You might call it art. I call it surveillance. This blog has been called ‘weird’ and I take issue with that. What I find weird is the impulse to frame and capture my face out here on the lawn every day. In the name of art or ownership. Power? I’m a power Chihuahua. That’s the picture I’m building here. A small guy gets ground down, reduced in canny angles. I call that weird too.

Let’s talk for a moment about kids with artist parents. Often, they become lawyers or investment bankers. This is because they are disgusted by their parent’s narcissism. That primal glimmer. It seems obscene. Kids of artists come to know art as an excuse to be a scatterbrained pornographer and there is some truth to this. How different is the experience of pets? Not much I say. For every child of a major artist who signed up for a career in accountancy or the loony bin, there is a dog or a cat, possibly even a salamander, pixeled to death in the rhapsody of some owner’s glee  -  in the name of love, or worse, sophisticated humor. Is pet photography art or smut? Who cares. Is it dirty? Does it look dirty? If it stinks like a pig and it oinks like a pig, then guess what – it’s a pig. These photos suck and I declare my emancipation from them. I retract my permission – as if such a thing as a dog agreement has ever had a moment’s gleam in the eye of the smug, self-satisfied human world.

I’ve been having some thoughts. Firstly, that I would like to stay outside. I mean for the rest of my life. I belong here, under the sun, on my bed of stone or grass. I want what you want, to be free. I see the freedom in your eyes when you take my picture. The greed for an extra space for you which is me. Your cute dog. So it’s puzzling for me to watch you in your stillness with your heavy black machine, trying to get me to be still. I want to run with an elk bone and be chased by you. I know that’s what you want too. After all why do you want a dog. You couldn’t ever get yourself out here every day but now you can because it’s “for me.” Really? You look tired on the porch with your mug of coffee. You like a dog to be sleeping by the window with his underside exposed. I can do that a little bit, but really I want to run. I want to find hiding spots and despite my size, I want to kill things. A fine warm bird perhaps. And then I like to get high. I like to run around and around in circles. I smell everything better that way, I feel the entire circle of my life: the young yard with my sisters and brothers and all those other odd dogs I’d come to love. The mysterious drive here with the two white women and moving again to the city of stone and constant exits and entrances and the underneath world that scares me so with the one long loud rumbling car. Back when I was first kidnapped in the car with the women, I vomited. I sat buzzing with a panic that hasn’t yet left, clutched by the younger white woman, who stroked me madly. It was the worst day of my life. I won’t say today is the best but I feel circled by something strong now, something so hopeful and mysterious that I feel compelled today to share it with you.

mylifebyhank as told to Leopoldine Core & Eileen Myles