Please read this man’s description of his dachshund and its most annoying habit
“I have a ridiculous dog named Walnut. He is as domesticated as a beast can be: a purebred longhaired miniature dachshund with fur so thick it feels rich and creamy, like pudding. His tail is a huge spreading golden fan, a clutch of sunbeams. He looks less like a dog than like a tropical fish. People see him and gasp. Sometimes I tell Walnut right out loud that he is my precious little teddy bear pudding cup sweet boy snuggle-stinker.
In my daily life, Walnut is omnipresent. He shadows me all over the house. When I sit, he gallops up into my lap. When I go to bed, he stretches out his long warm body against my body or he tucks himself under my chin like a soft violin. Walnut is so relentlessly present that sometimes, paradoxically, he disappears. If I am stressed or tired, I can go a whole day without noticing him. I will pet him idly; I will yell at him absent-mindedly for barking at the mailman; I will nuzzle him with my foot. But I will not really see him. He will ask for my attention, but I will have no attention to give. Humans are notorious for this: for our ability to become blind to our surroundings — even a fluffy little jewel of a mammal like Walnut.
…
When I come home from a trip, Walnut gets very excited. He prances and hops and barks and sniffs me at the door. And the consciousnesses of all the wild creatures I’ve seen — the puffins, rhinos, manatees, ferrets, the weird hairy wet horses — come to life for me inside of my domestic dog. He is, suddenly, one of these unfamiliar animals. I can pet him with my full attention, with a full union of our two attentions. He is new to me and I am new to him. We are new again together.
Even when he is horrible. The most annoying thing Walnut does, even worse than barking at the mailman, is the ritual of his “evening drink.” Every night, when I am settled in bed, when I am on the brink of sleep, Walnut will suddenly get very thirsty. If I go to bed at 10:30, Walnut will get thirsty at 11. If I go to bed at midnight, he’ll wake me up at 1. I’ve found that the only way I cannot be mad about this is to treat this ritual as its own special kind of voyage — to try to experience it as if for the first time. If I am open to it, my upstairs hallway contains an astonishing amount of life.
The evening drink goes something like this: First, Walnut will stand on the edge of the bed, in a muscular, stout little stance, and he will wave his big ridiculous fan tail in my face, creating enough of a breeze that I can’t ignore it. I will roll over and try to go back to sleep, but he won’t let me: He’ll stamp his hairy front paws and wag harder, then add expressive noises from his snout — half-whine, half-breath, hardly audible except to me. And so I give up. I sit up and pivot and plant my feet on the floor — I am hardly even awake yet — and I make a little basket of my arms, like a running back preparing to take a handoff, and Walnut pops his body right into that pocket, entrusting the long length of his vulnerable spine (a hazard of the dachshund breed) to the stretch of my right arm, and then he hangs his furry front legs over my left. From this point on we function as a unit, a fusion of man and dog. As I lift my weight from the bed Walnut does a little hop, just to help me with gravity, and we set off down the narrow hall. We are Odysseus on the wine-dark sea. (Walnut is Odysseus; I am the ship.)
All of evolution, all of the births and deaths since caveman times, since wolf times, that produced my ancestors and his — all the firelight and sneak attacks and tenderly offered scraps of meat, the cages and houses, the secret stretchy coils of German DNA — it has all come, finally, to this: a fully grown exhausted human man, a tiny panting goofy harmless dog, walking down the hall together. Even in the dark, Walnut will tilt his snout up at me, throw me a deep happy look from his big black eyes — I can feel this happening even when I can’t see it — and he will snuffle the air until I say nice words to him (OK you fuzzy stinker, let’s go get your evening drink), and then, always, I will lower my face and he will lick my nose, and his breath is so bad, his fetid snout-wind, it smells like a scoop of the primordial soup. It is not good in any way. And yet I love it.
