DOGS AND MONSTERS

MAGA-Furries, Bark Porn, Minneapolis

“To his dog, every man is Napoleon.” Aldous Huxley

My first dog committed suicide.

What happened, apparently (I wasn’t there), is that young Samson, a smallish black-and-tan, snuck in behind my father when he stepped into the garage to hit the carbon mono. Sam, being a good boy, waited loyally by the car door, the way good dogs do, while the old man hunkered behind the wheel, motor running, until the exhaust did its job. I like to think the little terrier died with his tail wagging. But I doubt it. More likely, Sammy got dizzy, puked, and keeled over wondering “What the fuck?” in doggy-ese.

I was sixteen, and no longer living at home. Somehow – and the whole point of this drivel -– I never cried for the human suicide. But even now, thinking about Sammy, thinking about dog suicide, I could tear up. Because… animal. Plus, as any dog person can tell you, that’s what dogs do. They hang out while we live our life – or in some cases, end it – and for this privilege (ours, not theirs) all we have to do is fill their bowls, walk them, occasionally clean up their accidents and and pretend they’re not judging while they sprawl on the end of the bed and watch you having sex. Dogs, and I believe science has borne this out, are natural exhibitionists, and just naturally assume humans are too.

These days, speaking of judgmental canines, I find myself in a truly problematic dog situation. After my last pup, a burly German Shepherd rescue named Frankie, succumbed to old age and super-tumors, we went back to the Shepherd rescue place to get a new one, Lola. (But before we get to Lola, I should explain that her name, when we picked her as a two year old, was not Lola. Or even close. Like her Shepherd processor, Frankie, she was graced at the shelter with a title worthy of a fifth generation inbred Habsburg. All Something-von-Something-Something. Frankie, on her papers, came with the name Yantze van Clauswitz-Schicklgruber. (Or wait, was that Hitler’s name?) Lola, as I recall, was Greta van Barenfanger-Totenkopf. Indeed, scanning the list of adoptables, it was hard to tell if we were selecting rescues or casting for Nazi death camp re-enactments. But the name’s a side issue. Though (maybe it’s just me) a deeply strange one….

Frankie, God rest her drooling soul – did I mention she had a wound that left her with a perma-drool situation, like a leaky tap? It happens. Lola, for her part, is a sweet, smallish Shepherd. Jet black. Absolutely gorgeous and gentle, if a little crazed in the presence of squirrels or cats. Along with another very specific species. Men. She hates men. Or no, I shouldn’t frame it that way. Let’s just say she fears them. Mightily. With, I have no doubt, a myriad of completely legit reasons for doing so. What little I know of her background – she was found, so they tell us, locked in a suitcase on Skid Row - an act, in my imagination, perpetrated by some XY chromosome-owning ogre who also kicked, starved and generally abused her in the process. Raise your hand to scratch your ear and she flinches. Heartbreaking.

A recovery-based, Jungian analyst, if I had one, would doubtless tell me my dynamic with Lola has more to do with my own issues with women. But what does some imaginary therapist know? There are still moments, precious moments, when Lola sidles up, as if she’s forgotten she’s supposed to be terrified, and – not to get romantic – turns around to aim her glossy backside at me, so I can scratch her butt. (And, at the risk of overshare, I confess I have never had a two-legged female back up and request a butt-scratch. Am I doing something wrong? Ladies?)

Actually, according to experts, when your dog faces away, right in front of you, it stands out as the ultimate gesture of trust and empowerment. So that your best friend is simultaneously protecting you – look at me, being fierce! – and offering themselves for your affection and pleasuring. (Which sounds, reading back, embarrassingly like a sex toy advertisement. I know because I use to write copy for Doc Johnson “marital aids,” and sometimes slip into the jargon like a vertiginous senior losing their balance and tumbling into a bathtub. Never mind….

