|
sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
|
Lew Dog
Right. So I'm housesitting for Kel and Kev, a gig that includes watching my dog Lew, the blue heeler that they haven't yet realized that they've been raising on my behalf for the last six years. Lew is my favorite dog ever, so long as you don't count Cooper, who is my favorite dog ever after Uncas, who was Max's family's dog when I met Max and who was my favorite dog ever. (Uncas, appropriately enough, was the only member of Max's family--besides Max, of course--who actually liked me from the get-go. Max and I had Uncas's blessing from day one. Uncas, my dog, actually growled and snapped at Max's mother one night when I was petting him and she tried to get him to go outside. He wouldn't go until I told him it was okay, then he went out like a little lamb. RIP, Uncas.) Anyway, I was going to tell you about Lew. Lew is my dog until Kel and Kev return, and he and I are coming to an understanding about our current living situation. That understanding is that he gets everything he wants: He gets to sleep wherever he wants, he gets little bits of my dinner if he wants (though I don't feed him from the table, because Kel specifically asked me not to), he gets to fumigate the house with the most terrifically toxic farts that you have ever experienced in your life--if he wants to, and, trust me, he wants to. Several times I've had to run for the door and fan the room frantically to avoid impending suffocation. I mean, it's worse than anything my father every produced, and he was a Mexican beaner like me. Kel told me this hilarious story about Kev's teenaged niece and her friend who came up from the South to visit and who endured a long, long car ride with a gassy Lew (and his also gassorific, then-companion Jack (RIP, Jack)). Turns out that the toxic dog gas was not even the worst of it though, as they were all going hiking and Kev had forgotten his reading material and ended up stopping to buy a copy of MacBeth as a campfire read-aloud book for everyone to share. (And when Kel told me this story, Kev protested that there hadn't been much in the little town's used bookstore, and Kel was, like, excuse me, you could have bought anything else, you could have read them the car owner's manual out of the glove compartment and they would have been happier.) What was I talking about? Oh, right. My dog, Lew. Lew is the frisbee champion dog of the world. He seriously has about nine thousand frisbees in the backyard. There are four or five in current rotation, and after Max and I had each tossed one over the high fence into the neighbor's yard, I went searching for another and found an entire milk crate full of frisbees out near the water faucet. Lew is very picky about the frisbee du jour, however, and he won't deign to slobber on a frisbee unless it meets his high standards (which I think includes being peed on by him a half dozen times or so). But me? I'm not a dog owner of the faint-hearted variety. I'm not squeamish about dog pee, or dog poop, or dog farts, or even dog snot. Dog snot? That's right. In one of our many games of frisbee, Lew must have inhaled a fly or something, because he sneezed about twenty times, ran inside, drank some water, and then sneezed another dozen times. A dozen sneezes worth of dog snot landed on the floor. And guess who got to wipe it up? Sock mop? I think not. I used papertowels. Anyway, that's Lew. I'll try to get a picture of him up here soon.
More lies:
|
|||||