"Could you take the dog for a walk?"

My father had a way of asking or telling you to do something without sounding like an irritating dictator, that's something that I think makes him one of the greats. He was that way for everyone. If you came into the house, you were his child, and you received all the guidance, love, and discipline therein. You received Film Noir, physics, and a peculiar philosophy all wrapped up in one boisterous Irishman. So it's difficult to refuse a simple request like taking the dog for a little constitutional.

Sometimes it seems like everything is ordinary. Logically, though, concepts like ordinary couldn't exist without there being something extraordinary in contrast. Unfortunately, the fact that while I'm snapping the leash onto my Zoe's (what a horrid name for a dog, I know) collar and preparing to venture out into the cold darkness outside, someone, somewhere, is experiencing something extraordinary offers little solace.

It's probably best not to think about those things, though, at least not while you're doing something else at the same time, like carrying the dog across the stone patio to be sure it doesn't defecate anywhere except the grass. After all, one might lose concentration, trip on an unexpected and out of place fallen branch, drop the dog, miss the leash in that desperate grab, and look up just in time to see a dozen pounds of furry animal slipping into the darkness.

I never was good at parallel processing.

So there I was, outside the back of my uncles house, just standing there with a generally dumfounded expression, wondering how to go about recapturing a dog that never really listened to my beckons even in less consequential circumstances, much less when the beast's freedom was at stake.

Other conditions weren't favoring me either. Obviously, being absentminded enough to lose the dog, I had overlooked the light switch at the house (a distance away now that I didn't feel like crossing again without recovering my pet), which would have shed some light on the situation, although it never would have hoped to illuminate the entirety of what could have been called my Uncle's yard. He lived in a small house on the edge of a forest, with a short field of grass before the woods on his side of the road, and empty tracks of land on the other. Of course, they looked the same in this darkness. The clouds overhead were as thick as clouds can be without bursting into rain, like a fat man taking a deep breath, retaining it until his face turned red. But there was no red in the sky, only a sullen dismal blue that offered no lighting whatsoever. I could look back at the house to see through the windows, of course, but to look anywhere else; all that could be seen was the ultra-black silhouettes of taller structures like the trees or the silo (which was never used, but was there when my uncle moved in). My vision made the objects and the sky trade places, never quite able to decide which was the object and which the background, unable to discern whether it was black on blue or blue on black.

Stepping out toward where I had seen the little mongrel charge off, I began to realize just how much I valued sight. In this kind of darkness, the ground is invisible. I hear nothing save for faint voices far behind me, so Zoe must have stopped, perhaps to fertilize the lawn. With that thought in mind, I missed the sight of the ground even more. It's in this kind of situation when you realize just how slow and ultimately inadequate the sense of touch is. Under normal circumstances, it may not seem that it takes a terribly long time for sensory input to travel from the sole of your foot to your brain, but when you can't see the ground below you, it is an eternity of not knowing whether or not your foot is buried in dog feces.

Things like blindness and deafness have always been what really scared me. Actually, maybe it's nothingness that scares me so much. Of course sights and sounds can be frightening, but the utter lack thereof is terrifying, isn't it? I'm forced out of desperation to believe that blindness and deafness are simply seeing in a different way, hearing in a different way. I could never really know for certain, though, as I've only ever known one man who was blind, and I didn't much feel like asking him about it.

I would visit my grandfather. Even at age seventy, he never began to wither until he began the chemotherapy. Vision had left him several years beforehand, though. I always wondered what he saw. At first, the idea that he truly saw nothing but blackness did not even enter my six-year-old mind. I had to assume he saw something. When I talked to him, and his blank eyes lolled this way and that, I would attempt to stay in what would have been their line of sight, regardless of whether he could see me or not. It made me more comfortable to ignore the fact that for him, there was simply nothing to be seen. Because if I accepted that fact, then eventually I would have to realize that at some point, there might be nothing for me to see.

That was why I continuously looked upward at the blackness of the silo against the blue of the night sky. I couldn't let an optical illusion defeat me and allow the blue to overcome the black and the night to consume everything. The silo was my sword to fend off that immaterial demon of nothingness. If the blue ever overpowered the black, then it would take me no more time to forget about Zoe and turn back for the house than it would take for me to realize that my foot had landed in shit.

Or that I had run into a bush too short to make a silhouette against the sky, which was thus, of course, invisible. By a strange stroke of luck, this was precisely the bush that Zoe had decided would make a suitable bathroom. Both of my hands snatched down and got an unpleasant combination of branches and fur. The branches were enough of a discomfort to cause my hands to open, and the dog was gone again.

Curses escape my mouth, somewhere between whispering and screaming, but not seeming to have any affect on my situation. Cursing rarely does.

Why is it I'm always pitted against dogs?

The last time had been a far stranger circumstance. The details of just why the four (three friends and I) of us were breaking into a fifth friend's house while his entire family was away elude my recollection. I'm quite certain it was to retrieve something borrowed, but why this could not wait until more legal means of retrieval would be possible, I don't remember. I had only agreed to come along because doing such things makes me feel very much alive. I never think at the time that I'm doing something extraordinary. Of course not. Only ordinary things are to be recognized for what they are.

Breaking into a house is a good deal easier than one might think.

Go to a window; take off the screen. Take a pellet gun; fire it through that window, just above the latch. It will create a small hole, into which one can insert anything, such as a branch or a sturdy pen or a screwdriver, and break away enough glass to reach in and unlock the latch. All of this creates very little noise.

A dog, however, does create noise. The only current resident of the house did not seem to approve of our entry, and though I fail to guess his breed, I can say that he was much larger than my own canine. Attempts to calm the beast through petting failed miserably. One friend ran for the kitchen to find something to fill that gaping, toothy maw. Another sifted through her purse for pepper spray (she took long enough that I'm certain that any attacker would have had her subdued long before she found it). The pepper spray served little purpose, except to teach us all the valuable lesson that pepper spray should never, ever, be sprayed indoors.

