How much for that ugly doggy in the window?
Diving deeper into the Self
I shared over 15-years with my beloved dog before she died. And then I spent another two years with her before the stench of rotting dog made the smell of wet dog seem like running through a lavender field. Her shelter-given name was “Sky” but, like naming a child “Jeeves” and acting surprised when he grows up to be a butler, I didn’t want a gay dog. So I changed her name to Abandon, as in “reckless abandon,” and called her “Bandhi” for short, spelled with an “h” to give it a “Gandhi”-like spiritual essence.
After Bandhi, I wasn’t ready for another dog. Part of me didn’t like the idea that if I got another dog she would be like a used tampon, disposed of and replaced with a fresh one with no looking back, unless you’re a vampire who wants to use it as a tea bag.
Another part of me liked the freedom. At 9:00 p.m, after being cozy under a blanket on your couch in your warm house, the thought of having to take that “final walk for the night” in the -4 degree weather of a northeastern winter was like a waiter asking you, “For dessert, would you like the cheesecake or a blowjob?” and you choosing the blowjob and when it is finished thinking, “I should have gone with the cheesecake.” The difference was my dog was worth it. That toothy blowjob by the waiter was not.
I also wondered on those cold winter walks if global warming—which was changed overnight with no fanfare or explanation to “climate change”—is real, then why are the winters getting colder? The same Lamestream Media, you know, the one that has come out with articles blaming everything on climate change, “Rise in Heart Disease May Be Caused by Extreme Weather” (ABC) [You would think mass injecting the population with an experimental gene therapy that had no long-term studies should be on the list of usual suspects], announced that CO2 emissions are also causing a cooling of the atmosphere. “Global warming, global cooling—climate change! We’re covered.”
Almost 3 1/2 years after Bandhi’s death, I woke up one morning, jumped out of bed and shouted, “I’m ready for my next dog companion!” My partner values herself and her freedom and when she heard my excitement her response was, “I don’t see any benefit of having a dog.” More accurate would have been if she said, “You already have a bitch in the apartment.”
I then checked my phone and saw twenty messages from the waiter with the bad blowjob begging for another chance. I mean, I have BDE but, seriously dude, it’s time to put that cow out to pasture! In case your “LOL” and “TTYL” and “WTF” shorthand lexicon doesn’t include BDE, it means either “Big Dick Energy” or “Biden Dementia Energy,” I can’t remember.
I filled out two long-ass dog adoption interest forms with two different animal shelters and, besides an acknowledgement from one of them that they received my application, neither one ever got back to me after multiple follow-ups. It’s possible that they got wind that I raised my last dog vegan and thought a dog would be better off executed than having to live the gastrointestinal distress that I would subject it to, which would include tofu and broccoli farts.
One day my current live-in bitch sent me a picture she took of a flyer of a dog in the area that was up for adoption. I met the fosters and the dog. He was a 50 lb. pit bull and they said he was super chill. I came home and said, “I want him!” His name is Minion, probably named after the movie Minions. The word “minion” means:
a follower or underling of a powerful person, especially a servile or unimportant one.
"he gets oppressed minions like me to fob them off"
I didn’t want my dog to grow up to be a Liberal, so I planned to change his name to Trump or Brandon. “Let’s go, Trump!” “Let’s go Brandon!” It’s a coin toss. The alternative was calling him Biden, which would help me better accept when he cost me money, destroyed things and shit on the floor.
My partner said she was intimidated by him, not realizing that after a year of a diet of tofu, his balls would shrink to the size of raisins and he’d behave like all of the effeminate men whose student loans we are unconstitutionally paying off after graduating with a degree in Gender Studies. I, too, had my doubts about adopting a dog that fobbed-off all the other dogs in the neighborhood. “Sorry, Marge. He’s just trying to be friendly. Okay, you don’t have to be a fob about it!”
We went to St. Hubert’s Animal Rescue, which was the place where Minion the Supplicant came from, to look at other dogs. A note to anyone who has never been to an animal shelter: it smells like piss and shit, which incidentally was the bathroom sign at a seedy bar I used to go to, where they divided bathrooms not by gender but by which hole was leaving a deposit.
On another note, you are generally not going to find dogs that are perfectly behaved and walk on leash by your side like an S&M submissive wearing a leather head mask with a red rubber ball in their mouth. Even the Buddha has to crawl before he walked. He didn’t just drop out of his mother’s vagina, land on his feet and start giving talks on The Middle Way.
