a dog’s life

what is it like to be my dog?

view from the basement

I often wonder what it’s like to be my dog, Boswell, but I wonder particularly what it’s like to be him the past year and change. Back when I first adopted him I wrote about how one of the tasks of dog ownership is establishing a shared language between yourself and the dog. I’m not sure if I’ve done a great job at that, but regardless, there’s no way to communicate to him in any shared dog–human language why his life changed so much and never changed back.

When I first adopted him, we would go walk for miles every day. Then I got sick (the first time) and we never really regained that rhythm; then COVID hit and everything got a lot worse. When we walked around the West Village, where we lived at the time, I felt like we were living through a twee apocalypse—the stars of Wes Anderson’s I Am Legend, I joked at the time. Everything was pictueresque and everything was empty.