Happy New Year? That’s rich!

            Humans are geniuses of self-deception. They must be seen to be believed. They invent offices, ranks, occasions, then invest them with mystical significance, as if they were truly big deals and not blow-up toys. What makes this year new? Or (by half the world’s reckoning) the two thousandth and twenty-fourth? As if one guy’s appearance pressed history’s reset button, magically transforming seamless time into before and after!

            I don’t doubt this Jesus was special. A few of any species are – we can’t all be Rin-Tin-Tin.  But to claim his birthday commences the world? By my calendar, the world began May 10, 2023 – make a note, please. I am planning a champagne (technically, Prosecco) reception and the slurry singing of Auld Lang Syne.

            What do humans fret about that’s real? We dogs – Henry here, but you knew that – confine our foci to actualities. (Do you like that noun, foci? Better than “focuses”, no, which is barely pronounceable in Human? Yet snooty too, as if a Latinate lexicon bespoke erudition. Then again, I am a tad snooty, hardly ruff-ruff riff-raff, though not as snooty as this clumsy CAI (canine artificial intelligence) translation tool makes me. (“Translation,” said the Russian poet Yevtushenko, “is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful.”))

            I chuckle at Carll, though he doesn’t realize it, for he speaks Dog about as fluently as he does Italian. He wakes in the night in a sweat about – get this – Meaning – or Respect – or Time. He fears he will vanish like a raindrop into the ocean (his metaphor), as if he had never been. He must write harder – and harder – to forestall this deliquescence. His panic causes him to hyperventilate till his prose pops like an overfilled balloon. Poor baby!

            For dogs there are no years – or Meaning – or Respect – or Time. Lowly or lordly, we simply are. Today is today, not before or after. We love, yes, but only who’s here, not yesterday’s or tomorrow’s affiliates. This spares us a peck of woes. We don’t pant with ambition or cringe with shame, “kick ourselves” for inadvertent faux pas (how can any creature kick itself?), exalt, exult, execrate, et cetera. Our sole aim, if you can call it that, is to maximize our moment: Happy Now, not Happy New.

            No limitation this but liberation – a get-out-of-jail-free card from the tyranny of time. Time messes with humans’ minds. Yes, time produces art, science, progress, all the brags on the human c.v., but who needs better amidst the best? Oughtn’t sufficiency – for any creature – define success?

            Does this dogma (love that word) signal spiritual indolence? Are dogs less because we’re glad?

            No, I bark my loudest, we too feel! And not just in our bodies. Our minds, too, misgive.

            The other night I couldn’t sleep. This had never happened before. Carll and Jane were tucked in, reading their books, I was in my cage (which they insist on calling a crate, to make them feel better), fed, exercised, evacuated, nothing bodily amiss, but my mind was restless, anxious in Human. I alerted Carll and Jane to this anomaly, who instructed me to shut the f*** up (Carll) or be quiet please (Jane). Persistence, though, pays off, at bedtime as elsewhere. Eventually, my whimpering extracted Jane from bed to “see what was wrong” and forced Carll to dowse his reading lamp, muttering “Oh, to hell with it.”

            What was wrong? Can’t say. Some moral imbalance in the universe, the stars out of alignment, maybe Trump.