Most dogs were repeatedly barking or jumping up and down in their cages. One dog was painting on the wall with his own feces. It was a regular asylum. Turning on Google Translate from Dog to English, they were mostly saying, “Get me the fuck out of here!” We saw one quiet dog who leaned against the cage and unmovingly let us touch his snout. Once we got him outside alone in the large caged in area, he ran around like a crazy man. “Throw the ball! Throw the ball! I have my cocaine hidden behind a brick in the wall!”
The staff member who was taking care of us brought a dog out for us to see that it seemed she thought was a hidden treasure. The dog was named Snaggle Tooth. To save you the Google search and having to sift through the several pages of entrees that Hillary Clinton paid for that says this was the name of a Vietnamese hooker that Trump gave a Dirty Sanchez to, it means “an irregular or projecting tooth.” You’re on your own for Dirty Sanchez.
From what I could see, St. Hubert’s does a great job. But whoever is in charge of naming the dogs should be taken to Gitmo and share a cell with Dirty Hillary. Snaggle Tooth didn’t even have a snaggle tooth! Are we really pulling names for dogs from physical deformities now? “In the other cage is Hobble Foot. Genital Warts is over there picking her scabs. And Smelly Vagina is a real sweetheart.” I suppose it was better than if his teeth were actually fucked up, in the same way that naming a regular baby, Retard, would be mean but naming a retarded baby, Retard, would be an express ticket to Hell.
Snaggle Tooth was a dog that was pretty indistinct. If a police artist asked you to give him a description the only thing you could say would be, “Brown dog.” My partner was standing up, as she has an aversion to bodily excrements and it was pretty clear that we were standing on a minefield of piss and shit. I was kneeling down, as I’m a dirty hippie and piss and shit would probably be more averse to me than me to them. “I almost touched that dirty hippy’s arm!” “Ew, gross!”
Snaggle Tooth walked right up to each of us separately and cuddled into us and gave us a lick. When I walked her on leash, she walked right by my side. This is unheard of for a dog a little over one year old in a shelter. It was like the surprise of going to a psych ward and after you talk to one patient who ate his mother, another that is bipolar and thinks he is both Jesus and Hitler, you come across a patient who discusses Kant and Emerson, tells clever jokes and helps you with your golf swing. You think, “This is too good to be true. He probably gives a toothy blowjob!”
After we saw all the dogs we could handle and lost all the hearing that the 120 decibel sound of continuous barking brings to the auditory system, we went to the car and had a discussion about if we should take home Snaggle Tooth for the 10-day try-out, weighing the pros and cons. “She has good speed but her curveball is weak. Let’s send her back down to the Minor Leagues.”
I told her that all dogs can be trained and that, having trained dogs professionally in the past, including Abandon The Hun, who used to pull like mad on the leash and get into fights before becoming a model Hun, I could bring any dog we got up to speed, but that it is rare to have a dog as well behaved as Snaggle Tooth out of the box (I imagined, they would send her home with us in a big box wrapped with a red ribbon tied in a bow on the top.)
She started giving bullshit reasons not to get the dog. “Our apartment is too messy.” I tuned out after, “I don’t have the proper shoes to walk a dog.” There was more shit flying around that car than in the animal rescue and I told her so. She finally said she had fears regarding the responsibility and loss of freedom involved in getting a dog. Unlike the earlier shitstorm that was pelting the car with golf ball-sized hail before this, I accepted this as a genuine concern. The surface objections were just ways to avoid getting to the heart of the matter.
I made it clear that I wanted a dog and Snaggle Tooth, besides the stupid name that we could change to something better, like Fucked Up Nose, was a special dog. Her response was that she was “simple.” I asked, “Like in the head? Dimwitted?” She meant plain.
She wasn’t wrong. She didn’t have a black patch around her eye like Petey The Dog from The Little Rascals Gang. She didn’t have a big goofy grin that made you laugh. She was not by any means up for the Ugliest Dog contest but there was no fear of anyone ever saying, “Now that’s a handsome dog!” In case anyone ever did, I was already prepared with a stock line, “She takes after her father.” They would say, “You are a handsome bastard,” to which I would respond in shock, “What are you crazy?? I’m a human. She’s a dog. I didn’t pass any genetics to her. Her father was a handsome dog, Jesus fucking Christ!” I plan to make a lot of friends at the dog run.
Most of us live on the surface of the skin and not to the depth of the heart. We embrace our anonymous followers on social media, yet won’t give the known people in our lives that truly care about us a reach-around. We spend more time watching projections of nature on the television than immersing ourselves in the fucking forest. We base our growth on what we do for a living and how many hours of meditation we do, while never addressing the “Who” beyond the job and meditation. We say the obstacles to us not being at peace is, “My job sucks. My relationship sucks. My yoga teacher sucks.”
