woke

Paul F Walsh

 

It was during the K9 virus pandemic that we made a momentous decision. No less a doggo than Lord Staffador, Chester the Jester himself, had suggested that we purchase a companion human from the Lost Humans Home.

Being an Irish wolfhound named Michael Collins and a Mexican chihuahua named Pancho Villa we were gay canine revolutionaries with no biological puppies of our own. Due to the stress of social distancing and being locked down in our kennels for an indefinite period of time, Lord Staffador issued us with a special travel permit on the grounds of nurturing our mental and physical health. He advised that there was no finer exercise of body and spirit than walking a companion human on the leash.

It was quite a journey in our bonemobile, but we eventually arrived at the rural hamlet of Rutherford to be greeted by Dr Rottweiler. The good doctor was the vet at the Lost Humans Home, and he seemed rather proud of what we experienced as a rather depressing establishment.

It seemed to us initially that Lord Staffador, the greatest dogologist that a doggo could ever consult, was attempting to lift our spirits by sending us to the most bleak and sad prison in the Hunter Valley.

On the journey outward from Newcastle, we had been so excited that we free-fall fantasized about rescuing two small-breed humans since we feared that one alone might be too lonely. By dog, we decided that even our choice of humans would be revolutionary!

We instructed Dr Rottweiler accordingly, and he briefly lowered his mask to smile at us with a complete lack of sincerity and razor-sharp teeth.

We chose two smallish humans in accord with our revolutionary fantasy, and we were invited to meet them in a large greeting cage in order to confirm our mutual compatibility.

The meeting did not go well.

The first human would not shut up. It was clearly a problem screamer that would set our neighbours growling. And it showed no interest in sniffing butt or having its face licked!

The second human attempted to pat Pancho on the head, and then it exploded liquids from its nose all over Pancho’s face. Need I say more? Gross!

We left the greeting cage bitterly disappointed. It seemed that there were no suitable small humans available. We felt crushed and depressed at the thought that our journey had been wasted. We both cocked our legs on the nearest tree, and then we lowered our masks to sniff a signpost for further guidance.

Surprisingly, further guidance manifested in the form of a large cross-breed human who escaped from his cage and ran towards us. He was huge, two humans in one, a veritable giant, and he inspired both of our tails to wag, and he leaned down to allow his hairy face to receive our excited tongues and a damned good sniffing. It was love at first scent in this unmasked bonding moment. The nose always knows, and his hairy face smelled like a keeper. This skinbaby would find his skinever kennel with us!

It is difficult to judge the mood of a human since they lack an indicative tail, but he was exposing his teeth as our bonemobile carried the three of us back to Newcastle. We learnt later that exposure of the teeth in conjunction with concave-up lips is a sign of happiness in humans as opposed to being a sign of snarling displeasure in doggos. How ironically droll these two-legged beasts are!

We had been looking forward to chewing the bone and chewing the fat with our new companion, but he refused to eat meat. We had unwittingly adopted a vegetarian, which, at first, felt like a disappointment from the perspective of two revolutionary omnivores, but then we realized just how radical our choice was within the omnivorous community, and we felt like founding members of what we chose to call Radical Newcastle.

Shockingly, our feeling of founder status was shattered on our first visit to HumanHome.

HumanHome is a one-stop-shop for doggos who adopt companion humans. HumanHome stocks everything you could possibly want for your human skinbaby as well as everything a discerning doggo would never purchase: backyard homes; clothes, footwear and hats; toys and fitness games; food; hair shampoos and skin products; collars, leads and harnesses; and colourful little identity tags in the shape of a human. It helped that Henry, the rather fetching husky who served us, was openly gay, but Pancho, in particular, was horrified to learn that HumanHome had a vegetarian section due to the recent fad of doggos rescuing non-meat-eaters.

For Pancho, being labelled a faddist was so au contraire to his revolutionary spirit, that he started yapping his masked resistance to such a bourgeois retail barb as only a radical Mexican chihuahua could … yap, yap, yap … oh the embarrassment of such a random head-turning display of little-white-dog syndrome. It was too much for an Irish wolfhound like me so I told Pancho to get over himself, which would not have been difficult given his minuscule size. And then he accused me in a rather ear-watering ascending cascade of strident southern North American decibels of being a massive bitch with small peccadilloes: MOI: but Henry diplomatically intervened. Henry was a born salesdog who would never let a domestic squabble terminate a possible purchase. He simply shifted our attention from marital conflict back to our skinbaby by proffering a complimentary treat.

