Sloth

We’ve had Harry for just over a six months now, and it’s been a draining if often hilarious experience. For the first couple of months, he was basically a little ball of fur, teeth and anger. I’m convinced that he didn’t realize our feet were attached to the rest of our body and not just four other, smaller, faceless dogs. He wouldn’t sit still for more than a nanosecond at a time, except to take a dump inside the apartment. So, you know, fun.

The things with dogs is that they can be surprisingly focussed. Not all the time – Harry still has fits of complete spazmosity where he bounces and vibrates around the room like Robert Downey Jr. after a eightball bender at the Viper Room in 1991. But he can also follow us around like the world’s cutest little stalker, panting disturbingly as he makes what we like to call Crazy Face at us. You can see a bit of Crazy Face here, although the picture doesn’t quite do it justice. Imagine that he’s making this face while slackjawed, panting and drooling just a little bit, like a Solid Gold dancer after a vigourous interpretive dance set to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Escape Of The Heart”. All that’s missing is the gold lamé jumpsuit and the laser beams.

He also likes to – and I really don’t know how else to say this – freak on my head. This is hard to explain, and even harder to experience, but he’s been doing it since he was a pup. Basically, he tries to scale Mount Kevin, then tries to position himself on top of my head while he either licks the inside of my ear, eats my hair, or both. This often involves a lot of vibrating on his part, as if the sheer joy at assaulting my skull is simply too much to bear. Luckily, he hasn’t tried to make sweet puppy love to either my ear or hair… yet.

So the first two pictures were taken during that magic, golden period of about five minutes where he’s happy to sit on my lap or chest before making mounting another attack at my head. I like the longer shot, because he looks extra crazy.

The last picture here was a pointless attempt to take a picture of him from my vantage point right before he got all freaky. I like it because it looks like he’s starring in an Ingmar Bergman movie.