used that traditional Jewish blessing for someone who has died, a reference to Proverbs 10:7, referring to their own late dog.)

Anyway, the point: This is schnorring.

Not merely an example, nor an ideal. This is, I aver, the veritable Platonic ideal of schnorring. (I said what I said.)

Professional fundraisers the Jewish community over should hang their heads in shame (and go give love to their very fortunate domestic animals, of whatever sort). 

1. Given the extent to which she uses, and enjoys, sniffing the air, and given her relative jowliness (and the fact that she's gentle enough that she could retrieve an undamaged bird, in shallow water), Catherine is a scenthound. I will not be entertaining any questions at this time.

Catherine the Great, the Bestest Bulldog in All the Land (Part One of Many)

This is Catherine the Great.

Catherine's guardians live across the street.

I have very liberal borrowing privileges, however.

Catherine, as the title says, is the bestest bulldog in all the land.

Wicked smaht

She's also wicked smaht.

An immediate example: She's quietly lying under my desk. I hadn't petted her in a while. So she put her (hefty) paw on my sneaker. I petted her, but there the paw resides, as she licks it (but hopefully not my shoe).

She wanted more attention, and she knew how to get it.

(Her paw was on my sneaker for a while. The pressure varied and increased periodically. Wicked smaht.)

Other examples

Hot, hot, hot

I went to get her one day in the early afternoon. The pavement was hot, and Catherine was not having it. Once she was "encouraged" to leave the concrete at her guardians' house—stubborn, as the breed name implies—she ran across the pavement, on the most direct path to grass on the other side.

How did she know to do that? Do dogs see far enough into the infrared that she could see the relative temperatures?

Bed

She is food motivated. (Again, no surprise.) I move her dog bed (yes, we have one, at her guest house) near our dining table at dinner time. I usually sit at the table after dinner. (I'm more comfortable on a hard chair than sunk into my usual place on our couch.) One night she was schnorring for food right next to us.

I gestured to the bed… and she went.

(I reinforced that, and taught her the command word "Bed." It works… sometimes. And yes, I have her guardians' permission to educate her, or try.)

Walkies

When I take her out, she sniffs around, walks to the grass, urinates or defecates, sniffs around some more… and then she decides when we're done and going back to our house. No hesitation: She turns around and starts walking. Trudging. (As one of her guardian's dowager guardians said, she's probably usually in pain. Bulldogs and osteoarthritis, like sand in a bathing suit.)

Canine autonomy, I tell you. (I eat a lot of beef and chicken for someone—a lawyer—who uses the expression "nonhuman person.")

N.B.: From that definition, "'Schnorring' is also a respectable and honorable profession – that of fundraising." Speaking of which, she was schnorring—fundraising!—at me about her own victuals, before she splooted on my cool home-office tiles. Growling and loud barking, and the occasional paw. Quite opinionated.

I better go.

Preliminary Introduction

 Howdy, y'all.

Back in the day (2004–2013), I kept a blog, The Scrivener (the link is on the new main page).

As I wrote in 2014,

Now, I am writing. Some blogging, keeping a journal, an occasional screed, a magazine article. (And this.) Life gets better—much. And—pain recedes.

Well, I've lived since, as one does. Better, I don't know about. But, living still.

Not as much writing of late, and few screeds.

Which is where our story begins again.

Stay tuned.

(The fragment from 2014 is from my prize-winning essay "Keep Writing." As prolix as I am, the word limit for the contest was 250 words. My winning entry came in at 249. The essay can be found here.)