The look on our skinbaby’s face when he received this raw carrot was priceless, and he proceeded to crunch the orange treat between his happy teeth while Henry advised us as to the quantity and type of vegetables required to keep our giant human in good condition. By dog, it seemed likely he was a gargantuan glutton, and Henry consequently recommended the largest poo bags available.

Moreover, Henry assured us that our skinbaby’s odd obsession with doing his business in the smallest room of our kennel was a common teething problem with humans. He suggested that pedagogical perseverance on our part would see our new companion defecating and urinating in a civilized public fashion in no time. The trick, Henry advised, was to reward our giant peach with a small contrasting carrot whenever he evacuated himself in the great outdoors. And so it proved on our daily walks in Lambton Park, with the added bonus that our skinbaby picked up his own mess and bagged it. These humans are curious pets indeed! Who knew?

In our revolutionary minds, Pancho and I were radical Novocastrian desperadoes in our surgical masks as Henry led us towards his biscuit register, but at least we were acting in accord with the latest medical directive, unlike that unmasked kelpie bitch who was showing her companion human an entirely predictable fitness game based on chasing balls. She was clearly a hover parent trying to shape her skinbaby into a mirror image of herself. Kelpies are obsessed with balls. The males will even chase their own if nothing artificial is available. They are so conservative, predictable and common. Such a fine Celtic breed name is wasted on such ball-hugging herd followers and turd swallowers in my humble but refined Irish opinion.

‘Dickit’, Henry said, glancing in the kelpie bitch’s direction.

‘I wouldn’t stoop so low,’ I replied, utterly misunderstanding Henry’s total lack of coarse, lusty wit and his keen canine eye for the next sale.

Henry gave me one of those masked enigmatic handsome husky frowns, and said: ‘That will be 50 biscuits, thank you.’

In our dogonomy, dog biscuits are not only the coin of the realm, they are also our major wealth export. Indeed, there are several biscuit loaders filling ships in Newcastle Harbour every day and night, and other ships bring back  foreign biscuits from doggos overseas that pay for our export Australian biscuits, and I’m proud to say that Pancho and I have a truly radical unmasked job on the dog shift as professional biscuit eaters, but that’s a story for another day. On this day, I paid the fifty biscuits for our purchases and watched as our giant skinbaby picked up the huge bags of vegetables from Henry’s counter. Companion humans are literally very handy in that regard, but, just as I was having this slavish thought, Henry looked at me quizzically, as only a buff, butch husky could, and he said: ‘I think you misunderstood me before.’

‘Before what?’ I asked.

‘You’re an idiot,’ Pancho interjected, ‘it’s obvious, with a radical emphasis on the it!’

I was still clueless, and I’m sure that the unmasked portions of my battle-scarred radical face looked momentarily conservative.

‘Dickit,’ Henry repeated, glancing at Pancho with a wicked grin on his face.

For an agonizing moment, I thought this handsome hound was making a pass at my little Pancho so I bared my teeth beneath my rainbow mask with a growing intention of biting his shapely husky buttocks. I would show this lascivious lad the incisive pot of gold at the end of my rainbow! And my associated green-eyed growl caused Henry and Pancho to roll around the floor kicking their legs in the air with mutual mirth at my expense. Clearly, I was not getting the joke, but I can always sniff if I’m the butt of a joke, and my masked Irish wolfhound sniffer was beginning to work overtime. I was angry and bemused!

‘Calm down, dear fellow,’ Henry urged. ‘Dickit is neither a biological imperative nor a vulgate vulgarism; it’s a fitness game, my dear boy, and companion humans love it. It involves a big stick called a Dick that they wave around to hit their balls with! The howler howls the balls, and the one doing the hitting is called the ratsman, and all of the other skinbabies run around like hairless goats trying to catch it after the ratsman hits it. I should explain here that each rock-hard ball is called an it. Do you get it? Hence Dickit. We sell heaps of them!’

‘Well, you won’t be selling a set of Dickit to us, Henry,’ I said, slowly recovering my dignity and reaching defensively for my intellectual snobbery while rearing from Henry’s rather purple pedagogical style. ‘I intend to teach our skinbaby to read rather than waste time running around hitting his balls with his Dick.’