The point is we have a deep connection – in those moments when she’s not so panicked she scuttles away like I’m about to machete her. As mentioned, I suspect – you never really know with rescues - that some monster tortured the poor thing in her unhoused years. Who knows? Do dogs have instincts about such things? If, for some ungodly reason, Kristi Noehm shimmied through the door, would my genius shepherd sense immediately that here, standing before her, was a MAGA-strong pet obliterator? Would Lola somehow know about the bullet (or bullets) young Cricket took as a function of the future Homeland Queen’s wrath? (Do we know, for that matter, what kind of weapon she used to waste the unacceptably frisky pointer? Was it a Glock? A .38? Did she unload an Uzi into the 14 month old victim, reducing her, as they used to say in Sgt. Rock comics, to a “fine red mist?”

If I may wax poetic…. Oh Kristi, you Mar-a-Lago lipped striver, what mutant humanity set you on the path to dog slaughter? We know your daddy died your first year in Northern State at Aberdeen – go Wolves! -- and you had to drop out and run the family farm. And good on you for that! Truly, it’s a Capra-esque, relatable tale from the American heartland. Except – as noted ad nauseum – most Americans don’t gun down their pooches. I’m reminded of the great Maron bit, from his HBO special, “Panicked,” where he sits through an atrocity-packed eight hour documentary on Nazis, and when it comes to the moment, towards the end, when we learn that the Fuhrer shot his dog, he’s suddenly outraged: “Hitler was really a dick!”

Will Kristi, in the afterlife, occupy her own chamber of pup-killer hell? Perhaps, as a gesture of repentance, Trump could entomb her on the second floor of the soon-to-never-be-built East Wing, like Fortunato in Poe’s classic, The Cask of Amontillado, walling her in, for eternity, with a gaggle of yapping hounds and no ammunition. As Sartre might have said, “Hell is other puppies.”

Personally, I never feel like I own an animal. It’s more like you take care of them and they let you pretend you’re in charge. Which, as any cat owner will tell you, is definitely not the case…. I once shared a home with a feline named Yahweh – don’t ask – who would hang out languidly on the second story window sill all day, then suddenly, come dusk, launch himself flying fox-style and snatch some unsuspecting robin off a branch. For the sole purpose, of course, of leaping to the ground, bird in mouth, and trotting into the house to drop the poor blighted creature at my feet. And what, really, can you say but “Good kitty!” as you wipe up the bird brains…

In one more truly distressing contempo trend, now that Musk’s Grok has made it possible for thirsty pervs to freak on whole school buses of fake-naked pre-pubes, the practice has pushed further into creepdom, until we’re now faced with the AI-enabled phenom of “undressing dogs,” showing whole galleries of spread-eagled young Dalmatians and Dobies, among other innocents. IMO, the process is not just morally reprehensible but demeaning for the dogs. Does anyone really need to see “Canine Anal,” a category so revolting even full-on “Bark Porn” enthusiasts give it a hard pass? (That said, if indigent celebrity curs need to engage this obscenity in their Only Fans space, no one can fault them. Not in this economy. I understand the last half-Lab to play Benji – I believe we’re talking, Benji: Off the Leash! (2004) – was found washed up and homeless in a Tijuana shelter, forced to live rough and sell their body for Milk Bones. Meanwhile Joe Camp, Benji’s creator and director, grossed 600 mil. Think about that, all you aspiring auteurs.

Don’ get me wrong, the Safdies are fucking genius - I love’em all day long! - but did Uncut Gems or Marty Supreme bring in the Benji bucks? Tough call. Our heart goes out to Knuckles, the actual pup (or so I’ve heard) who starred in Off the Leash. Thanks to Elon, Knuck-Knuck can’t even sling nude selfies to tourists outside TJ jizz joints. Why? Because any techno-feeb with a phone can now trick out the most popular dog since Lassie in all manner of unspeakable sex-wear and positions that would make a Weimar Dachshund blush. So how is a washed up four-legger supposed to make kibble money?

Are there bigger traumas taking place in this country? Of course! And I don’t mean to obsess. But I keep hearing about xAI generating images of rando schnauzers, bound and gagged, performing the most obscene acts a dog can perform. Which is saying something, given that, in Dog World, sniffing and licking strangers’ anuses (ani?) is routine. Who’s to judge? Have you ever been to France? Why do you think Serge Gainsbourg always looked so relaxed?

