Balance

I’ve already spent the morning basking in the digital glow of hi-rez pixels, eating handfuls of chips, drinking yesterday’s cola and squinting at lines of computer code, trying to decipher the purpose of a certain program’s existence - which is still easier by far than reaching for the purpose of mine - and not trying to but succeeding at a gradual ruin of my eyes in conjunction with what you could call a petrifaction of human social interaction skills meaning that after many hours of communing with my hipper-than-all-other neon colored, iridescent, supersonic, multiphonic, ultra ultra-modern, terabyte monster of a 100 pound computer, I looked into the eyes of everyone around me and my skewed vision could only see, could only comprehend matched pairs of little non-flat screen monitors staring back at me, and my voice, my input device to them, was as steady and monotonous as my typing on the ergonomically angled keyboard of my ultra, ultra sleek machine.

So to counter the erosion of all connections with the living, at noon, I go visit the dogs where they give me such smiles that even my mumbling, fumbling language with them is of no concern and I can laugh at all their secret jokes.

Copain

And when I say the dogs save me, I mean they save me from the inertia of butt planted in seat for 9 hours straight and they save me from eating a saturated fat saturated meal at the nearest fry pit. When I say they save me I mean they reanimate my pixel infused brain, they pump life through my digitized heart and they re-inflate my micro-chipped soul.

Travis

The dogs dissolve away all my plastic pretense and wreck all this sleek, clean metal concrete glass architecture overhead and around at what? a quarter million for 600 square feet?, and replace it simply with fur and drool and dirt. They replace it with bright eyes, excited ears and paws that pad through snow and puddles and mud and onward, always onward. They are a force field against the artifice of my bipolar commodity/consumer world, a world that suggests to me daily I would be happier indeed if I were an automaton permanently wired and 100% exposed to the marketing for the next future-is-now, must-have electronic device.

But these dogs don't care. These uncivilized, unwanted, uneducated dogs don't understand and don't even try. They just laugh at all this and re-infect me with life.

Maggie

Update on Maggie here.

Update on Travis here.