Barley, a dog, tries to assert dominance by putting her head atop a golden retriever’s neck. The golden retriever responds by craning its neck, getting its head up and over the top of Barley’s head in return. While there’s no doubt that Barley’s the boss when she has playdates with her buddy, he’s not light on provocation. Her efforts to be the taller dog, for example, are consistently frustrated by the reality that he’s got about 25 pounds on her and isn’t shy about throwing that weight around. But, still having echoes of puppy flexibility, he also finds novel, bendy ways to get the upper hand.

Barley, a dog, sits beside a sculpture of white stone, an abstract form that mixes smooth and rough surfaces, mounted to a lenticular base. Artist LeeAnn Perry has described her sculpting process as one in which she studies a piece of stone until she can find a “head” that can act as its focal point, with the resulting planes and curves emerging as a consequence of that choice. In that respect, this work (entitled “Inner Peace”) is a bit like Barley. As much as Barley has many fans and is appreciated by many folks, her personality is very much a natural outgrowth that I have only influenced with a light tough. She, too, is a mix of smoother and rougher bits, a dog I have tried more to know and to embrace than to mold and reshape.

Barley, a dog, sits in a shady spot. Behind her, a couple of weather-worn decorative paper party spheres hang from a tree. Both are in focus thanks to a very obvious split-focus seam, revealing that the photo is a composite of two photos. Yesterday’s post was selected as a prelude to this admittedly dumb experiment. I saw these sad-looking paper party decorations, gradually disintegrating from rainfall, and thought it would be fun to take a photo with them in the background. But of course, with Barley in focus, they were so out of focus that you couldn’t see the deterioration. So I snapped a second pic and thought nothing further of is until I loaded them both and realized how dramatic the difference in focus was. Rather than meticulously manufacture a cinematic split-focus effect, I thought it would be fun to instead make the seam between the two photos very obvious.

Barley, a dog, is photographed up close, such that the lens keeps her face in focus, but her body is slightly out of focus. It’s second nature to me now that the third dimension can be read, at least in closeup shots, by attending to the focus of the photograph. But I have to wonder, is that something I had to learn? Clearly, our own eyes adjust the focal depth all the time, so reading three dimensions into a two dimensional photograph that relies on the same optics isn’t exactly rocket science, but I can’t turn my eye to something in my own visual field and not have the focus automatically adjust. With a photo (or a movie), your eye can linger on things out of focus for as long as you like, providing an experience that is specific to these externalized optical records. At some point, I presume, I must have come to understand this about photos, but it must have been very early in life, perhaps even before my earliest coherent memories.

Juniper, a dog, is curled up on her huge dog bed while wearing a black dog hoodie. Juniper’s rarely anywhere cold enough to need extra insulation, and she’s not nearly as bit a chicken about storms and fireworks as Barley. However, some things definitely still stress her our (like when a plumber needs to come and fix a problem, and is mysteriously bonking around for a couple hours doing so). Rather than wear a thundershirt, she generally just dons one of her sweaters, and this seems to do the trick. In fact, she gets very excited whenever she gets to wear one, for whatever reason, so their benefit may be less of a “let’s squeeze this scared dog until its calm” effect and more of a “I’m so fuckin’ stoked to be cozy!” effect.

Barley, a dog, looks at a driftwood collection that has been painted in several bright pastels, and upon which several plastic eyeballs have been balanced. “I’m telling you, Zeta Epsilon, if we disguise ourselves as yard decorations, we’ll basically be invisible! Humans just don’t look at that sort of thing, it’s like being invisible.” “OK, sure, but I think that dog might be on to us.”