And yes, the whole Kristi Noem dead dog controversy should finally be put to rest. In her defense, perhaps the ex-governor was just doing what she had to do. After all, Kristi-with-an-i was raised on a farm. Or was it a ranch? Either way, part of ranchy farm life is you kill things, even domestic things. Even a domestic, I suppose, if you’re wealthy enough to have someone who comes over in a crisp outfit and tidies up once a week. Who knows how many of them have gone missing since the Doyenne of Deportation took the throne? Since most such folks are, you know, immigrants, KN doesn’t really count them. As long as there are plenty of vans and zip-ties to requisition, it’s Goodbye USA, Hello CECOT! I mean seriously – kiddie smut is horrific enough, but sexualized puppies? No! Just…. No.

If nothing else, the whole pedo-Grok deepfake sitch might finally complete the ongoing beshitting of Elon Musk’s legacy. A legacy, at this point, worth approximately the value of one used White House diaper. Speaking of, Polymarket is already laying odds on how long till Trump rolls out his own line of DJT Presidential Depends. And what will he call’em? Presi-pends? De-presies? Or maybe – be still my heart! – Trumpers? (Embossed with real gold!) “Honey, will you grab me a fresh Trumper? It’s that damn fried baloney!”

And it gets better…. For Fox fans who’ve reached the age when they, too, are liberated from having to hoist their MAGA bottoms (mega-bottoms?) off the couch and waddle to the bathroom to void their bowels, incontinence is just one more reason to love their leader! Like their Lord and Savior, they too can crap and gobble (and probably tweet) at the same time. Yinning and Yanging. Big Macs simultaneously sucked in and pooped out. All with Hannity, or all five of The Five onscreen. Who says the American Dream is dead?

But while we’re talking about dinner, a lot of you are wondering about RFK’s new Food Pyramid. So many questions! Like, are dead dogs considered acceptable roadkill nutrition? A bear or moose is one thing. But what about that rando unlucky Retriever? Or maltipoos! Do runover maltipoos, teeny as they are, make tasty canapes at HHS cocktail parties? Teddy Roosevelt, famously, spared the life of a little bear while hunting, and inspired the Teddy Bear craze. RFK, for better or worse, has inspired the Deady Bear. Which, when stuffed, resembles a jumbo pancake with fur, claws and eyeballs. Your deluxe model, of course, come with tire tracks, bloody teeth and a really bad stench. What kid wouldn’t want to snuggle up to that? But stench-wise, how about the gusts wafting from Junior’s chops after a tasty repast of murdered freeway mammal? Eau de Roadkill. What does that smell like? I’m going with zoo morgue.

Trump famously does not have pets. Unless you count fascist bottom – AKA “Fash Bot” -Stephen Miller, who occasionally slurps from a bowl on the floor near the Resolute Desk. At the same time, just as famously, the president loves to invoke dogs as the ultimate dis. Who can forget how Hillary Clinton “lied like a dog?” Kristin Stewart “acted like a dog;” Omarosa earned the moniker “lowlife dog.” And so on… Ironically, in his own case, on the Access Hollywood tape Trump regales Billy Bush with his canine-ish reaction to seeing a beautiful woman – “I was on her like a bitch!” We assume he’s talking about the animal and not Cruella Deville, or whoever comes to mind when you think the b-word. It is, however worth mentioning that Trump’s slur rings pretty hollow when you consider the recent Marie Antoinette Furry night at Mar-a-logo. In which guests tripped the last fantastic done up like two-legged, overdressed Late Baroque French dogs.