Perhaps I said it too bluntly, or too ambiguously, but we Irish do love our literature and our ambiguity in a way that a sled-pulling, sports-mad Alaskan husky would find difficult to comprehend. Henry was so handsomely ignorant, I concluded, all packaging and no contents, a rich vocabulary garrotting a strangulated syntax. He would be particularly at-risk if a virus for intelligence threatened dumbness. He did not know in that moment that I, Michael Collins, was the big fella himself, the secretive head of the IRA: the Irish Readers Association.

Back home in Dublin, we treasure Ireland’s most sacred text, the Book of Smells, which can be noseread for free from an ancient illuminated oak tree that serves equally as the General Post Office (GPO) and still bears the battle scars of the Easter Rebellion. Pancho and I are so proud of the fact that one of my rebellious ancestors left more than one radical stain on that revolutionary oak.

And oh how l loved to noseread medieval tales from old piles of stones like the Rock of Cashel, but, here in Australia, an indigenous dingo introduced me to far more ancient tales that can be noseread from the bush. That indigenous dingo was an old digger, a true elder of his breed, and he also inspired me to read about reconciliation between dingoes and non-dingoes in Australia, and to learn of the true history of dingo resistance against the invasion of their territory by European doggos such as myself.

All of this was far too deep and serious for little Pancho who is regrettably hooked on lightweight puff pieces masquerading as celebrity biography and autobiography. He nosereads the former by sniffing famous dogs’ butts, if they are low enough on the biological shelf for a chihuahua to reach, so to speak, and the autobiographical latter by sniffing his own butt. Well, to each his own, I say, but the critic in me can also say with some radical certainty that Pancho’s selection of reading matter truly stinks. It is the least revolutionary thing about him. But, at that moment in time, I had higher hopes for our skinbaby’s reading list.

Sadly, and perhaps predictably, my literary introspection was crassly interrupted by Henry for the most ludicrous of reasons.

‘Well, have a nice day,’ Henry said, in a phoney American Staffy accent more to do with cultural imperialism than cultural appropriation, ‘but next time you come, you might like to buy your skinbaby a fantasy outfit.’

Pancho gave him a withering glare that would have melted the snow under his husky paws in a more natural environment, but Henry could be thicker than ice when trying to sell the unsellable.

‘You could dress your human up to look like a doggo for the Boneday Holiday or the Holy Biscuit Week. Or you could put a set of red horns and a tail on him for Dogdevil Eve!’

Pancho growled and lowered his mask to bare his tiny chihuahua teeth, and all I could think was how cute he looked, while hoping that Henry was not of the same opinion.

‘I doubt that you have anything in our giant boy’s size, Henry,’ I suggested diplomatically, while fully knowing that a revolutionary like Pancho would regard the idea of dressing our skinbaby up in some half-baked canine fantasy garb as demeaning in a bourgeoise, faddist fashion especially when this insanely insulting idea had been communicated in such a ridiculous borrowed gringo accent. Pancho’s growl became more strident. My little Mexican lovenut hated gringos with a revolutionary passion.

No, NO, by dog, better to leave our skinbaby naked like a true proletarian, and, from my point of view, it would have meant less laundering for this good and faithful kennel husband in his domestic duties. And less than nothing was surprisingly something for which I and Pancho would have been eternally grateful. Fantasy outfits indeed!

‘Why don’t you just go pull a sled, Henry!’ I whispered in a quiet, jealous, rainbow-masked, Irish wolfhound rage as we exited HumanHome with our heavily laden and radically naked companion leading the way on his leash.

But it was difficult to maintain such rage in accord with Gough-the-Golden’s revolutionary retrieving edict as later that day and later every day we walked our companion human in Lambton Park. Maintaining the rage was not compatible with the growing love that we felt blossoming between us as a couple and our naked proletarian skinbaby as we strolled past the rose gardens near the memorial gates for all of those doggos killed in the Great War with Merlin the Magnificat and her Hiss Army. Cats are all matriarchal fascists in our revolutionary opinion, but, as we strolled past the roses, we were reminded that a growing love was equally not without its thorns. Imperfection itself is an egalitarian quality more often than not projected by the beholder of perfect beauty in nature, much in harmony with Gough-the-Golden’s radical retrieved view of himself.

And, thinking of Gough-the-Golden and his radical yet comradely literary eloquence, I had been waxing lyrical to our giant skinbaby about the variety of reading matter to be found in Lambton Park. Lowering one’s mask for the purpose of nosereading was in accord with the latest medical directive from the doggo parliament, and, of course, our skinbaby was exempt from mask wearing since humans could not catch the K9 virus.

