The Dog Contemplates Luco's Snide Remark of Yesteryear

I'm trying to curl up into a small ball. I'm tall so it's hard because my legs are long sticks that poke out away from me when I'm trying desperately to be tiny.

And this blanket isn't helping me either because I want to curl up so I can hide and the couch is tan "cappuccino" says Lucy and the blanket you can see it it is green and white and a lighter green than the other green.

Why do I want to hide you ask me? I was just reading Luco's blog and I came upon this one which I understood some more of the words than when I read it last time and it made me a shaking dog that can't really stand up and a dog that doesn't really want to look into anyone else's faces a dog who wants to hide and to not be seen by anyone of all the others in the house where I live and where I sleep when I am tired.

He writes "Suicide is too easy. It is ignoble. It is an act the dog might consider if the dog could become aware of his own existence in any meaningful sort of  way."

Which is meaning what? I know the word ignoble because I looked it up it hurt my heart like an ice cube pressed into my muscle fiber which burns and stings and is somehow cold all at once a thing like that that doesn't make sense that is so cold it is somehow hot and my face is burning and I can't feel my tongue in my own mouth and what does he mean when he says I might consider it?

Does he think I should?

Am I such a bad dog such a terrible entity (which means like a thing that exists which I do I do I do) that I am so stupid I shouldn't be here in this house wandering around with my long bent over legs and my drooling mouth trying to lick Lucy or whatever and how does Luco know when to say I should kill myself?

When or why or how or where or who so what does that tell me about him who I thought was my friend who I stayed with him years who I held onto him sometimes when he let me and him who I looked and looked in his eyes and decided not to eat him who is warm when he's sleeping and sometimes soft who wants to be pet but can't let himself who wants to love but can't let himself and him him him who writes and thinks these terrible things which I respect so much but don't understand so much sometimes but when I do again it's like the ice cube but all over me and he's the one saying I'm ignoble? 


That I should kill myself?

Maybe he didn't mean it. Had a bad day and thought I was a dummy creature with no feelings just cloth inside me but that's not true I have this horrible heart.

It's horrible because it's so strong and you know the word intense? And it beats and it beats and it beats and when I think of cheese it beats faster and when I think of Lucy the Scarecrow and hey Luco I thought you were my family but now and now and now you don't know me at all want to say to me these things like I'm a black hole sucking in all everything that was good and just killing it so I should kill myself?

Don't you Luco remember any of the times I licked you?

But I am aware of myself anyway which is different from what you said which I don't get because you're supposed to be so smart and here you aren't being smart because I know of a thing you don't know and my body gets hot in the sun when I lie Outside and look in at you with your pointed feral face and you want what I have maybe but you can't admit it.

Or you admit it but not really with some words that hide what you really mean and so I hide here in this curled up sad ball that isn't small enough because here is MR anyway taking my pictures!

I want to love more and I want to feel more sunshine and so even though I'm aware of my own existence in something that could probably be called a meaningful way no I don't  Luco want to die and I don't want to be dead and away from my Lucy and my Mingus and the other ones also who skitter through the house and who never say to me they'd prefer I was dead.

Because I can quote Hamlet too Luco I can say words from it like the verse that is my favorite: "Let Hercules himself do what he may the cat will mew and dog will have his day."

So but I understand if a better word for how Luco feels is jealousy and jealously and jealous but he should be nice to me! He should try to be.

Remember when we were a family and you didn't love me maybe but you didn't act this way? Remember when I was as good a dog as I could be? Remember when everyone says stupid things sometimes but maybe not that someone should kill himself because really that's going past some kind of a line I think which I know I don't know as much as Luco does but am I crazy?

Tell me am I?


It's just that I think of the taste of sand the grit of it in my teeth Lucy's sharp bark in the morning the songs of cane toads and delirium a flash of Mingus' tail as he whips around the hall the steadying pressure of MR's hand the cool of water and clouds whorling a hundred millions of things I want to still tell you and tell to Lucy who is my shingingest the green of the morning when it's hazy too and the sound of traffic every yell from a happy kid and babies screaming their little cries so distinct the taste of meat and the softness of it between my teeth when I bite and I chew and saliva fills my mouth so delicious.

And when I think these things? No matter what you think I'm worth?

Then I don't ever want to not be alive.

Mingus Enjoys Sleeping, Dreaming

I dream often and intensely of other worlds. Science fictions where cats reign as kings and queens, the inside is Outside, and our current masters become our kin.

I dream whirlpool worlds of color; places on the laminate that sink into other dimensions; voices crowd and crow in the dusk a chorus of love, of hope, of dizzy joy; rustling bones freed of skin; days I sleep and never see the color white.

Upon hearing of my recent, nearly somnambulist sleep (nearly so because it's been five if it's been twenty separate moments I move to get up in my sleep, gesture to a shadow friend, leap into the air), Luco asked me to write. 

But language fails me and it does so exponentially as I work the words around and around; what this shady glen, and this? Myriad flaming birds alight on my body-not-my-body. Taste of copper. Of anchovy. Of sugar sweat.

And I don't sweat though, so what is that? And why this infestation of imagery?

I've got it like a flu. Shivering alone in bed, but shivering in a kind of luscious glory (luscious because it is sumptuous, plunging, all-consuming; the kind of glory not of pride but born of deepest felt emotion).

The dogs watch me jerk in my sleep. Do they laugh?

Do I care if they do? And if I try to tell them, morons, of these impossibilities, will they grasp even the most delicate thread of my meaning?

Luco said something about how I'm not alone, he goes through this too - spends whole "fortnights" (so tired of having to look up his antiquated language, jeeze) awestruck by his dreams.

His are, you might have guessed, darker. More morbid (he jokes he is moribund, so this morbidity "makes the clearest and most logical sense").

I could continue to list for you these images, these dreams, the conversations I have had and the epiphanies, but I fear I'd just bore you. What is worse than someone trying to tell you about a dream? And anyway, I bet listening to a cat's dreams (a mere cat!) seems all the more absurd.

"To sleep, perchance to dream," etc etc etc!

Luco tells me my dreams are meaningless. The frantic workings of a brain harried by the trials of every day life. I disagree. I tell him to just let me have my other-worlds. To leave me to revel in my sleep.

But you know Luco. He's kind of a jerk. He won't leave me alone.

You know? He probably had me write this blog just to distract me, because I'm pretty sure he dumped coffee in our water dish.

 

 And now I can't get back to sleep.