Walnut and I move down the hall together, step by bipedal step, one two three four, tired man and thirsty friend, and together we pass the wildlife of the hallway — a moth, a spider on the ceiling, both of which my children will yell at me later to move outside, and of course each of these creatures could be its own voyage, its own portal to millions of years of history, but we can’t stop to study them now; we are passing my son’s room. We can hear him murmuring words to his friends in a voice that sounds disturbingly like my own voice, deep sound waves rumbling over deep mammalian cords — and now we are passing my daughter’s room, my sweet nearly grown-up girl, who was so tiny when we brought Walnut home, as a golden puppy, but now she is moving off to college. In her room she has a hamster she calls Acorn, another consciousness, another portal to millions of years, to ancient ancestors in China, nighttime scampering over deserts.
But we move on. Behind us, in the hallway, comes a sudden galumphing. It is yet another animal: our other dog, Pistachio, he is getting up to see what’s happening; he was sleeping, too, but now he is following us. Pistachio is the opposite of Walnut, a huge mutt we adopted from a shelter, a gangly scraggly garbage muppet, his body welded together out of old mops and sandpaper, with legs like stilts and an enormous block head and a tail so long that when he whips it in joy, constantly, he beats himself in the face. Pistachio unfolds himself from his sleepy curl, stands, trots, huffs and stares after us with big human eyes. Walnut ignores him, because with every step he is sniffing the dark air ahead of us, like a car probing a night road with headlights, and he knows we are approaching his water dish now, he knows I am about to bend my body in half to set his four paws simultaneously down on the floor, he knows that he will slap the cool water with his tongue for 15 seconds before I pick him up again and we journey back down the hall. And I find myself wondering, although of course it doesn’t matter, if Walnut was even thirsty, or if we are just playing out a mutual script. Or maybe, and who could blame him, he just felt like taking a trip.”
Not to mention the way he says “No one would refuse me a kitten, would they?” You can hear how much thought is going on behind every word, behind every part of this act. He hates Seward but will absolutely pretend to be delighted to see him if necessary.
And then if that doesn’t work, he’s equally willing to mope and beg and plead. And when that fails too he gets quiet and just sits down to plan out his next move. He is such a cerebral man, constantly considering things and adapting his approach as needed.
Speaking of cerebration, Seward is not at his best here again. From “we are progressing” and calling Renfield “my friend” again to testing him by asking if he wants a cat rather than a kitten just before refusing him, to outright saying “I shall test him with his present craving and see how it will work out; then I shall know more.” He’s definitely too interested in just seeing where this goes and while he isn’t giving Renfield a cat and thus encouraging him that way, he is using this opportunity to test him and see how he reacts - it feels like this is in aid of his own thoughts on the nature of Renfield’s madness, so that he will figure out whatever he needs to complete his theory. He’s completely focused on Renfield but not for Renfield’s own sake at all. He’s back to encouraging his madness, or at least testing the limits of it, in a way that is more about his own curiosity than Renfield’s mental health; the only reason he gives for saying no to a kitten is because he personally doesn’t want to see the cat eat all the birds. If it were still smaller/less personable animals I get no sense he would have refused here. At least that’s the impression I get. It’s all about his view of Renfield, as opposed to just being about Renfield and his needs.
I did not expect Renfield’s voice today. He seemed at the same time young and ancient, like an oak sap. Very peculiar.
As for the entry itself, the contrast between the dry-as-wafer doctor’s style and the straightforward communication from the patient is clear and intended. The science goes on in its mechanical carousel, while sometimes one should just be bothered to actually listen.
He’s a mess. He acts like a big shot, flaunts his battlefield skills and acrobatics, thinks he’s all that. Talks a big game about how he can get any partner just by being a smooth talker, but the minute his love interest walks in the door his wheels are locking up and he’s falling over himself.
He secretly begs Ironhide to mentor him on how to court someone, and Ironhide can only chuckle because he remembers being as enthusiastic and awkward when he was younger. But Sideswipe is young and impatient, unwilling to listen to Ironhide’s sage advice on taking it slow and really connecting with someone before jumping into the berth.
The bigger the pillow, the better. See, Ratchet is not a graceful sleeper. He has two modes: wrap himself around a pillow or husbands, or spread out and shove them to the edge of the mattress. The latter he doesn’t do consciously. It just happens in the middle of the night, usually during the warmer months.
Give him a body pillow to curl around with a soft cover. He loves burying his face into flannel pillow covers.
Hates pillows though with too much give. He needs some support. Also hates hotel pillows.
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