‘Admittedly, there are no smells here from the Middle Ages, my boy, with a heady story to tell, but good narrative fiction abounds.’ I took a damned good sniff by way of pedagogical example for our young human companion who seemed very attentive to my literary advice. ‘For instance, the parchment trunk of that palm tree next to the memorial gates offers the detective mysteries of a cocker spaniel named Sherlock, with regular serial updates in full urinary cuneiform. Most adventurous reading, purely escapist, of course, but real noseturners! And there are political Gough-the-Golden cartoons available in the borders of the rose garden for the discerning doggocratic socialist nose if that proves to be your thing. Giggles books can be noseread from the fallen fig leaves near the library, and swashbuckling seadog tales can be noseread from the banks of Kerrai Creek.’

‘You’re an idiot,’ Pancho said. ‘He can’t understand our doggo language. He has no idea what you’re barking about. You’re literally barking up the wrong tree!’

‘He understands more than you think,’ I defended. ‘Once I get his nose to the trunk or the ground, he’ll understand even more. Look at him, Pancho, he’s smiling encouragement at me. I tell you, he’s a born reader, the bone of my eye!’

At this point, the bone of my eye went mad as he observed the approach of a female human on the leash. I glanced apologetically at her frosty custodian who happened to be a saintly, frigid St Bernard named Snowy. It’s strange how we doggos feel so personally responsible for the aberrant behaviour of our two-legged companions. This madness had become a regular and worrying phenomenon on our walks whenever our companion male human came within contact of a female human. Like most other chilled-out doggos, Snowy momentarily lowered his mask to lean across to give our lad’s giant butt a sniff and to tell him that he was a good boy. And he was a good boy, except when he pulled on his leash and almost extracted my teeth or caused little Pancho to fly through the air in a circle centred on his great human head with a radius determined by the length of his leash.

And Pancho experienced this disconcerting leash-between-his-masked-teeth flying circus on this very occasion as our naked skinbaby tried to interact with Snowy’s female human. We felt dreadfully embarrassed yet again and apologized most profusely once I removed Pancho from Snowy’s broad St Bernard back where he had crash-landed like one of those brave doggo war fliers from the Giggles books. Snowy quickly gave Pancho a little nip of unmasked brandy from the little, mythical barrel that always dangled so invitingly and mysteriously from his life-saving collar. He explained that a wee warming dram would assist with Pancho’s feelings of shock, so I cocked my leg over Pancho in accord with my mistaken understanding of Snowy’s expert paramedical advice.

This unacceptable and frankly dangerous pulling on the leash was almost always inspired by the sight of a female human. For this reason, combined with his oh-so-hairy-face, we named our good boy Shaggy, and such incidents led inevitably to the question of desexing Shaggy. A brief chat on the dog-and-bone with Doctor Rottweiler, who advised that the procedure could be done ever-so-gently with his razor-sharp teeth, and Pancho’s wrongful association of the entire castration process with gay conversion therapy led us to seek an alternative remedy.

We naturally consulted Lord Staffador, and Chester the Jester himself did not disappoint. He advised that our good boy just needed plenty of independent exercise off the leash to restore his place in the pantheon of good boys. We had noted that Shaggy showed no interest in chasing birds or the time-honoured practice of mutual butt sniffing. He did seem quite attracted to cats, but not in a good way. He wanted to play with them and stroke them rather than chase them and eat them in accord with our cultural mores and our bitter genetic memories of the great war against Merlin the Magnificat and her Hiss Army. Bloody matriarchal feline fascists! Was there something fundamentally wrong with Shaggy? Did he lack the revolutionary spirit to become a free radical off the leash?

Behavioural observations, and concern for his cat-centric eccentricity, although it was often little Pancho flying outside the great circle, if you get my semantic, longitudinal whiff, had caused us to wonder whether Shaggy would simply run away and keep randomly running towards a rather artless artistic vanishing point if we let him off the leash in accord with Lord Staffador’s advice. In short, we were terrified of losing Shaggy since we loved him dearly, and we were concerned that some lowlife, sausage-eating sausage dog might ignore Shaggy’s microchip and not return him to us if he was found wandering the streets like a stray human. So, for a time, we did nothing, except pull him away from any female humans who might inspire him to behave in accord with his lusty, bush-beating, bearded name.

