It is super hot this evening- I AM living in New York, right? Not Georgia? Oh well. It’s 9 PM and STILL icky out… and it’s not even August yet!
I feel slightly guilty working on a new woodcut, instead of unpacking/organizing in the new house. But it’s really too hot to be moving furniture and boxes. Best to toss the boys a few bones, pull up a (fake) Adirondack chair near the garden, and work on some art. That’s what I’m telling myself, anyway. 
I’ve kind of moved away from working on MDF… it’s SO easy to carve, my gouges tend to get a little uncontrollable and skitter around like drunk drivers. You simply can’t get a good “bite” like you can with linoleum so I end up making lots of technical mistakes. Alas, I have a pile of it and I *told myself* I HAVE to use it up- waste not, want not. Right?
This new piece has been noodling in my head for about a week now… a piece based on Cliffie and his dang jimmy-legs. He’s the most active dreamer of a dog I’ve ever had! It’s pretty amazing. I mean, within moments of him falling asleep, his little toes begin to curl, then spasm, and within seconds his big, long kangaroo legs begin galloping around like maniacal possessed things. It’s especially bizarre because, like many older male greyhounds, Cliff has been experiencing more degeneration and weakness in his back end–and yet it seems his dreaming is more crazy/active than ever. How does that work?
He looks harmless, but kicks like a ninja. Believe you me.
I’m currently down to 3 bruises- unfortunate byproducts of having to share the bed with a huge, black-belt-worthy kicking greyhound. I wonder what dreams cause him to run and jump like he does? It kind of brings me back to one of the most beautifully written pieces I’ve ever read, “The Sounding of the Call”, one of the final chapters of The Call of the Wild:
Irresistible impulses seized him. He would be lying in camp, dozing lazily in the heat of the day, when suddenly his head would lift and his ears cock up, intent and listening, and he would spring to his feet and dash away, on and on, for hours, through the forest aisles and across the open spaces where the nigerheads bunched. He loved to run down dry water-courses, and to creep and spy upon the bird life in the woods. For a day at a time he would lie in the underbrush where he could watch the partridges drumming and strutting up and down. But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something, that called- called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.
Jeepers, I get teary-eyed just flipping through my book and typing that! What an amazing story. I wonder if my greyhounds dream that way, of primitive times generations removed, and existances before they were even born? Or do they just dream in a dislocated-crazy-patchwork fashion, like humans do-? I guess one of life’s mysteries.