Barley, a dog, relaxes on the futon. She is, in an unusual move, not wearing her collar. I’m used to seeing Juniper without a collar, since collars are only a sometimes-accessory for her, but Barley is almost always wearing a collar, since it only comes off when she gets a bath, and goes back on once her fur is fully dry. As such, seeing her without that signature splash of blue feels transgressive and strange to me. For her part, she doesn’t seem to give it a second thought. If she’s got an itch she needs to scratch, for example, she never goes after her neck. I figure this is because her head’s so blocky that the collar can be a little bit loose without any risk of coming off, which has the added benefit of letting it swivel freely while the leash is clipped to it.

Barley, a dog, trots up to a Halloween display in a yard, undeterred by the tombstones, skeleton motifs, and plastic-fiber cobwebs. I wonder what it would take for Barley to find a ghost to be scary. Appearance alone wouldn’t cut it. I’m fully confident that if she was approached by some impossibly tall ghoul with strangely set eyes and Junji Ito rictus smile, she would happily make its acquaintance. If it moved in an uncanny way, that would probably be enough - I’m willing to bet dogs find the herky-jerk kinematics of undead movement just as unsettling as their human owners. But what if ghosts smelled scary? Surely dogs, being such olfactory creatures, would agree that certain classes of smell are spooky by nature, in a comparable way to human agreement about certain forms of visual stimuli. And if they could talk, what sort of analogy would they need to formulate to explain to us what ghosts smell like?

Barley, a dog, walks bast a fallen tree branch that has a clean cut through it, made recently enough that the exposed wood is still bright and unblemished (to the point of being overexposed). I’ve again had the experience of walking past a branch cut to clear a path (link to 366), only this time the cut can’t be more than a few days old. It’s not until I’m looking more closely at it now that I realize how overexposed the wood is, but you may take my word that this is because it was as fresh a cut as you like, revealing a blank (well, ringed) canvas beneath for nature to begin tinting and staining. Even in context, bare wood that is this pale stands out like a high-vis surveyor’s marker, a distinctly artificial note amid the overture of natural tones.

Barley, a dog, lies on the floor and chomps her new snake toy along the back half of its head. After the initial new toy zoomies have subsided, Barley will settle into taking account of her new toy. She doesn’t do this after playing with familiar toys, so there’s clearly a need to get the measure of this unfamiliar object. Before her lower incisors were removed, this would be the point at which the toy would get eviscerated, but today her probing is a bit more blunt in its approach. She’ll usually start by identifying the squeaker, as we see her doing here. It’s not uncommon for her to disable it entirely during her first play session, if the squeaker’s plastic is soft enough and the fabric of the toy thin enough that her canines can pincer a hole into it. If the toy is stuffed too full, she’ll eventually shift tactics and start worrying at the fabric with her hind teeth. If I see the toy’s been breached, it’s time for it to get taken away and for about two-thirds of the stuffing to be removed, making the fabric much floppier and thus that much harder for her back teeth to scissor. Any disabled squeakers can come out at this stage as well. Stitch the toy up with upholstery thread and it’s likely to last years from that point forward with minimal upkeep.

Barley, a dog, eyes a toy snake. Barley attacks! She and the snake are now merely a blur. I don’t think Barley has terribly much patience for games of keep-away. That said, I’ve not really tested this assumption, as my preferred approach when introducing her to a new toy is to wind her up merely my signaling that it exists, and then offer it just high enough that it takes her a bit of effort to get to. I’m happy to let her get it on the first try, because she very much enjoys scampering around in small circles as I bumble around in her wake, chasing her Yakety-Sax-style. So, this particular episode of hunting the dreaded snek was not a particularly prolonged affair.

Juniper, a dog, stands next to a patio fire pit that is halfway unwrapped. Juniper’s neck of the woods is rapidly approaching Peak Backyard Wood Fire Season: Cool enough after dark that a warm spot to gather around is a pleasant option at a gathering, but not so cold but everyone would rather just stay inside. For her part, though, Juniper is somewhat suspicious of such gatherings. The fire pit itself is worthy of suspicion (which, frankly, is a much more welcome reaction from a dog than excessive curiosity), but more generally, gatherings in the dark seem to heighten Juniper’s need to Protect, lest some heinous creature (such as, gasp!, a possum) tries to crash the party. So rather than withdraw to her chambers to relax, Juniper is given under such conditions to remain a bit high-strung, prowling the perimeter with restless energy.