For one reason or another (perhaps my coughing and hacking was louder than that of my friends), the animal decided that I was the most threatening of intruders, and rushed at me. Through my tear filled eyes, I recall the glint on the collar. Just why that stuck with me I don't know, but I don't remember thinking about anything else. Not to run, not to defend, not even about my hand leaving my eyes and balling into a fist. Instinct had taken over faster than thought could ever hope to. The canine had barely landed its front paws on my chest when that fist whipped into the dog's skull and gave it a knock to the floor that it would never forget.

Why am I always pitted against dogs?

Whatever the reason, if it must happen, I certainly prefer keeping my gift of sight as it does. Regardless, I continued in the direction I had last heard Zoe trotting off into.

It's an odd thing, darkness. Logically, losing an entire venue of sensory perception should do a great deal to take away from how real the world is to us. As I've found, though, the effect is quite the opposite. Once upon a time, what we saw was real without question, but, of late, mankind has had to develop very different methods from the classical ones for differentiating between what is real and what is not. The media is everything. In the end, life seems to be little more than media that hasn't yet been discovered. This is why a lack of sensation is accorded with great authenticity.

Look at film. Assume the subject of a scene in a film is that a man is being shot in the head, obviously a surprising and unexpected event. If the shot is focused on the head soon to be blown apart, filmed in super-slow-motion, eight hundred frames per second capturing every bead of sweat and particle of dust in the air, following until after the gunshot, detailed with such care that we can practically taste the brain matter, then we know that this is fake. It isn't real. But what if the head is somewhere in the corner of the screen? What if we can hardly see it? What if only a quick spatter of blood is visible before the head falls out of the screen completely, and the camera jerks and rocks trying to find the subject. This sounds more like a documentary, does it not? It sounds more real.

Because we all know, somewhere deep down, that reality is what we can't see.

Suddenly, to my delightful surprise, what I do see is Zoe, on the fringe of the circle of illumination cast by an electrical light attached to a telephone poll. I'm about fifteen feet to the dog's left. The road is perhaps fifty feet to her right. She takes a long look at me, perhaps wondering how quick my feet are, guessing at its chances. It must have eventually come to the conclusion that my feet were slow enough to bet against, and it looked to the road and began to run.

Have you ever attempted to catch a running Border Collie? I have no technical knowledge about Border Collies or any other breed of dog, but I will tell you what a Border Collie is. It is a tiny little powerhouse of ceaseless energy. It will never stop bothering you for scraps at the table. It will never stop barking to be let out of a cage, and will even tip that cage over if its cries go unanswered long enough. It will never give up at a tug-of-war, even as you lift the toy up so high that the dog dangles by it's mouth. It will never get tired, unless a tag team of family members trade off playing fetch and tug-of-war for hours on end, allowing not a pause from the little ball of dynamism. The word stamina doesn't begin to describe its vitality.

And the word speed seems utterly deficient when referring to the animal's ability to run. I never had to think to give chase, it was simply done. I exploded out of stillness into a mad dash harum-scarum run as if all the hounds of Hell were at my back and all the fortunes of Eden lay before me.

Why? In all honesty, this dog is not terribly important to me. I could lose this thing and go on living quite happily. Sometimes, the chase itself is worth chasing.

This is the moment between moments when something ordinary is turned into something extraordinary. Chasing down that animal, my feet pounding the dirt, its paws scampering over the grass, I feel like a hunter. Granted, I sought not to kill my prey, and it would have made a scanty meal if I had. And in fact, all I was really doing was trying to overtake a runaway pet, but it doesn't change the feeling, and the satisfaction I sensed would be waiting for me if I once again laid my hands on that fur.

This is why breaking into that house was such a thrill. Breaking rules, in and of itself, is not a terribly interesting thing. I do it every day without thinking about it. Speeding, smoking where I shouldn't, drinking. What brings the thrill is the feeling that a part of my mind is becoming active which usually lies inert. The part that made my hand into a fist and struck down my friend's dog, even as I choked on the pepper spray filling the rooms of his house. The same part propelled me into running after my own dog.

The blue was conquering the black, but it didn't matter anymore, because even if it does, it could never convince me of such a thing as nothingness now. Nothing mattered except myself and the dog, and the chase. Now, there is no thought that anything is extraordinary, no questioning condition or circumstance. I'm back to the state where what I see is real without question, and my actions are dictated not by thought, but instinct. I almost envy the dog that gets to live in that state constantly. I wonder, does it ever think?

For me, at least, thought never really goes away, it is only selective in its focus. At that moment, more than one thought occurred to me. Firstly, Zoe was headed for the road. Secondly, if it were to make it across the road, into the field, it would be utterly lost and I would never recover it.

And thirdly, I have no chance whatsoever of catching this dog before it reaches the road.

Through some stroke of luck, even just as this final realization comes to me, Zoe stops running. It reaches the side of the road, just where the grass ends and there is a brief area of broken stones before the pavement, and slides to a halt.

I stop dead in my tracks, not wanting to frighten the dog back into motion. I approach slowly, and the closer I get, the more I understand that she is waiting for me. I arrive and reach down and grasp her leash, and she stares at the road expectantly.

It is then that I remember that my younger sister, who most often takes Zoe for walks, always stops at every road, and looks both ways, and waits for any traffic to pass before venturing across. It appeared the dog had gotten so used to this little ritual that she performed it regardless of whether my sister was there or not.

And as I walked her back toward the house, I decided not to envy her. After all, she was obviously just as domesticated as I was.