armed with a well washed spoon and a jar of decent creamy peanut butter, I watched in earnest the wall to wall coverage of the 129th westminster kennel club dog show. this was on the night of february the 14th.
last year's best in show, josh, this 155-pound newfoundland, had his dog day again.
first he was introduced to the crowd of rabid canine lovers most of whom have been dogging the rock star barker since this year's kennel show started monday.
then the black st. bernard dead ringer threw a free stack, a canine handler speak where without poking and prodding by its owners, a dog just stands on its hindquarters for the judges to appreciate.
from there, all bets were off. a lady from the nose bleeder section of the gargantuan madison square garaden could not contain herself and hollered out josh's name.
quickly thereafter, the crowd erupted into rhythmic chanting of josh, josh, josh.
right on cue, josh, barked and bellowed and bawled in sync with the crowd's chanting. everyone there, four legged or otherwise, knew who was the top dog in the house.
this is what my life now seems to be inundated with. sentences ending with dangling prepositions and metaphorical expressions just losing their mojos, one after the other. i mean, top dog, dog day. come on.
in the hospital I work, it looks like it will not take a year before we would admit the broken heart syndrome as an official diagnosis. a week ago, doctors at johns hopkins university confirmed the wisdom of poets by saying that the loss of a loved one can literally cause a broken heart.
my reality now is close to being in say an alejo carpentier story where the once seemingly irrational stuff are slickly accepted as humdrum currency.
this sunday past, I decided to answer my emails away from my mickey mouse apartment. I thought a new writing milieu would make me come across as less crabby in my responses.
the café I chose to kill time in was one of those garden variety anti-starbucks lower east side joints.
after my second bowl of chai, the cd I was playing in my notebook started to hop and skip. I opened the cd drive and what came skittering out was this drab bug that would never make it to any any natural history museum collection.
without skipping a beat, the bug vamoosed to the next table where another notebook was left purring and unattended by its owner. I pretended to hunker back down to my keyboard.
a bug in my computer. it doesn't get more literal than this.
I spent the rest of my time in the café writing long hand while running the virus scan in my laptop. all the time, I was secretly hoping my notebook would detect a real virus, one that I prayed would corrupt the prosiness of my letters.