From the archives but never here:
July 29, 2020
From: The Dept. of Canine Renaming and Redundancy Dept.
To: JayDee Barkinger Bowles
Dear Ms. Bowles,
Your application for a spell-change to your first name has been approved to Jadie.
However, your application to drop your last name has been denied, as has your application for the personalized plate Dane Jadie Clench. And please tell your brother there’s no such thing as a “Disservice Dog.”
Dear The New York Times,
You are the one publication I fancied working for and never did, so these may be sour grapes. They’re most certainly fermented.
However, you did run blurbs from my reviews and covered my last day at USA Today fairly and accurately, so I consider us even.
But you’re dead wrong about Donald Trump’s presidential run, particularly the headline. Another Trump run is EXACTLY what America deserves.
What did you think you were watching the past six years? Downton Flabby? You have always flouted privilege as an option, from real estate to vegan food to theater tickets.
Yet you seem to think the privilege to choose extends to politics. It does not. Politics is like health: You make dumb choices early, you pay for them later. There’s no skirting consequence.
But all America has done in the 21st century is skirt, hem and haw. When it comes to inconvenient facts, the U.S. has proven itself Jim Crow backward. We’re competing with superpowers and oil barons over who can rot fastest.
Did you not watch the January 6th 2021 attempted overthrow of the United States government? It was in all the papers. Half our nation thought that was no big deal. How long does an American sit in the corner for trying to impose white make rule on everyone else in the room?
Under Trump, we became a nation of denial. Deny science. Deny equality.Deny data. Deny counting. Deny choice. Deny assistance.
He sprung a new dunce confederacy on the electorate (though Republicans gave him a mile head start), including Elon Musk, a Trump III mini-dunce. He made surgical masks look like political oppression. Dumbass stares at the sun: Do we even want to know how many yokels now do the same thing while driving?
Probably not. But do we deserve to have that idiot — who represents half of our union — on public display to reveal what we look like as a nation? Hell yes. We broke it, we bought it.
I didn’t deserve diabetes. But I did — and do — deserve every complication that comes from my mismanagement of it. Cleanup, Aisle Me. Try it sometime.
We’ve had political cancer for a while. The chemo may work, but we don’t get to decide when it’s over.
My mayhems,
HAPPY JOINT SECOND BIRTHDAY!! What a joyous serendipity, to share the exact chronology of existence!
Oh, and Charlie: I’m pretty sure your birthdate is fraudulent. I don’t even know that you’re two yet.
See, your paperwork from the shelter lists your birthdate as 11/1/2020, but I suspect they figured out Jadie’s birthday and forged your documents to seal the adoption deal. I haven’t met a dog person yet who puts you north of 18 months.
But that’s the beauty of rescues: They fill whatever role they’re meant to play. And Chuck, yours is to be the 2-year-old; unpredictable, deliriously destructive and mouthy as hell. You still bark at the mail carrier every time, like you just saw Hitler in shorts. You eat my glasses. Hence and heretofore, your birthday is at midnight on Halloween, so we can still mark the occasion together while acknowledging the possibility of subterfuge.
And Jadie, of ruby lobes and Cali sunrise eyes, you are in full bloom. You have become the quiet(er), calm(er) sibling. You helped train Charlie on the dog door, taunting him with toys that you’d scamper inside. Now you both burst through the once-clear plastic flap like Starsky and Hutch on meth.
In fact, your first year together has been a bit like watching a 70’s cop show, where the patrol officers pretend to dislike each other. When we tool up for the park — leashes, music, water — you snap and snarl and growl at each other. You’ll grab each by the reins and drag the other to the door. ‘Why are you walking yourself? I’m not touching you. Does it bother you that you’re walking yourself? I’m not touching you.’
But then I open the hatchback, and you become synchronized swimmers, leaping and twisting and arcing leashward to the park, a place so sacred I have to say it in pig latin if it is spoken aloud. If I could rollerblade, we could Iditarod the 2-1/2 miles to the park, and we’d beat traffic (note to self: invent the rollerblade bobsled).
I’ll admit, I love the park, too, and not just for the fang and claw. The humans there, we’re all fractured in some way by a real world busted to bits. But we find grace in yours, where life is all windshield, no rearview mirror.
I try to imagine what that off-leash world is like. You lose your minds with unadulterated glee. Is it a Disneyland you vaguely recall, even though you were there just yesterday? A place where you know the rides by heart, but not what they do to yours?
Or do you remember everything, exactly, and it’s the memory that makes you that celebratory? I guess the answer doesn’t matter, but I wish you could see it.
Maybe you do. You both still have that verticality to your gallop, like you want to be airborne a moment longer, glimpse a moment extra, stretch a moment further. You both grin like hayseeds when you pant, so perhaps I’m anthropomorphizing a smile at the end of the day. But I could swear you dig Splash Mountain.
Anyway, happy second birthday! Who knows? To celebrate, we may go to the arkpay.
