Encore une fois – that’s French. (I know the word in Dog but can’t spell it.) Less sveltely: Hello again:

            I’ve had it up to here with your human news. Carll reads it to me – if you can call snarling reading. It exasperates him, though that verb hardly does justice. “Disgusts” doesn’t incorporate the frustration. He’s sick and tired of it, he hisses, done with it, to hell with it, it’s bad for his blood pressure, tranquility, mental balance, etc., and on he goes scrolling. I mean, really. When a dog sniffs foulness – as we do often – do we grind our noses in it day after day, sometimes thrice daily or more (there’s no adverb for “four times” – fource? quadrice? – or five – quince? – none enshrined by the redoubtable OED – ever wondered why?).

            Dogs, confronted by the despicable, decamp unless we can’t. We’ve a ton more of that sense humans laughingly call common. Life is made to be loved, not suffered through. If the news sears and scars, twist the spigot off why don’t you! Duh!

            With humans it’s more complicated – and convoluted. They trot out hifalutin concepts like Responsibility and Awareness and Need to Know. Can you imagine a dog sighing (with T.S. Eliot), “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”

            Carll reads the news, he explains, because he feels responsible for the “world during my watch.” Have you ever! Carll, last I checked, is a retired old white guy of no great influence, with a glamorous clutch of followers (gotta get that in), but numerically or practically impotent and inconsequential. He doesn’t matter bubkus – no more do I. But whereas I embrace my nonentity as license to romp, he dons his hypothetical significance like a hairshirt, remember them? (Hairshirts don’t sound half bad, but what do dogs know?) He gets in a foul mood because of information he can easily avoid, to the point (I can feel it) of kicking the dog, though he refrains.

            I ask Carll about this. He smiles, ruffling my head-fur and exclaiming “You’re so cute”, an ejaculation I both enjoy – it’s tender, no? – and resent – it’s so patronizing! Dogs, he explains, don’t rule the earth. They don’t make the laws, manage the equipment, sort out the spats and otherwise arrange for the survival of this vulnerable planet. (His addition of that adjective vulnerable subtly magnifies his valor, as if the globe were a damsel in distress.) Dogs, he reminds me, only half-apologetically, as Massah might have his house slave, exist at humans’ sufferance, to serve the master-race, and if we lose sight of our subservience… here he draws his forefinger ominously across his throat.

            See what I have to put up with? The superiority! Condescension! Fortunately my common sense inures me to such cock-of-the-walk absurdities. I’m tempted to whistle the “Circle of Life” anthem from The Lion King (which Carll and Jane have now seen thrice, blaming their travail on successive grandkids), only I can’t for the life of me hard as I’ve tried. (Can any dog whistle? Might make a lucrative act. Colbert would love it.)

            Just skip the news, I nuzzle Carll as persuasively as I know how. We’ve got each other, don’t we – and Jane – and the grandkids when they come over – who needs more? Let the world go hang! (Carll’s feet especially smell like Camembert.) Take your joy from the sky – and mud – and squirrels – and the sun! Humanity is not your fault!

            But Carll only sighs, wistfully, and keeps ruffling. You’ll never understand, Henry, he thinks sadly. You’ll never understand, I thump my stubby tale in response.

            And on we go.