There was not a female human in sight, but Lord Staffador’s advice was still lingering in our minds when Shaggy suddenly attempted to extract my masked leash-laden teeth via his usual lunge at a doggo bubbler near Lambton Pool. He always was a thirsty bugger on a walk, and we had purchased a special fold-up drinking bowl to enable him to take advantage of the bubbler without offending other doggos by getting his human dribble on the actual tap.

It was while Shaggy was satisfying his monumental human thirst on this warm morning that we noticed some council beagles erecting a human-proof fence around a large rectangle of lawn between the arcade of ancient figs and Kerrai Creek. Lambton Pool itself was of little interest to us, apart from its Great Cat War memorial status, meow, meow, hiss, hiss, since it was always full of dirty, web-footed Labradors who were a little macho and hetero from our contrasting non-chlorinated perspectives, but the figs were well frequented by us for a variety of urinary wee-mail and newsworthy reasons. The figs provided the latest news from highbrow journalism for the discerning doggo nose to tabloid, reeking rubbish favoured by Alsatians, barking mad, but I digress. The real story here was the fence itself.

The head council beagle advised me that her works crew was constructing an off-leash area for companion humans. Well, I literally howled my appreciation in her masked City of Newcastle face although the new city logo might have looked better on the backside of the mask. Any backside, actually! But, finally, we would be able to follow Lord Staffador’s advice and save my teeth from being extracted by the sheer force of a giant like Shaggy trying to pull the leash from my rainbow-masked mouth so that he might converse with a passing female human, or indeed to save Pancho from the indignity of being a flying Gigglesworth chihuahua circumnavigating Shaggy’s gargantuan barrage-balloon head in a metaphorical and rather human-centric Sopwith Camel.

Indeed, the off-leash human area eventually proved to be a cure for both dental extractions and aerial acrobatics. We could not have been more delighted, sitting together on a raised council doggo bed, watching Shaggy run amok with his fellow humans, all as naked and leash-free as the day they were born. And birthday suits came in many sizes and shades of colour just like surgical masks, but it seemed to us that Shaggy was particularly drawn to female humans of all persuasions, and we were observing Shaggy’s latest romantic entanglement when we became aware that we were no longer alone.

‘Fancy meeting you two here,’ Henry, the rather fetching and vacuous salesdog from HumanHome, said, from behind his oh-so-distinctive buy from me HumanHome fantasy mask.

I glanced at the human-proof, barbed-wire fence and entertained a fleeting vision of the illiterate Henry the Feckless meeting Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol. Now Oscar was a doggo who would have appreciated the distinctive Irish paradox of an empty package like Henry without a tale to smell in a gaol named Reading.

‘Nice to see you,’ I lied, ‘who’s your friend?’

But I knew who she was. At least I thought I did. She was that unmasked hover parent whom we had observed in HumanHome drooling over Dickit, but why was a testament to open, hapless, husky gayness like Henry hanging around with her?

Was this herd-following, turd-swallowing kelpie bitch his token female hetero friend? If so, his platonic discernment was as lacking as any sign of platonic intelligence. But his surprisingly intelligent response to my lamentably post hoc ignorant question left us all questioning my discernment and my intelligence.

Where was Plato when you really needed him? Most likely playing Dickit with his companion human if the Symposian vista before us was any guide. Perhaps the spherical it was one of Plato’s ideal forms, but surely not the platonic Dick! Could the Dick really be but a shadow of reality swinging back and forth on a cave wall? Plato was one of the great stinkers of our doggo world, and it was notably ideal that a Jack Russell like Plato could stink out a philosophy that even Pancho’s lowbrow, utilitarian, Mexican chihuahua nose could appreciate.

‘This is Professor Smeller from the University of Dog,’ Henry advised. ‘I am one of her language students. I only work at HumanHome as a casual.’

Very casual, I thought, but the University of Dog, with its motto I Sniff a Head, as opposed to sniffing butt, was world famous for attracting only the best pedagogical pedadogs and only the best canine students, so my earlier evaluation of Henry was now undergoing a rather embarrassing evaluation of its own. Any graduate from the University of Dog would attract a high-biscuit-paying profession even though Henry still came across as a graduate of puppy preschool in accord with my current and persistent prejudicial ignorance.

‘Henry is a postgraduate student in human languages,’ Professor Smeller revealed.

