REX AND THE CITY: Part XVI - Letting Sleeping Dogs Lie

In which we argue over whether or not the dog should be allowed in the bed...

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Now, I'd wake up with [Wallace] facing me, his face so close to mine that our noses almost touched, our nostrils aligned like a plug and a socket. I breathed in the air he breathed out, and vice versa, and the exchange — so soft and delicate — made me feel connected to this dog on levels that were beyond anything [Ed] and I shared. It was as if my prana were his prana; that we flowed with the very same life force, and who but another very insane dog person would understand this? I kept my discovery secret.

Greetings, dear readers.

Once again I am sharing yet another installment from my Rex in the City series which ran in the late, great Bark magazine for several years in the Aughts. For those of you who are new to Substack: Bark was primarily a print magazine, so a lot of these columns never appeared online. Many of them did, however, get incorporated into my memoir REX AND THE CITY which was published by Random House in 2006.  Here on Substack you can see the pieces in their original, heavily edited form.  I’ve noted this elsewhere, but I always had a roughly 3300 word count limit for these pieces, and my first drafts were always somewhere between 5K- 7500 words. I am not a person of few words, I suppose.  

Anyway, this piece is about--surprise, surprise--another disagreement my then-partner Ed and I had about how best to care for our dog.  Ed felt that dogs should not be allowed in beds.  I felt that dogs should absolutely be allowed in beds. 

You may have noticed by now that almost every installment of Rex in the City is/was about how Ed and I disagreed about such and such and about all the antics that ensued as our very sensitive dog picked up on the energetic vibes of disagreement and acted out.  

No wonder I ended up becoming a sound healer!  Vibrations are everything :) 

People tend to blame dogs for a dog’s “bad behavior.”  I say: look to the humans. Consider what kind of energy the people are giving off, because our dogs (and cats) are always absorbing that.  I swear Wallace was always a more balanced dog with me alone than he was around both me and Ed. But that’s another long story...

Enjoy the piece. And Happy Holidays!

Love,

Lee

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This 16th installment of the REX AND THE CITY/REX IN THE CITY series—“Sleeping Dogs Lie” originally appeared in Bark magazine, Volume 30, Spring 2005, Copyright © Lee Harrington (writing as Lee Forgotson and E. M. Harrington). Illustrations copyright Bark and the credited artists.

I have no affiliation or agreement with any advertisers shown—those are all old ads from the original print edition.