So. I was sitting on the pot this Morning with a hot cuppa Joe, the Dallas Morning News, and a chilled countenance. The Joe was dripped from a shade grown Costa Rican bean roasted dark and ground to powder, then slow soaked to drip directly into my cup through a recycled paper filter. The newspaper was fresh, fragrantly printed on partially-recycled newsprint stock, and kissed with the morning dew of a humid, moldy Texas morning. The chill running through my bones results from the somewhat recent understanding that my body has an expiration date stamped into its DNA, said date rushing at me on greased skids. And I’m so angry at the entire Supreme Court debacle, I’ve a frosty attitude at almost everything.
My hands smeared newspaper ink fingerprints on the mug each time I lifted it off the toilet paper holder for a drink, and the rich coffee coated my gullet with its velvet acid with every swallow. As I am allowed but one serving of coffee daily, the white mug is a Texas-sized ceramic monstrosity, now covered with dozens of black smudges. It brought to memory this one time when burglars broke into the compost plant office and the cops dusted everything in sight for prints. That fucking ink has a twenty-year half-life and transfers to anything else with a wisp of breeze.
My ADD was somewhat calm and I was task-focused as the coffee transitioned from hot to warm, and I was in the moment for the most part. Said another way, I was relaxing into my morning routine.
I’d made my way through half the coffee, the front section, Arts, and Business sections, and had opened the six pages of Metro/State in the DMN when the dogs came into the bathroom from outside to deposit their furry asses at my feet.
As these two lovelies park themselves at my feet anytime I sit on the commode—plus I always read on the pot and am always consumed with whatever it is I’m reading combined with whichever of the convoluted thoughts burble to the surface of my brain stew—I thought nothing about their presence, the same as every day when I don’t consider it. Consider them, maybe? But, again, on this day my ADD was quiet for a while so I had opportunity to actually think on an observation.
The Squirt was directly below me, lounging on the same short-napped rug upon which my own feet rested, and the goat dog lay on his side on the tile, somehow managing to touch his back feet on the Squirt’s hip and his front right paw lazily draped atop my left foot. Were you to have taken a photograph of this pastoral scene, you’d have captured the daily ritual of an unbroken string of the seven years since Yoda came to live with us. Every day when I sit with paper and coffee to start my day, these two sweet puppies come sit there to my feet. Years this has been going on and for years I never paid any attention to it.
Until today.
For some reason—maybe because I was of frosty mood unencumbered with loony thoughts—I looked down at the adorable brown dog laying at my feet, and asked her, I said, “Why do you two sit at my feet every time I sit down on the commode? I know you have things you’d rather do.”
She looked at me as though I’d lost my mind and said to me, she says, “That’s a dumb question shithead, why do you think?”
Rather than snark back at her I took a moment to contemplate. Part of thinking about meaning-of-Life shit is attempting to see every-day events as important, and giving benefit of doubt to those I love, and likewise trying to not be a dickhead for no good reason. I contemplated, considered some more and told her, “I’ve got no fucking idea, Squirtie girl. No idea whatsoever. The two of you are often mysteries to me.”
“Me neither,” she said. “We can’t help it. You grab something to read and head for the bathroom, I get up and follow you like a programmed robot. Dumbass there robotically follows me and we sit at your feet like you’re God. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, but I wouldn’t be anywhere else even if I tried. Can’t help it.”
She quieted and seemed to think for a minute, then says to me, she goes, “Maybe it’s one of those pack law dealios, you know, you’re our pack leader and this is how we show you respect, when you take a shit. Shitting and peeing are big deals to us. If you were a dog I know we’d sniff your ass and your dump when you finish, and then you’d sniff us. Wanna sniff my ass big boy? It’s what you’re supposed to do.”
“That’s a disgusting idea,” I responded, and we all laughed about it.
Which reminds me. I need a new Bug-A-Salt pump-action fly killing machine. I’ve worn mine out and it has started losing zip. I love the plastic crunchy sounds it makes when I cock it, and blowing flies straight to Hell is accompanied by a compressed air clack like no other sound.
Reflecting back on my day I realize that life is a complex fabric of known, unknown, imagined, real and surreal threads woven into the tangled network of our brain’s synopsizes. It is those threads that tint and texture and tangle our thoughts creating both who we are and how we look at the world, and likewise snap to amazement when actual knowledge contradicts that imagined. Sometimes it is the awaking to small contradictions that are the most amazing. Sometimes it a little discovery that can change you from a foul mood.
Like the close smell of a small dog’s ass.
Fuck Walmart!