(Full disclosure: I have a history with professional Furries. And it’s not great. After wrongly conflating Plushies and Furries in an episode of CSI, irate devotees of both camps picketed Black Rock, CBS’s storied headquarters in Manhattan, in protest of the primetime insult. The episode, no surprise, was called “Fur and Loathing in Las Vegas.” More embarrassing – please don’t hunt me down and give me rabies - I’m still not sure what’s a Furry and what’s a Plushy. The former, I believe, are real animals; the latter are based on cartoon characters. But don’t quote me. This was back in my TV days. (Let’s not even talk about my failed pilot, “Tea for Toodles,” about a tax attorney with a secret life cosplaying a fullback-size poodle. His wife finds out on their honeymoon. Hijinks ensue. The network said it wanted “cute not creepy.” This was around the time I got fired from Twin Peaks for turning in a script with blood and hair on it. Not to get sentimental. I was the last writer on earth to work on an IBM Selectric.)

But where were we? Right. The Palm Beach ballroom, as you can see from the pic, is aswirl with partygoers in dog masks and Marie Antoinette gowns cutting a rug Happily, no one clocked the president popping on stage to tell the Duchesse de Polignac in the Piccardy Spaniel mask she “waltzes like a dog.” Puppy drag, in the New World Order, is apparently acceptable. While drag-drag – unless you’re Rudy Giuliani in 2007 – is strictly verboten, as shown in that infamous clip from Williams Cole’s spectacular doc, “Guiliani Time.” Look it up. (Cole also writes a column in the indispensable Brooklyn Rail. Big recommend.) As described by the AP in a piece called “Guiliani in a Dress: Will Voters Care?”, the film captures the moment Donald Trump “groped Giuliani and buried his head between the mayoral breasts.” Hot!

Whether there’s more of Don-on-Rudy action in the Epstein Files is anybody’s guess. There might be more Russian Kompramat material. Either way, who knew, in 2003, when presidential candidate and noted Puritan Rick Santorum predicted gay marriage would lead to “man-on-dog,” he’d be proved right two decades later in Mar-a-Lago. Maybe there is a dog spelled backwards!

Personally, I suspect dogs would love our commander-in-chief. I haven’t met a furry four-legger yet who isn’t drawn to the scent of foul meat… I remember catching a very bad comedian whose big closer was “Who wants to see a doggy do it human style… am I right?” Or maybe – we’re only as sick as our secrets! - I made that up so I could attribute it to some mythically-invoked-but-likely-non-existent D-comedian and not sound like the douche who would actually say something like that himself. (Pro tip for you aspiring authors: writing, on occasion, is really just an artful, or not so artful, form of lying – I mean, embellishment…. No, sorry, exaggerating. Which, I’m guessing, is not the kind of sparkly insight that gets you inducted into Master Classdom. He said with no resentment whatsoever. These days, I do seem to know more and more people who teach online writing classes. Because, you know… money. And why not? It’s not like books are going to buy you a Bentley. Unless you mean a Bentley zip-up bomber jacket. Available on Amazon for $120. Even that’s kind of pricey. But hey, if you can’t buy the car, by the cardigan.)

Still, to those legions of humans who, for their own inchoate reasons, want to be writers, I say hats off! Maybe you can be the next James Patterson and not even have to write your own novels. Just bang out a premise and hire some other jim-jim to do the heavy lifting. Why not? For all we know, Proust hid a bevy of scribes under his bed, living on madeleine crumbs and scribbling away while he slapped his name on the cover and got all the glory. On the downside, it’s a tad dishonest. On the plus, you’ll be a job provider. And make zillions. Like Jeff Koons.

The truth is, teaching-wise, I’m just not sure I have what it takes. Could I ever be the Mister Chips of online narrative? I mean, I love dogs, but does that qualify me as dog trainer? Who knows? Way back, trying to somehow mitigate Lola’s fear of men – I believe that’s where we started this babble party - I hired a fellow who worked at the Shepherd Shelter where I’d adopted her. The thing is, I actually prefer adults or seniors. What?No! I’m talking about dogs, not trainers. Though of course I’d happily hire an octogenarian if they were pup-savvy and did not have hip issues, making leash-training dicey. Oldster rescues are less fun than puppies – if more grateful; but you don’t have to clean up after them. And senior shelter dogs, let’s face it, tend to be kind of losery. Especially if due to some physical impediment or handicap, the dog equivalent of a harelip, say, or a limp, they’ve been unpicked and incarcerated at a no-kill shelter for years. As mentioned, in the case of good old Frankie, she suffered a permanent drool-string. (Permanent Drool-String, as some of you know, was also the original title of my first memoir. But never mind…. ) The prob was, that dangling drool would sort of fly off Frankie’s lower lip when she got excited… So that, if she was happy to see you – and she was always happy to see you; she was happy to see anybody! - you were guaranteed a flung loogy on your shirt or pant-leg. After a while, every article of clothing I owned looked like I’d blown my nose in it. Which was, like so much of life, simultaneously adorable and disgusting.

