UNITED STATES—Sunday can be a drag, the master believes, all those shallow Sunday smiles and that sunshine. There is a positive urge to leave the dogs to their own whiles and have a vacation. Yet… and this is a mighty yet: call of duty beckons. It beckons with the insistence of dogs s scratching at fleas.
The water bowls must be filled to the brim, then come the kibbles–a cup for Miss Luna and then a hint of meat from the can. Lupe makes a beeline as soon as the smell reaches her highly evolved sense of smell, and DeVille makes a beeline for his portion in the opposite corner of the house.
This morning Luna reached her long, affectionate arm over the granite counter and The Milk Bone that lay there, strategically beyond reach, was history.
The master recognizes there is great humility in serving a dog and educating it. To leash her up and do the slow gait around the blocks comprising the Netflix campus and what could be called the party campus, which is an object lesson in string quartets and caviar yet enjoyed in the fringes of a bombed-out zone, where the promised reconstruction never replaced the destruction.
It is all my master can do to not explode with impatience. As we well know, it stems from his walks with the Chihuahua, for I, Luna, display no obedience when the master attempts to leash me, who remain obstinately glued to the floor, the couch, or the cot on the cooler side of the house.
“A pox upon me,” the master blurts out. He has realized that he neglected to get out to the sidewalk without any doggy bags in his pocket. For a few seconds, he feels pretty stupid. But there’s just so much you can focus on when there are police copters overhead, there are bizarre spam calls, and nothing can be counted on. The master knows this is where resilience and ingenuity must kick in. Instead of getting rattled, best get creative.
So first there’s a leaf that serves to enclose one of DeVille’s compact pellets. Then, by and by, he gets to the public trash can–one of the real cultural jewels to be found in the Hollywood zone. By the time, DeVille got to the filthy sidewalk that runs alongside the Tagalyan jungle field of trash, sagebrush, broken glass and concrete chunk, there was a discarded, mirror lined Lays potato chip bag.
He fashioned it into an ersatz doggie bag, albeit with salty chip fragments lodged its creases. It weirdly blurred the senses of smell, greasy surfaces that taken altogether stimulate the reflex that turns our stomach. Yet it worked to capture DeVille’s newest Sunday pellet production which could be soon deposited in the public can at the corner where a mysterious new construction looms.
We were almost home. Grateful for the public waste receptacle and rid of the doggier bits and that gruesome potato chip bag.
To be continued…