Going beyond the surface of our shallow statements of, “He’s an asshole,” or “He’s a bad yoga teacher,” or “He’s a crappy lover”—phrases that might be applied to anyone and not just me—how about asking:
“What needs of mine are not being met here and are these really needs or conditioning?”
“What belief system do I have that is leading me to feel this way and where did that come from?”
“What fears are underlying this statement or thought? Are they real or are they Memorex?”
“Who is responsible for my peace of mind? If it is me, what am I doing to abide in it?”
“The treasure chest is never found on the surface of the ocean but only in its depths.”
—Rebel Yogi Satya, asshole, bad yoga teacher and shitty lover
Why do you care if your dog is Plain Jane, Dumpy Dorothy, Homely Helen? The deeper question is less whether the dog is non-distinct or ugly as fuck and more so why that fucking matters to you? You’re not planning to fuck the dog!
[EDITOR: “I would cut at least one of the ‘fucks’ in the previous sentence. ME: “You’re fired!” (can I say that without E. Jean Carrol fantasizing about being fucked by me?]
Unless…
Back in the day when Craigslist was a place where you could find a used bicycle, as well as being the glory hole of dating sites, I was looking at ads that involved threesomes, as I had two more items on my Bucket List that I wanted to check off as quickly as possible before the world ended; according to Al Gore’s trashy environmental fear-porn, An Inconvenient Truth, due to global warming we all had about 48-hours left to live. Strangely, that hasn’t stopped him from having the carbon footprint of a small country.
I responded to one ad that said: Looking for someone who has a dog for my wife. I thought this meant that I would bring my dog over for her to play with and then her husband and I would fill her holes with our stucco. I found out that they were looking for a dog that would fuck the wife.
I wrote back, “First of all, my dog is a female and doesn’t have the necessary equipment. Secondly, I try to keep my dog protected from any of my depravities.”
I suspect the deeper truth of why we have an issue with a plain or ugly dog, besides them not fitting in as an accessory to our outfits, is that we would feel judged by our friends and neighbors, who wouldn’t have the balls to say directly to our faces, “Why did you get such a Basic Betty?” but whose look would speak novels. Instead of saying, “Your dog is so cute!” they would be like the mother when Average Anne asks her, “Mom, am I pretty?” “People find you very funny, Dear.” “But what about my looks?” “I was talking about your looks.”
Why does this affect you? “Because I need approval.” “Because my happiness is based on what others think and say.” “Because I think a plain dog reflects on me.” “Because I’m a lot more shallow than I want to admit.” “Because I fuck dogs.” Um, okay.
Deep diving feels pretty fucking vulnerable because you feel like an asshole, a shitty yoga teacher and a bad lover (minus the latter two). You can be a pussy with your snorkel, dabbling around on the surface, or you grow some balls and scuba dive to the depths. Just don’t grow them so big or they’ll float you to the surface where you’ll be surrounded by pretentious pussies who think they are experts on the ocean because they’ve seen its surface. Are you an expert of your Self? Not if you don’t dive into the depth of your motivations and actions.
There is nothing wrong with tits and ass. Despite all the homosexual references here, which I think comes from just completing a tour of duty in Pride month, I like tits and ass. But when you’re 107, your tits are going to be hanging below your knees and the only fuzz left on your lady bits will be from the Saltine crackers you left up there three decades prior and forgot about. If you’re a man, your former trophy package will change to the point where you will get up in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom to take a piss while your balls still rest comfortably in your bed. This is the whole basis of the Buddha’s journey. He was searching for the eternal and discovered that perky tits and tight balls are not.
When you dive deeper into your soul, you start seeing that much of the thoughts, opinions, beliefs and desires you have had are just tits and ass, awesome but incomplete. They may be pointy but where they are pointing is deeper into the Self. When you fall in love with a soul, yours or another’s, you care less about tits and ass and more about living truthfully and lovingly. You care less about the looks of the ones you love, be it two-legged or four-legged, and more about how you can serve both them and your Authentic Self.
I’m planning to invite Trump, the dog not the President, to join my family. She may be plain but she’s not ordinary. Although I won’t let her write mean Tweets like, “Rover has fleas” or “Molly is a bitch” or “Buster drinks from the toilet.” It’s funny how that seems to upset people more than destroying the economy and letting murderers and mental institution inmates come into our country through our open borders. You would think people would care about bigger issues… such as living authentically. And living authentically is never achieved by hiding from your Self.
“If you are authentic, you will be amazingly plain, gloriously ordinary, and yet admired by all because they have spent their lives accumulating toys while forgetting how to play.”
—Rebel Yogi Satya, an extraordinarily ordinary man