‘Do you mean that you and Henry can understand what our companion human is saying?’ I asked, my imagination running rampant. ‘I’m a radical revolutionary, and I appreciate radical revolutionary ideas like conversing with humans in their human tongue. So, can you converse with them?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Professor Smeller said, ‘but some things will always be lost in translation. There is still a lot we don’t understand about the previous human civilization and the relics they left behind.’

‘Like the rotunda, you mean?’ My eyes tried to smile above my rainbow mask.

‘Yes,’ the professor said. ‘Was it a burial chamber, or what?’

‘Maybe Shaggy knows,’ I suggested.

I looked across to where Shaggy was now swinging his Dick while a pack of companion humans was chasing his balls all over the enclosed leash-free compound. Lord Staffador had been right. Shaggy no longer lunged on the leash towards female humans. Running leash-free in this new human-proof council facility had notably cured that particular lunging-on-the-leash madness. He was far more interested in his Dick.

‘Shaggy sure does love his Dickit,’ Henry observed. ‘I did tell you, you know, how humans love Dickit.’

‘Yes, Henry, I remember,’ I said. ‘I was wrong, Henry. I was wrong about a lot of things. I was even wrong about you. Do you reckon you could converse with Shaggy for us?’

‘No,’ Henry admitted. ‘You’d be better off if Professor Smeller converses with him. She’s far more fluent in Human language than I am.’

We called Shaggy over, and he reluctantly leaned his Dick against a spotted gum.

Professor Smeller then conversed with Shaggy in his own babbling tongue.

‘What’s he saying?’ I demanded impatiently.

‘He’s saying that mother earth wants us to create a fairer, more female-friendly world.’ The professor smiled approvingly. ‘He says that the previous human civilization was destroyed by a combination of climate change and viral diseases that was brought about by a male unwillingness to change.’

‘Change what?’ I cried.

‘Your male selves, Shaggy says,’ the professor translated patiently. ‘You need to share the power of decision-making at all levels with females. Hence, a fairer, more female-friendly world that will live in accord with nature rather than in opposition to it.’

‘That’s Labrador shit,’ I said. ‘We males would lose all female respect if we let you bitches be in charge. Next, you’ll want lowlife sausage dogs to have a fairer share of the actual sausage! Females in charge; by dog, what a sick joke!’

‘Not in charge, Shaggy says,’ the professor growled impatiently, baring her unmasked teeth like Prometheus unbound. ‘You’re wearing a male fantasy of power-over rather than power-shared in your all-or-nothing, fantasy-costumed, male mind! Shaggy is simply suggesting that, “in REALITY”, as opposed to “in your male FANTASY”, shared equal power between males and females will address climate change and all of the other viral ills that our current sexual imbalance enables.’

‘Well, it’s still Labrador shit,’ I growled back at her, as little Pancho nodded his chihuahua head in rusted-on, male agreement. Pancho’s Mexican-flag mask with its red, white and green strips and serpent-eating, liver-loving eagle made him look so cute like a miniature revolutionary soldier with big cojones, and I longed to slip him full, unmasked tongue, but, strangely, this vision resplendent of nodding-head, male flag-waving took me back to the rural hamlet of Rutherford and a certain razor-sharp smile. ‘Shaggy needs a trip to see Doctor Rottweiler.’

‘What’s so radical about a fairer, more female-friendly world?’ the Professor asked.

‘Well, he’s having you on,’ I growled. ‘A fairer, more female-friendly world? Shaggy’s always trying to have his unfair, wicked way with every female human he sees. He’s a bloody hypocrite!’

‘No, he says you’re wrong,’ the professor was snarling now. ‘He’s attracted to female humans because he learns from them. What you saw was platonic attraction.’

‘Well, if he’s so attracted to females, he can become one,’ I said. ‘Doctor Rottweiler has sharp teeth.’

‘And you have a dull mind,’ the Professor observed. ‘Shaggy has one radical revolutionary idea, and you males are immediately threatened.’

Pancho and I glanced at each other like true hover parents. Our skinbaby, a revolutionary? How radical would that be! And how blinding would our reflection be in the mirror, having raised a mirror image of ourselves? But I had to ask the obvious question.

‘So why is he wasting so much time playing Dickit, comrade,’ I snarled, ‘instead of getting on with the bloody revolution?’

