The Dogma of Motherless Potheads

 K is gone again today (boo) so J is going to walk us to the boat ramp (yay).  When K is home and has to go to work, we do the shorter walk.  Yesterday on our way back from our walk, we helped K work by posing beside some bags at the construction site across the street! I laid my ears into Seinfeld Shower mode; I wasn't that excited about being there but K was happy to see these bags, for some reason. J says that it's because in a nutshell, these bags provide dog food. It was not nutshells - and NOT dog food, I can tell you that.

Last night we just kind of hung out. A good evening except when K fired up the HOG and went for a short ride. J threw the ball for me, which helped a lot but I still don't trust that thing!! I watched a little hockey with K.

JK are pretty pragmatic.  They like to keep it real.  For instance, they are the kind of dog owners who are not big on calling themselves “mommy” and “daddy” to Buzz and me.

Like say we have gone to a restaurant and we’re all sitting outdoors and Buzz and I are tied to the chair legs and flopped under the table. The server comes up and says something to us like “Ask Mommy and Daddy if you can have a piece of bacon.”  It amuses them to no end.

When the server leaves, J will say something to K like, So glad we have tied the children under the table where they can lap up our crumbs and K will say, did you make sure their collars are nice and snug around their necks? Wouldn’t want the kids licking the other customers’ thighs. Or at the vet. Have Mommy hold you while I take a look. J will tell K later, the kids got their flea medicine today and neither one has worms.

I know it’s different for other dogs because I hear their humans talking to them. Come on, Pitterpat! Come to Mommy! And JK have no problem with that, they just say, for them, it doesn’t work.  Because we are dogs.  Buzz says it has always been this way with JK and is partly what turned him into the paragon of JRTs that he is.  J says it’s called anthropomorphism –attributing human characteristics and thoughts and skills to animals - and that I should write about it now and then in the blog, maybe even compose a haiku. 

But it’s not just us with the Mommy and Daddy thing. Even though J loves them to death, she won’t even let Annabelle, Penny, Lexi, Izzy, and Godiva call her “DogMa” even though Buzz and K say dogma  (from Greek δόγμα "that which seems to one, opinion or belief ")  pretty much describes J to a T. 

And it almost never happens, but if K were to call J his “Mommy” or go further up the ladder of Words Not Appreciated, to the rarest rung of “Mother,” (as in let’s go for ice cream Mother), we just turn the air conditioner off. The glacial freeze from the look she gives him cools the house for the rest of the day. In fact, K has to put on a sweater.

That's a knockout rose, Maxie

I love being JK’s dog, though, and I know they love having me around. Everything they do is pretty much for my enjoyment.  Like when J plants flowers, she says things to me like that’s a knockout rose, Maxie or that’s going to be a bright reddish-pink azalea when it blooms. I’ll sniff it just to make her happy. Kind of boring though. 

But the pot…the pot!!!  I was pretty young when I discovered the joys of pot. My favorite is the Chinese Black, but Green is good too. Once J planted a knockout rose and tossed the flimsy “made in China” black plastic pot onto the lawn.  It rolled, and I pounced!  It made the most wonderful crinkling sound I have ever heard.  I shoved my head into it and breathed the heady scent of pure organic dirt.  I wore it like a full faced helmet and raced around in the dark. I tossed it in the air. I attacked with all my might. I scraped it along the driveway and wrestled it on the lawn.  I didn’t stop with that thing until it was so crumpled that there was no fight left in it.  Since then, I can’t get enough.  The last time J worked in her garden, she dug some holes for her flowers, then turned to get them out of their little pots.  What the heck? I heard her say.  I could have sworn I had four of these?  For some reason she isn’t that happy when I steal her pots with the flowers still in them.  I left the flowers lying nicely on the lawn, it’s not like they were hurt or anything.

But pots have their dangers.  One day last fall, a pot almost got the better of me. K looked out the kitchen window into the back yard and said Oh-oh, this isn’t going to end well. J got up to look.  They both started laughing very hard, and J ran, fast, for her camera.  J says pictures tell the story better than any words could.

This is what K saw out the window

J called me-- HERE MAXIE

Me in my pothead days

Humans will laugh at anything. Anything!

Finally I asked J to take it off. And she did.

I have other pots.  A huge white plastic one that I found behind the deck, and a tough little brown one that is fun enough, but doesn’t crinkle.  It’s good on the driveway, though.  Rolls and growls at me. So if the Chinese Black is too crumpled, I go with the American Brown. 

Me with American Brown, Chinese Black in foreground

Oh , one last thing. When I play with my pots, for some reason KJ calls me Ruprecht.Then they say, in a strange voice, DNOT MOTHER? I guess the pot brings out the weird in them, too. I've heard it can do that.
Anthropomorphism. I have to remember that. I don't think it will happen with us.

She's not dogmom, no...
Their dogma: we're animals
They love us that way!