I only have eyes for you

Well, I'm sad to admit it but it's true. Newman has serious intimacy problems.

Oh, he's a normal dog in so many ways. He loves to play hide and seek (I hide, he seeks, gives up, lies down and forgets what he was looking for), he can shake a paw (although he doesn't quite get that the other paw is shakeable too) and last night he stood up on the counter and fetched a chicken wing bone from my plate. All signs that things are copacetic with Newman. I was upset about the chicken wing, though. I had already eaten it, which is fine, but I'm a little rusty on my emergency surgery skills to remove chicken bone shrapnel from a dog. This was not covered in any MASH episode I saw.

Real intimacy with Newman, however, is elusive. I measure intimacy through eye contact. In my view, you can never really achieve intimacy with a person or animal unless you can sustain deep, focused eye contact. This probably doesn't apply to Twizzles, our guinea pig. If you stare deeply into her eyes in a loving way, she will make a hissing sound that may or may not include spit in your face, grab a piece of her own poo and run into a corner to dine on it. All very exciting for her but not an intimate meal by any definition.

So when I am lying on the bed with Newman, I will come close to his face and look lovingly into his eyes. He puts up with this for about half a second and then promptly shuns my advances. Could it be my breath? That would be curious, since his breath reminds me of a skunk farting just before its body is sculpted to the road with tire treads.

My last dog, Cosmo, was quite high on the intimacy meter. I could stare into his eyes at a close distance for hours and he would stare back, completely forgetting about his itchy groin. But I could never really hold my breath under these conditions for more than a minute or so.

Perhaps Newman is shy and uncomfortable with intimacy. I have a great solution to overcome that condition. I learned this technique while I was starring in a play at university. That's right, I starred in a play. I stood in for Ryan Gosling, who wasn't born yet.

It was really a very powerful exercise, taught to us by the Director, a strange guy that as I think about it now should have been the offspring of a marriage between Dog the Bounty Hunter and Cameron Diaz. A strange breed, indeed.

The Director had two chairs facing each other, about five feet apart, and me and this cute girl had to stare into each other's eyes for 15 minutes. That's it. I was quite nervous because I didn't know this girl very well and I was a complete spastic, bumbling idiot around all girls. I couldn't rely on the normal 5-10 beers I needed before I could strike up a conversation with the opposite sex. At parties I would often end up speaking vomish, a language combining gurgled words and vomit. The only word out of the girl's mouth would be, "vamoose".

So during this exercise there was nothing between us but the eyes. But what an astonishing effect it had. When we finished I felt totally comfortable around this girl. I felt like I really knew her and could completely trust her. It was as if a long, deep conversation had taken place between us, without uttering a word. We were friends from then on, with nary a beer in sight.

I recommend you try this exercise if you are shy and nervous around someone. It works much better with the other person's cooperation, too. If you pick someone randomly on the subway or in a fast food joint and stare at them for 15 minutes, I'm not so sure it would be effective. They have to be voluntarily staring back at you, not calling the police for assistance.

So that's why the eyes are so important to establishing intimacy. Newman just isn't ready yet. I can feel that on an emotional level. I tried feeling things on an intellectual level and it was too hard.

I just might try the chair exercise with Newman. Although I suspect he'll react more positively to "vomish".