Happy Whatever.

            (Dogs don’t do holidays. What’s a saint, anyway?)

            If I’m sounding less than happy today it’s because I am: in human terms, grouchy, in dog terms, momentarily put out. It pays coming up short with short-term memory. Grievances evanesce. One recalls what one likes about one’s kennelmates, not what irks.

            Clemency will come, perhaps before I finish dictating these six hundred words. (Why six hundred? A bit fetishistic, no? But to continue.) Carll’s only occasionally insufferable. But in this matter, at this hour, I could – I don’t know what. Little good pouting does me. Carll thinks it’s “cute.” Jane too. They laugh. Being laughed at when you’re glowering is nettlesome, to put it mildly.

            My gripe? (Finally, you say, he’s coming around to a topic sentence. Jane adjudges all that precedes said sentence “throat-clearing,” urging Carll to get a move on. Carll smiles gnomically (at Jane): “Isn’t life a digression?”)

            My gripe (as I was saying): When and what to eat for breakfast.

            Carll wakes in a hurry, as if catching a train or something – stows dishes, mixes my chow, boils his coffee, and plops a sweet roll onto his little white plate quicker than you can say lickety-split if you can say it at all. His hurry, he explains, is (get this) “the half-life of originality.” He derives his rhythm, he imagines, from his dreams, and it deflates faster than a slaughtered tire. The quicker out of the kitchen, the better his chances of agreeable utterance.

I, slower to wake, rate this matutinal rush a crock, not to say unseemly. Roused from my merited rest, reservoirs emptied (in the apt spot – no puppy I), I opt to stretch, nibble, dawdle as I contemplate the dawn. Where’s the fire? Life’s made to be lived, not hurtled through like a pitcher’s fastball, so fast that the batter can’t connect. (“Calmativi… the English say caaallmm…” – that’s from Waiting for Godot, if I remember right.) Hold your horses, can’t you! But poor dear Carll, future-harried, sprints as if chased, slurping his coffee (before it cools!), gobbling his sweet roll without savoring it. You’d think there’s some crisis he’s so antsy to flip open his f**ing laptop. (My competitor, his laptop, for which I bear little love.)

We’ve arrived at the nub of my gripe. (“Finally!” says Jane, with evident exasperation. Yes, I’m a dog, this is litterature, not literature, but really!) (P.S.: do gripes have nubs?)

Fact is, I do not feel like eating my breakfast now – with sloppy precipitancy – and resent being rushed. Moreover, if I were of a mind to gobble, guzzle, scarf, wolf, gulp, my preference would not be such adequate and unappetizing fare. I’d prefer, now you mention it, that sweet roll Carll’s devouring – with supervisory superiority – in my sight.

I wouldn’t call Carll a sadist – though my basis for comparison is not numerous. He really does love me, I’m assured – “love” is his verb. Yet he takes pleasure taunting me – with toys, treats, footwear, you name it – lording his humanity over my caninity – much as owners and overseers, back in the day, condescended to human chattel. It’s as if I lived for his entertainment and not he for mine.

Wouldn’t this rile you? Post-adolescence (which I consider myself), does subservience ever endear? It’s d***d annoying, that’s what it is, to be forced to cuddle by Carll’s side on his work-couch and coquettishly cock my head and bat my eyelids for the least crumb of his morning sweetness.

“Eat your breakfast first,” he shoos me.

Why don’t you eat it, I’m tempted to retort, but don’t.