And little Pancho yapped his Gough-the-Golden solidarity with me in another magnificent male-bonding maintaining the rage moment. And I suddenly had a vision of a human army of swinging Dicks fighting for a fairer, more female-friendly world while laying waste to our entire dogonomy and canine culture. Now, that was truly a male it moment that no female would ever have the rock-hard balls to embrace. We should have put a Beware of the Human Running Free sign around Shaggy’s Giant’s Causeway, bushy Bushmills neck.

‘Shaggy says that you’re wrong again,’ the professor advised.

‘Wrong about what?’ I challenged, putting all of my confused male Irish sectarian anger into the question.

‘It’s called cricket, not Dickit,’ Professor Smeller smiled her unmasked, black equine, kelpie smile. ‘No Dicks involved, I’m afraid, which arguably makes you Dickless as well as wrong, but it does take rock-hard balls to play the game, and Shaggy says that men and women can play cricket equally well. Indeed, he reckons that the best teams have six females and five males on the field with a twelfth man in reserve. Such a team could even beat climate change and any viral outbreak balls that are bowled at it. Oh, by the way, Shaggy says that it’s called bowling, not howling, you were wrong about that too. I did warn you that things can get lost in translation.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed churlishly, glancing at hapless Henry, my erstwhile translator, ‘especially between males and females. That’s why the great doggo parliament has traditionally been dominated by males. Less translation issues that way. And no lowlife, sausage-eating sausage dogs either!’

‘And no fear of change,’ the professor quipped. ‘Your conservative male need for false certainty in uncertain times is showing. How can you males be in sole charge, be in sole control and totally dominate our world when you are not really in control of the threatening uncertainty inside yourselves? It’s clear that Shaggy is the only true free radical in your family. I mean, I know you think of yourself as a revolutionary, but then you cling to traditional patriarchy like a true male conservative swinging his Dick in a desperate attempt to hit any female balls over the boundary of his lack of imagination.’

This really was too much. Professor Smeller was intellectually castrating me in front of little Pancho and Henry the Feckless Feckin Eejit Dick Translator. I would have preferred Doctor Rottweiler’s razor-sharp teeth. Or, better still, being drowned privately in Lambton Pool where kelpies can shape-shift into dirty, web-footed, reverse-hooved Labradors. I could feel my internal combustion rage boiling in my pool of wounded male vulnerability. MAINTAIN THE RAGE, I heard my lonely Y chromosome screaming. Was there a quote from the Book of Smells that might be apposite?

‘You bitch!’ I growled in a literary understatement of the snarling obvious.

‘I may be a bitch,’ the professor smiled, ‘but at least I know who I am.’

‘And I don’t, I suppose,’ I yelped in dark, transformational, Irish wolfhound pain.

‘No, you don’t,’ the professor confirmed. ‘You are asleep.’

‘And you are my nightmare! And you females are dreaming if you think we males are going to share decision-making with you!’ I growled chauvinistically, with just a hint of republican Tipperary in my tone. ‘We’re not cats, you know. We fought a war against feline fascism and Merlin the Magnificat’s matriarchal queerness. Doggos died defending our revolutionary male right to rule. And, how dare you be so bitchy with me, you bitch!’

‘How dare I not,’ the professor was now annoyingly calm. ‘We reap what we sow, you know. Shaggy is a prophet. He was sent to tell us that this K9 virus is a message to our entire doggo world. We can’t just keep pissing and pooing all over the environment without consequences.’

‘So now you would ban our literature, I suppose,’ I scoffed with all the black-and-white, literate, intellectual, male snobbery I could muster through my oh-so-fabulous, oh-so-colourful, rainbow-warrior mask. ‘A world without urinary cuneiform is no world at all! How would we read or write? What’s a penis without a pen?’

‘Just is, I suppose, but you’re doing that male thing right now. Taking my metaphors literally to score debating points.’ The professor shook her head and wagged her tail in simultaneous opposition. ‘We need a fairer, more female-friendly world in order to live in radical harmony with mother earth. Then, and only then, will the K9 virus no longer be a threat.’

‘Why should I take medical advice from an unmasked kelpie bitch like you?’ I demanded. ‘Bloody hypocrite! Put a mask on!’

‘I do have a mask on,’ the professor said. ‘The K9 virus is my mask!’

And then she howled like a dingo … and perhaps it was her indigenous, female howling that woke me up … but I was now woke …

 

 

Copyright © Paul F Walsh 2020