Dog Watching — give me attention!

This morning the dog diarrhoea-ed all over the kitchen floor, then walked in it, then lay down.

By the time I tramped into the kitchen the mess had been dealt with. All that remained was the smell of disinfectant and a lingering sense of disgust. The kitchen floor looked bare. All the rugs and household paraphernalia were stacked outside the back door. The dog lay on the lawn, panting and lifting his face up to the summer breeze.

He was smiling.

Not for the first time, I considered the anxiety-free life of dogs.

He lived, in his golden shagged coat, minute to minute, with no obvious comprehension of time. His life was that of a small branch, moving downstream on a happy river. His eyes had that glaze of someone who understands higher consciousness and writes a newsletter about it. I thought about his diary entries.

‘Today gave thanks for the gift of existence by rolling in grass’

‘Today sat in presence among the garden weeds’

‘Today my fellow light-being gave me a piece of bacon under the table’

‘Today: purged myself of negativity’

The purge was immense.

Presumably, he woke up last night with a pain in his tummy. The back-kitchen must have been dark and quiet. I wondered if he had been distressed.

The paw prints in the mess, as my mother described with churning detail, told a different story.

‘He was happy enough to walk all around in it anyway’, she said.

I imagined his night. He had felt sick, horrible, that twisting pang in the back of your stomach — usually after a deep, cheap, takeaway tray of sauce — and realised that his dinner needed to come out, urgently. He then proceeded to empty his bowels on the floor. Luxuriating in the expulsion of toxic waste from his body. After the deed, he must have been content enough, walking through the mess to look out the window into the dark garden, then, with comfortable fatigue, lying down to resume his slumber.

I considered this scenario, while crunching cereal at the kitchen table.

The dog had no thoughts of bowel cancer, or the innumerable variations of digestive disease this attack probably indicated. He didn’t lie on the floor, contemplating an apparent shutdown of his organs. He most definitely did not pull out a phone to check his symptoms on the internet and trawl through chat rooms about probiotics. He didn’t wake up a sleeping bed-fellow to inform them of his, now confirmed, auto-immune disease. No sweating palms. No spiking thoughts about surgery. A life free of imaginings; full of reality. Free to bed down once again in the liquid remains of one’s dinner. It sounded idyllic. My own stomach warmed to the idea.

I watched him plodding around the lawn.

My mother recently told me that she likes to watch the dog when he doesn’t know she’s there. This allows her to see him in his unedited state. Without the pressure of human eyes, she explains, he moves about the garden in a natural way, pausing to sniff and consider. Once he knows you’re watching, his attention moves towards you. He wants a rub. He wants to come inside. He wants to simply stand and watch you watching him.

It’s like we only see him seeing us: I gather this thesis from underneath my mother’s observations.

There’s something unnerving in watching the dog when we’re not the centre of his attention.

I think about being the centre of attention.

I’m always the centre of attention.

Do I have the same innate desire as the dog?

Yearning for people to pour watchfulness onto me.

The same can be said for people, I reason. There’s something immense about watching someone reading, or watching someone watch a movie. Watching someone watch someone else, that isn’t you. It’s getting to see a little slice of what the person actually thinks. Their expression changing with inward thoughts. Their thoughts without any attachment to your own, or without any desire to appease or contradict your own. Watching a movie with someone has that feeling. Even though you’re both looking, gluey-eyed, at the screen, there’s the knowledge that the other person is having their own experience with the images. They’re processing things in a different way, they’re noticing different things, soaking in the story with alternative high-points.

In a way, when you discuss the film afterwards, with your different musings, you’re both yearning to get a look at the other person.

Wanting attention.

Wanting to jump into the other person’s pool of attention.

You can certainly nab someone’s attention by telling them you were watching them watching the film. Is disclosing this a form of attention-seeking?

You think I’m talking about watching you, but it’s actually about my experience of myself watching you.

Google search: attention seeking disorder test.

What can someone’s take on the film mean in comparison to your own? Will your ideas meet and melt together or remain separate? Disagreement.

Disagreement is really just attention-seeking?

The best way to get attention is to disagree with someone.

Google search: why do I always fight with people I actually really like and want to be friends with.

Watching someone watch something else is the closest thing to watching the dog in the garden. People when they don’t know you’re looking. There’s a fascination to this practice, of seeing people in their un-compromised form.

People-watching is an activity in itself.

I imagine hordes of people, friends or strangers, out meandering around the garden.

The dog is content with his night’s work.

He pauses to catch some sun rays at the back of the hall, before sitting at the back-door, among the exiled rugs and shoes, in a bid to get back into the house.

I think about the joy my mother gets from watching the dog when he doesn’t notice her. I imagine myself watching my mother watch the dog. A whole cycle of domestic observation. We’re preoccupied with seeing things, noticing things, observing people and objects and animals. Our brains search for patterns. Combing through our surroundings in need of stimulation.

Our brains are attention-greedy.

Delicious, unsolicited, unwavering, eyes on you. Scrumptious.

As I lean to grab for my laptop, thinking about the internet, I catch sight of the dog, walking around.

We’ve lost the capacity to sit and observe. On the moral high-ground within, frosty and cold with self-satisfied height, my dialogue begins: we’re so saturated in stimulation, how can we re-learn the process of simply watching, when there is nothing to gain for ourselves?

In a triumphant, self-sacrificial, spirit I sit and watch the garden, seeing my mother hanging up clothes.

The dog is beaming up at her.

I see them both and wonder what this means for me.