Sixteen Candles Minus Twelve

​Today is Charley's birthday. She is four years old. Later we are having a cake made of veal and also something that sort of looks like veal, before tearing apart a celebratory pile of empty boxes with our teeth. After a dinner of additional veal with some carroty-looking chunks, we will have a few post-prandial waters in lappable steel bowls and tell stories about the old days on the Kansas City Marrow & Mailman circuit. Simultaneously the best and most disquieting thing about Charley is the human-ness of her eyes, a widely remarked upon quality inherent in this particular breed. Her stare speaks volumes. It is tempting to read a complexity there, a higher philosophical understanding of the world and its people, their purposes and flaws. Despite the fact that she regularly displays an unusual intelligence, I have come to believe, like a 1932 ticker tape machine, what she actually has is an endless furl of paper spinning through her head that contains four repeated phrases:
1. "Is that by any chance food, food-adjacent, food related, food-remnant, briefly food-contacted, something inedible I will eat and throw up later anyway, or food?"
2. "Physics and canine physiognomy aside, is there a way that I can get even one increment closer than the already sweaty closeness I am currently enjoying curled like a donut on your lap?
3. Can you open the door for the seventeenth time this hour so I can madly and barkingly chase that non-existent thing again, a quixotic backyard trot which always ends with a resigned piss upon the newly planted?
4. If I could dig a bone-hole large enough to bury this whole goddamned clown show of a world in, covering the existential fallacy of meaning let alone the verifiable meaninglessness with paw after paw of moist dirt, and then tamp it all down with a single dismissive sniff, I'd be on that toot-suite. Oh, you better believe it."