I Don’t Dream Of Electric Sheep And Dogs Don’t Search Like Machines

What a shitty day yesterday was. Imagine your dog goes missing. A few years later, you’re at the park and you see a dog that looks eerily like yours, but not yours. You blink twice, rub your eyes. You think of the craziness of what your gut is telling you. You feel an ice cold, white hot, phantom hand collapse your chest and take hold of your heart. You walk up to the stranger holding your not-dog’s leash. You want to say, “I know this sounds crazy, but that’s my dog.” But, what if you’re wrong. How creepy to claim a dog that sort of looks like your dog. You don’t want any trouble. You say, “beautiful dog. Is this how she’s always looked?” Real clever, Columbo. Of course, now they’re onto you and your creep-o conspiracy theory. No chance of a straight answer to this mystery. To your surprise, the stranger speaks innocently, like a junkie who thinks shooting heroin between the toes isn’t dancing with the devil, because no one can see the track marks, “She’s had some work done, but she’s my dog.” That’s it. She’s not their dog. But how do you prove it? Show them a photo! But, wait – the details don’t match. Your dog has amber eyes. This dog’s eyes are dark brown. Your dog has half-cocked, peach-fuzz ears. This one’s stand straight up. What about your dog’s stubby tail? This one’s long and curvy. This dog kinda sorta looks like yours the way my watercolor paintings kinda sorta look like a Rothko. The truth is in the heart and soul of the thing. How do you say, “Hey, stranger, your dog has my dog’s heart and soul. That’s how I know it’s my dog?” You don’t. So you walk away without your dog, and you go tell everyone who knows you and who knew your dog that you’re not crazy, but you’re going crazy. What a shitty day yesterday was, when I followed a suspicion, like tracing a toe over the seams in the hardwood floor and feeling the slightest swelling from one board to the next, slowly probing along and revealing a thousand innocuous leaks in the kitchen plumbing swelling and rotting the floorboards. What a shitty day yesterday was when I went crazy reading words that sounded a lot like me, words that had my phrasing, my tone, my themes, but yet, they weren’t my words. I couldn’t put one of my blog posts up next to one of these posts and say, “Look! Same eyes, same ears, same tail!” But, the truth is in the heart and soul of the thing. But, the truth is, these things had no heart and soul. No, they had a heart and soul – they had a high fructose heart, and a saturated fat soul. These were not all-natural words. These were AI posts. And, people were eating them up like McDonalds and Panda Express, thinking they were The French Laundry and The Chairman. What a shitty day yesterday was.

Today began with a reminder that yesterday was shitty. More people praising these AI posts for their eloquent, amazing writing. “This!” “Shared!” A message from a friend holds my hand to the hot stove of reality that I really don’t want to touch, but probably need to: “People are searching for a feeling and I’m not sure they care too much where it comes from.” OUCH. That burns. Maybe true, though. Do readers want my very human voice born of the slow churn of experience and marked with the imperfections of a body imperfectly probing through the dark tunnels of meaning in search of bric-a-brac to add to my squirrel’s nest of a brain, which I then reconstruct as a needlepointed pillow for others to lay their heads on and dream and probe through their own dark tunnels? “Hello? (hello, hello) Is there anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me. Is there anyone at home?” Pink Floyd must’ve went to the dark side of the moon and time traveled to an AI future, because that lyric fits the current moment quite well. Hello. I’m in there. I’m nodding. I’m home.

Today was a great day. Leon the doberman lifted my spirits as he gave a resounding yes to his human’s authentic requests to search with her. The searching itself was sweet and beautiful to observe – Leon’s lumbering ballet led him to cast towards and away from a tree as he wrote us a letter of intent to source with his heavy-footed steps through the thawing yellow-brown grass, ending his interpretive dance with a whole body flourish away from the tree he’d just found a hide in. Sypha, his older dobe housemate joined the party, and got just what she’d been asking for: an elusive suspended hide on the low hanging branches of a willow at the top of a small berm. The light late morning breeze turned the odor into a string and allowed Sypha the fun of becoming a kite for a little while. Up and down the berm she swooshed. Gliding, diving, and circling among the not yet budding branches of the willow. She wouldn’t ever think it, but I did: let’s see a fucking AI machine do that! Not gonna happen. See, for a dog to become a kite animated by odor, it takes heart and soul.

Odin came next. The Czech shepherd. The sweet boy. “Magical” a local instructor said of one of his recent searches. Today, the alchemist of odor was creating new and exciting communication. Imagine a 75 pound dog morphing into a cat to leap on a window sill for better access to a high hide? Having trouble? You could ask AI. But, here, in reality, it ain’t happening! But, it is adorable watching Odin leap towards the window with the expectation that he’ll magically fit on the sill. The true magic of his search was watching him face the challenge of the high inaccessible hide with a calm, confident resolve, like a ninja warrior who’s made it through the course with only the ramp wall left to scale, but he just can’t quite make it. Over and over, Odin set his approach, followed the ramp of scent, and climbed high up the wall at the edge of the window, but his nostrils couldn’t get a grip on source. We watched him with hope and appreciation for his effort, and when he finally realized just how close he was, hugging the wall and the window, clamping his jaw shut and willing every flexible fiber of his being to stretch towards that source until he could freeze and stare at the source, we cheered. He celebrated with his tug. It was a perfect end to an hour of magical searching.

When you write about nose work, how does someone know your heart and soul is in the work? How do they know the countless hours you spend with your nose in books, with your ears tuned to the lyrics of life, with a leather lead lighting up the nerve endings in your fingers, with your eyes on the stories told through the s-curves and head wobbles of thousands of dogs? How do they know you’re given secrets to sit with until you think you’re worthy to speak to their meaning? How do they know you feel lost and defeated, broken and worthless, but grateful to have the job of putting yourself back together again so you can share the good news that nothing ever breaks, it just reforms, and reaffirms. You hope they know your heart and soul because you promised to go in search of it and tell the tales of your journey.

