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Location: Chicago, Illinois, United States

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Nurture gone wrong

He only feels good when he's under a dog, though he does not own a dog. Something about the the musky odor and the fur in his mouth comforts him. He slips a fifty to the manager of the pound to take Fuji or Roger or Gracie in the back room painted olive green, where he feeds them human-grade chicken jerky from underneath.

"No sex," the manager always says.

He stands five foot nine, muscular, black hair combed sometimes into a pompadour, sometimes shaved close to his perfectly smooth head, depending on whether he courts a Newfoundland or a Pug.

His pound-wear is the same gray sweatsuit because hair sticks to it. He doesn't shave so he can lick his moustache and taste the (potential) pet long after the encounter.

"The old dogs are the best," he tells me, "because there's none of that kicking and biting, just sweet smothering goodness."

Telling the few friends he has left that they must view him as a dog to generate his creative impulses, he whines and slides on his stomach to lick their feet. I step on his head or kick him lightly, but this does not discourage him. He must get a tongue full of foot before he can go home and write his financial planning column for a major daily newspaper.

His wife, a vacuous brunette who seems to be under the influence of intense g-forces, does not know about the dogs. That is, she does not know on a conscious level. We appease her with talk of hors d'oeuvres (usually crabcakes) and the latest Tori Amos single. One can only imagine the explosive properties of her husband's alleged deviance from the norm combined with Earth's gravity magnified several times.

He is completely normal and completely crazy, an example of nurture gone wrong. His mother did not have many dishes, and thought it appropriate to feed Baby from a chow bowl with a cartoon puppy on the bottom as a reward. For additional fun, she would add coins to the meal and let him keep them if not swallowed. Nature did nothing wrong, but is this what God had in mind?
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1 Comments:

Blogger amadea's world said...

I like the sentence " He is both completely normal and completely crazy."
When I was a child, I was glad that nobody could read my mind. I was sure I would end up in an asylum. Well, now I have realized that there are more people out that are sort of mad. You realize the word "mad" in my name? What a coincidence.
Thanks for your comment. I did not write about an ice cone. I wrote about my dentist and the idea taking him to an ice-cream salon (Is that the correct English word?).
I think, Tom Wolfe said, "You can't live without a portion of madness".

Gruß aus Österreich

3:32 AM  

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