But before we go: whatever happened to Pavlov’s dogs? After they retired, did they still salivate when the doorbell rang? Way back whenski, I lived in Phoenix with an MG mechanic I met in rehab. Before British sport cars she was a bowling hustler, which I found both disturbing and sexy. She was also a pool shark. It was like fucking a Jim Thompson novel. Plus which, at the time, I was paying my Cali dealer to mail me grams of Mexican tar (sobriety had not yet put down roots) and once a week, when I heard the squeaky brakes of the UPS truck in the shitty apartment parking lot, I would need to stop what I was doing and fly to the bathroom. Fast. But not as fast my running buddy in LA, a punk bass player who looked weirdly like Basil Rathbone, if Basil Rathbone were missing a front tooth and sported eyebrow rings and a jailhouse spider web on his face. His nickname was Brown Recluse, but everybody called him “Rec.” Right after we had the stuff, Rec would scream that we had to pull over. It never failed. Two minutes after we had the stuff he needed a toilet. Not just to blast off, to blast out…

Like any junkies worth their salt, we could both have given bathroom tours of Los Angeles. Which, when you’re a trained professional, is just as essential as knowing where to score. On more than one occasion – Pavlov would be proud! – my fellow aficionado would actually shit his pants in the car. Memories! (Looking back, we should probably have bought him some Mampers. Just having those balloons in his hot little hand set his bowels on GO. Fully Pavlovian, and a better cure for constipation than Serutan, which they stopped making in the 80s. (“SERUTAN - It’s NATURES spelled backwards!”) The above was no small thing for a clogged-up heroin ecstatic. Constipation being an occupational hazard… As you may know from the Relistor ads on your finer cable stations. Targeted for regular folk who just happen to be strung out like lab rats…. (Is your mailman on opiates?)

What, really, are the ICE gangs in Minnesota but the ultimate Pavlov’s dogs, locked, loaded and salivating at the sight of Somalis, Latinos, and the odd well-meaning white lady who’s triggering enough to earn a bullet in her face? (But time out! Before I forget I want to recommend two Somali novels: Nuruddin Farah’s Maps and Nadifa Mohamed’s The Orchard of Lost Souls. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.) Who knew, in ’77 Berlin, when Bowie laid down Breaking Glass on Low – “Baby, I’ve been breaking glass in your room again” – he was describing beer-gutted, home-invading ICE skeeks in 2025 America. If you didn’t know better, watching them rant and smash, you’d think these trussed up jim-jims were waging war on windows.

You just never know. My first California dog, Nellie, would snarl at toddlers. It was like walking WC Fields, And of course, people think if your dog’s a dick, then you kind of are, too. Hence the phenom of DPS, or Dog Park Shunning. Right now, my little guy, Bob (half Jack Russell, half-whatever’s on the menu) actually starts screaming – and I mean screaming! - when he sees other dogs. Or some other dogs. There’s no telling which ones are going to set him off. A man-eating Rottweiler can trot by unnoticed. Then some dainty mini-pin in a stroller (can we talk about dogs in strollers?) sends him into hysterical shrieking, like I’m pulling his claws out with pliers. Mortifying! But what do I know? Back when LBJ picked up his beagle, Him, by his ears in the Rose Garden, people thought it was cute. Same when he ear-lifted Him’s sister, Her.Now, if your pooch so much as whimpers in public, other dog-owners glare at you like you’re some dog-mauling Jeffrey Dahmer.

Maybe we’re the monsters.

Dogs have 187 muscles controlling their ears. And all of them can hear you squirm.