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Deputy Dog Lives Another Day
Dear Mom,
I don't know if you remember this but back when you were still living I wrote to you about a barking dog in Virginia, down the hill from where I stay. He would bark all night at the moon and stars and the foxes and if there were sheep out here he would bark at the sheep. A yappy bark. A high pitched yappy bark. The sound would travel hundreds of feet and come into my bedroom and make me feel insane in a way disproportionate to the aggravation. If I were a superpower I might, to show how discontented I am, fire bomb a hundred small cities and follow up with a couple of atomic bombs dropped on the citizens of two larger cities, or, say I were the bitch step sister of a superpower and some mean people kidnapped two of my people, and these mean people were a group with no agenda that I considered relevant, I might fly around in jets and drop bombs over the entire country where the mean people holed up. What, mom? The innocents? Please, please mother, there are no innocents.
By the way, speaking of ill-logic, after a lifetime of eye-wandering under-achieving, with a list of suspect accomplishments including, college-quiting, cross-country hitchhiking, boxcar riding, ghetto dwelling, and a series of moderately satisfying dead-end blue collar jobs, I have ended up as sole occupant of a rather large house on top of a hill, surrounded 360 degrees by Blue Ridge foothills on a property that has a pond, a pool, a tennis court, and as we speak, a rather ambitious re-landscaping of all the land between the pool and the tennis court. Yes mother, I am in the bighouse. What? No mother, no. I know that's what Cagney and Robinson called the...no, I don't mean THAT bighouse. No, unh uh, I've never meant it that way, don't be silly.
Anyway, to the point--I am several hundred feet higher up the hill from the yappy dog and I can still hear it, sometimes waking up in the middle of the night to hear it, and so I was just wondering if maybe Jesus would let you have a dog I could send you this one. I know that after our cat, Frank, died, you said you didn't want anymore pets, but that's been a good many years ago and I think you might enjoy this dog, its no bigger than a puppy really, and...no, I wouldn't say it was cute but do you remember that cartoon Deputy Dog?, well, it looks kind of like that.
Sure, yeah, no, I understand. No, you are absolutely right, I should count my blessings. What? No, this isn't long-distance. No, really, I don't think you have to worry about that anymore, I think you are operating with the currency of eternity now and so....click...dial tone. Ok then, it was nice chatting.