Me and You, Drinking a Forty, Up On the Rainbow Bridge at Dusk

There are no facts, only interpretations.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

It’s 9 on Thursday morning. I’m in the yard, bare feet in the fat green grass, as Angus, the silver lab, is having a seizure. My first thoughts are, naturally, that this is going to mess up my schedule for the day. I quickly punch myself in the face though, remind myself that life is so very brief and everyone and everything is dying/collapsing/melting/eroding even as we speak.

He has these seizures fairly regularly and there’s not much that can be done. Whoever is with him at the time (or whoever finds him on the floor when they are the first to come home to a humanless house), that person just has to sit with him and try to make sure he doesn’t convulse himself into a sharp edge or something. You talk gently to him (like we hardly ever do) and you tell him one thing over and over again which, as it happens, is a gargantuan lie that most of us tell ourselves over and over again too.

“It’s okay,” I whisper to him as he writhes around in the grass while his eyeballs roll back into his head and he appears to be straddling that fine line between still here and gone. “Just relaxxxxx,” I coax. “You are okay. You are fine, buddy. You are doing great.”

_____

Doing great?

Wtf.

I mean.

I don’t know.

We say stupid shit, don’t we?

How exactly is he doing great? I’ll tell you the truth. He’s not doing great. He’s doing the opposite of great. He’s pissing himself on the lawn and his mouth is agape and there is a feral angel standing on his ribcage/ holding the scythe/ picking her pretty white teeth with its bloody blade point. I take a deep breath of country air and I look down at my dog and its as if his long lost wolfness is returning to him at last, but only here, in this strange ephemerality, at the borders. Over the shallow river there is death. Like a desert. Like a hot void where nothing thrives. Like Mexico in movies.

I kick myself for talking jive to Angus when he might actually appreciate a bit of raw dog honesty. I could be telling him things much closer to the truth as his pupils dilate and his face is overcome by panic sheen only seen on the mugs in ultimate distress.