Olive and Frankie arrive. Two pairs of eyes look out at us through their crate doors with a calm that comes from knowing humans are discussing important things. It’s true, Jen and I are talking of authenticity, agency, deep listening, and about dogs who expect us to reach towards our full potential. Olive is one of those dogs. A Gordon Setter, she is a one-person dog, and Jen is her person. She doesn’t need Jen, or her nose work game. But, if Jen wants to play the game with her, to connect with her, she’s going to have to push herself. Olive will not baby Jen. Like an old martial arts master, Olive will laugh at Jen, dismiss her, or whack her with a stick if she’s not all in, if she’s not moving at Olive’s speed. Good news, Jen is all in. She listens carefully to Olive’s needs, and when the search feels off, Jen recalls the moment when she made a demand of Olive, expecting her to want to search the other side of a trailer she was bracketing, even though, at that moment, Olive was searching the ground away from the trailer. To Olive, there are two possible responses to a demand: submit or rebel. Olive ain’t into submitting. Jen adjusts her approach, consciously making a request of Olive. This time, the conversation evolves with ease and mutual appreciation. The rewards of an authentic relationship are many, but the greatest one may be the reward of being seen and being known. Olive has taught us well today, and she is happy with us. Earning the respect of a master communicator sets your soul’s sun rising, and gets your heart’s drum beating. Frankie. Dear Frankie the Corgi. He’s aging and living with Addison’s disease. He didn’t search much today, but when he did, he searched like a superhero. He ate his treats like a shark. He chased the odor like a kid in a pedal go-cart, pretending to be a Formula One racer. On Valentine’s Day I saw a toddler playing with an automatic entry door at the Original Pancake House, and he looked a lot like Frankie. Authentically himself. Innocent. Joyful. Trusting. Inviting. All the secrets of the world are in the play of a boy or a dog.

Frankie put away his search race car, and let Jack the Corgi have a spin on the course. My last session of the day was shared by Jack and Luca, the poodle. Jack got on the track and made a lot of pit stops. He was the first dog of the day to discover nature’s buffet of goose poop hidden among the clumps of dead grass throughout the park. Jack could not catch so much as a whiff of odor without expecting a snack. If he didn’t get that snack from his human, the buffet was never far away and he was first in line. We decided not to fight Jack on this, after all, he’s telling us something important. Jack is telling us that choices are hard to make when one of the choices is freely available and one is conditionally available and requires the sometimes complicated and lengthy effort of searching, locating and sourcing. When Jack would choose goose poop, we would jump right in and put a new item on the buffet: odor. Now Jack could experience odor as sometimes equally as available as goose poop, and more fun to choose. Later in Jack’s session, he searched in a concrete area with no goose poop and did some fantastic work. He and his human are building a shared language to manage the challenges of conversing about hides that may be inaccessible, but may also have a path to source. Spending time to create clear communication can dramatically increase the dog’s desire to be in partnership with the human. Luca and his human were working on the same kind of shared language. Luca is a precise communicator, as most dogs are, and he expects his human to understand context and nuance. Today, he was able to help walk her towards a better understanding of how to be in conversation with him.

A day of sunshine and the unconditional love of dogs and dear friends sets the heart and soul afire, but what burns consumes, and so it also ignites the seeker in us, setting us off on a thousand journeys to look for the kindling of the heart and soul. And here I am on one of those journeys, searching my mind, reliving my experiences, humbly attempting to understand why the very human process of creative writing should be replaced by a technology, by AI. My kids and I were doing dishes this morning before my most wonderful day, and I found myself misremembering the story of John Henry, when I said to my kids, “John Henry lost to the machine.” My kids quickly corrected me, “No he didn’t, Dad! He beat the machine. He won… But, then he died.” So I was right. John Henry lost. I admit, I can’t beat AI. It has access to everything I’ve posted online and it can clearly very successfully synthesize my voice with someone else’s words, but not appear to plagiarize my work. Even if I could beat AI, like John Henry, it might be the death of me. So, I guess I’ll take a different route, I’ll decline the fight. I encourage everyone to get curious about posts that are a bit too well composed, too flowery or poetic, too complete – if the post hits your tastebuds like a Mountain Dew Slurpee, check out what the person who posted was writing a year or two ago – if it reads as dry as a dog biscuit, fucking spit that garbage out for the health and longevity of your heart and soul. AI is a one way train to cognitive arrest, it’s alphabet plaque, it’s phonetic fentanyl. When you read my words, know that I have invested so much into the effort to connect with you. It’s hard to be creative. But, that is the only reason it matters. It’s not supposed to be easy to connect with people, it’s not supposed to work all the time, or work perfectly. Just as the hide is not the the goal of the search. The manipulation of the reader such as to diddle their dopamine receptors at high frequency is not the goal of the creative writer. It’s the process and the practice that compels us. We search with our dogs to become better listeners and to understand ourselves and the dogs better. We write creatively to improve our self awareness and our awareness of others, and to become wiser. If the process is handed over to AI, the practice ceases to be, and wisdom is lost; into the void comes delusion and misery. “There ain’t no easy way, no there ain’t no easy way out.” Robert Tepper wrote that song and Sylvester Stallone put it in Rocky IV, the one where Rocky fights Dolph Lundgren’s Russian genetically engineered super human, Ivan Drago. My entire day today was like a Rocky movie training montage, searching with dogs, deep discussions with dogs and people, running around the park in the sun and snow. Then, sitting down at the keyboard practicing the process of creative writing. Let’s see AI do that.

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Happy Sniffing!