Heart of a Dog Page #2

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using static electricity.

She also made small sculptures

by pressing her paw

into lumps of Plasticine.

She made a huge number of these things,

and I didn't really know

what to do with them.

I thought maybe they could

be snack trays or

little clogs,

like the ones Japanese dogs

might wear in the rain.

You know, we could sell them

on the Web site.

# Hey #

# Hey #

# Hey #

Lolabelle sat in the studio with me

through lots of different record projects.

Rat terriers have really good hearing,

especially in the upper registers.

And they never seem to get bored.

"Hey, let's listen to that cello track

for the 70th time."

"Great idea."

# Hey #

"Let's do that."

# Hey #

Some trainers say that in order

to understand your breed,

you have to imagine what

their voices would sound like

and what they'd say to you

when you give them a command.

So give a command to a German shepherd,

and he'd say, "Right, boss.

No problem. Consider it done."

Give a command to a poodle,

and it's, "Please love me.

I'll do anything if you just love me."

But give a command to a terrier,

and they say, "Um, is it gonna be fun?

Because if it's not gonna be fun,

I'm just not interested."

It was so strange the way it happened.

Almost overnight,

there were soldiers

everywhere in the city.

Where there used to be

just maybe one policeman,

now there were groups of soldiers

with machine guns and riot gear.

Almost immediately, it became normal.

They began to blend in.

Nobody talked to them,

but they were everywhere, like ghosts.

And I thought,

when did that start to happen?

We're trying to prevent it from happening

instead of having to deal

with it afterwards.

So Homeland Security began to breed dogs.

When the puppies were 13 weeks old,

they were sent to prisons

to be trained by prisoners.

The smartest dogs were

drafted to work with police

on patrols and on bomb-sniffing squads.

The Homeland Security slogan,

"If you see something, say something,"

sounds like something

the Austrian philosopher

Wittgenstein might say.

And his books are full

of cryptic sentences about logic

and about how language has the power

to actually create the world.

If you can't talk about it, he says,

it just doesn't exist.

After the "see something,

say something" slogan

had been around for a while,

someone from Homeland Security

must have had second thoughts

about asking people to report

on each other all the time.

I would have loved to have been

at that Homeland Security

PR brainstorming session

when they decided to add

this phrase to their slogan.

There are so many trucks

in my neighborhood now

carrying information and data

on the way to secure storage areas.

Iron Mountain started

as a network of caves

for growing mushrooms

and gradually turned into

a bomb-resistant storage facility

for corporate documents.

After World War ll,

the company began inventing new identities

for Jewish immigrants

who arrived with nothing...

no papers or, at most,

their old library cards.

So Iron Mountain created all sorts

of new documents for them,

and they became instant Americans.

Lolabelle was a mall dog.

She came from one

of the high-speed puppy mills

that breed dogs in batches

and then sell them in malls.

She was bought by a couple

who were in the middle of a divorce.

And no one could take her.

The woman didn't want her,

and the husband didn't want her.

And the boy wanted her, but...

Nobody really wanted the boy.

And so the man took Lolabelle

with him to Canada,

where he spent a month camping and crying

and thinking it all through

and talking to himself.

And Lolabelle rode

up on the bow of the kayak,

perched on the front leading the way

as the man paddled along

and tried to figure out

what to do with his life,

how to go on.

And I think that was where she learned

the great skill of empathy.

And also where she learned

what our meditation teacher

keeps telling us.

And he says, "You should try

to learn how to feel sad

without being sad."

Which is actually really hard to do...

to feel sad without actually

being sad.

Terriers are really adaptable

and very social.

So Lolabelle immediately fit

right in into the West Village.

Within a week or two,

she seemed to know everyone...

Kurt, who has the Austrian restaurant

on the corner,

our neighbor Julian,

the painter who lives across the street,

and lots of people

who were total strangers to us.

She had a tab in several stores,

and, on most walks, she would drop in

to pick up a treat or a toy.

The West Village has the highest

density of dogs in the city.

Lots of the dogs are chasing birds

and barking at cars.

But, weirdly, there are

almost no collisions.

Pretty much everybody manages

to stay out of the way.

Dogs see mostly blues and greens.

Their eyesight is very blurry

and gets combined

with their sense of smell,

which is hard for humans to imagine

since we lost most of our ability

to navigate by smell

when we began walking upright

so far from the ground.

So many things are being recorded...

numbers, locations, names,

dates, times, directions.

Massive amounts of data

are being collected and stored.

And what kind of information is this?

Fragmented conversations

full of jump cuts and distortions.

And what are the stories that emerge

from these fragments?

And why are they being collected?

And it's only when you commit a crime

that the data is put together

and your story is reconstructed,

backwards.

A portrait of you made up of data trails...

the places you went,

the things you bought,

the pictures you took,

the e-mails you sent.

And like Kierkegaard said,

"Life can only be understood backwards;

but it must be lived forwards."

The new headquarters

of the National Security Agency

is finally almost finished.

This huge data center in Utah

collects information

and has clearance to bug the systems

of individual citizens

and to engage in sabotage

using subversive software.

The United States is the first country

in the history of the world

to collect and store information

about its own citizens

on this scale.

Until now, records were mostly accounts

of the lives of kings and pharaohs

who also stored their records

in massive desert complexes.

A lot of the information

is stored in the cloud.

But the likelihood that your story

is going to get mixed up

with someone else's story

is extremely high.

# Hey #

# Hey #

# Some call me beauty #

# Some call me pain #

I remember the first time I realized

that some people live in different worlds.

I'd be walking to school and I'd look up,

and there was Moses

hanging by his tool belt.

Every day, no matter what the weather,

Moses would climb up the telephone poles

and attach his belt to them

and open the phone boxes

and move the lines around.

Sometimes he'd take out his tools

and do some hammering.

In the winter,

you could see him really well

outlined against the bright sky,

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