Barley, a dog, plays with a golden retriever who, despite being on his back, has grabbed a hold of the chest plate of Barley’s harness with his teeth. Now that summer’s over and work obligations have come back with a vengeance, Barley’s had fewer opportunities to go on play dates. Even so, I’ve been very encouraged by her adventures this summer. Between the pandemic and a lack of fenced dog parks in this area, she’s had fewer opportunities to play with other dogs than I would have liked since she came across the country to live here. Playing with her buddy has been good for shaking off the rust and flexing those social muscles anew.

Barley, a dog, lies on a sofa with her paws on the arm rest, and looks past the photographer with an air of weighty consideration. As obvious as it seems to me that Barley experiences an rich inner world, I sometimes wonder just how full or empty her head is at any given moment. My biases are such that I look at this photo and see her grappling as hard as she possibly can to understand a world beyond her ken (and all our kens, frankly). She seems, often, to actively ponder. But it’s also possible that she is a cork bobbing on an ocean of sensation, experiencing the world as it washes over her without that very relatable need to crack its code.

Barley, a dog, is unimpressed by the list of pool rules on a locked gate that, among other things, forbid her entry. I have to admit, it’s quite an innovative strategy to make your pool entirely insect free by simply forbidding entry to all animals, but it seems a shame that in doing so, humans are also forbidden from entering the pool area. I guess this apartment complex caters heavily to plants and fungi.

Barley, a dog, sniffs a large, weathered piece of driftwood that leans against a bike rack, as if it was left there as someone’s vehicle. I haven’t the foggiest idea where this very substantial hunk of wood came from, or why it was left to occupy a slot in this bike rank, but I can’t imagine the real story is as amusing as the prospect that, lacking a particular obscure tome, the Beach Warlock surfed across the sky all the way from the coast atop a raw wood board and was, at Barley as I passed, inside this library combing the stacks for a sufficiently ancient edition.

Barley, a dog, curls up against an egg-shaped cushion with the words “wake me up later” printed on it. While she remains a committed fan of soft surfaces, Barley’s sleep preferences vary with the ambient temperature. Over the summer, she has spent more time retreating to my bedroom to sleep (rather than her crate), and I suspect it’s because she can sprawl a bit more and keep from being overly warm. As winter approaches and my apartment gets that little but more chilly, my bet is that she’s gravitate back toward her crate, which her body warms up pretty quickly once she’s settled in.

Barley, a dog, trots along a forested path alongside a series of large ferns. I’ve had a soft spot for ferns ever since they became tied conceptually to dinosaurs in all manner of illustrations. Famously old, their ancestral roots go back over 400 million years. Since they predate the evolution of flowering plants, and are so strongly tied by scientific illustration to the dinosaur period, ferns have felt “old-fashioned” to me for as long as I can remember. Now, encountering them as I often do with Barley in tow, I have a newfound appreciation for how conveniently they are shaped: Broad enough for Barley to peek under inquisitively, but floppy enough to be easily brushed aside as needed and growing from a rugged central cluster that I don’t need to worry about Barley damaging if she rampages through the underbrush.

Juniper, a dog, is curled up on top of a comforter, her body partly covered by a pillow with a fuzzy pillowcase. Juniper’s general fussiness extends to her sleep preferences. She would like to snuggle up close, until she doesn’t and prefers something soft within earshot of humans, unless she instead wants some full-blown solitude. the precise combination of factors that set her moods is always mysterious, but those moods also rely on the stability of her circumstances. So if (for example) a bit of painting temporarily necessitates sleeping on a futon in the living room, such that her circuit of snooze spots is off limits, she will default to her core preference for uncertain times: Keep it close, and keep it cozy.