Bummed on Crack

Like humans, dogs too dream. Often my dreams are affected by the things I've seen and done earlier in the day. Last night was no exception.

Earlier in the day I'd had to have a plumber come out and repair a leaky faucet in my bathroom. Like all plumbers, this one was clothing challenged as evidenced by a hairy butt crack. I had been thirsty and was going to drink from the toilet until I saw the plumber’s derriere. I tipped him an extra $25 and told him to buy some Velcro to keep his pants in place.

Then later that evening, T.T. called me from the airport to say goodnight. He always does that when he flies out of town and can't take me along with him. He was waiting at the gate for the flight crew to arrive so they could board the plane. While talking, he noticed a young woman bend to sit down. Her jeans were very low cut and T.T. remarked that he could see quite a large chunk of her butt crack. T.T. then remarked that that was her better side, as her face looked like a mule sucking on persimmons - which is T.T.'s way of saying the young lady should not be trying out for America's Next Top Model.

All of this combined to affect my dreams last night. In my dream, I was flying. Snoopy, another, though slightly less famous, beagle of Peanuts fame was my wingman. We were flying high near the clouds looking for that cursed Red Baron when Snoopy catches my attention. Pointing with his left ear, Snoopy indicated an object flying much lower beneath us. I nodded and we banked to intercept the bogey. Upon drawing near, I realized that it wasn't the Red Baron we were stalking, but a flying T.T. Maybe flying is an exaggeration...he was mostly floating and bouncing from treetop to treetop.

When he noticed us, T.T. waved and indicated he wanted to fly along with us. I was afraid we'd stall out as we couldn't fly that slowly, but T.T. managed to push off from a tree limb and began to swim through the air. It was funny to watch T.T. doing breast strokes. When he would get tired, he'd slowly float down to the earth, catch his breath, and bounce back into the air with us. Watching him fly was like watching a bumblebee. With T.T.'s big gut and flat ah...butt it should have been impossible for him to fly, but dreams often defy the impossible.

After awhile T.T. challenged us to a race. He shoved off from a rooftop and began swimming as fast as he could. It was at that point that I noticed how the wind was pushing his pants back over his rear. Another butt crack!

It's a dream, and anything is possible in a dream, so I dreamed that I pulled a credit card from a wallet I don't have and from a place that doesn't have pockets, and I swiped it down T.T.'s crack. Snoopy cracked up when he saw me do this, so then he pulls out a quarter and drops it in the crack. Not to be outdone, I reach into the front seat of Snoopy's plane and produce a putty knife and a can of putty and proceeded to caulk T.T.'s butt crack. Whether it was the shock of the swipe or the weight of the putty, T.T. lost his equilibrium and dropped like a bomb, plowing a furrow through a freshly-tilled Nebraska corn field.

I awoke at that point, images of hairy butts haunting my waking moments resulting in a not-so-slight headache. I don't know if I'll ever be able to look at T.T. again without thinking about his butt crack. Some people get high on crack; I don't see the attraction.

What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate!

I was up at the big house over the weekend when T.T. and his missus got into an argument. It was quite funny.

Humans, unlike animals, can't understand one another - even if they speak the same language. Animals don't have that problem. A Chinese Shar Pei, or German Shepherd, or a Portuguese Water Dog speaks the same language I speak. We communicate using all of our senses. Humans, on the other hand, have only one heightened sense - the ability to create. Animals don't require this skill as humans were purposed to use their creative abilities to take care of the planet and its inhabitants...and they can't even do that right. They can build a bridge across a canyon, but when it comes to building a communication bridge, they really suck at it.

Mrs. T.T. is not from around these parts. She's from Nebraska where humans speak a rather neutral form of American. (You do realize of course that there's a difference between the English dialect and the American form of English?) Well, T.T. speaks a different form of American; he speaks Southern. Mrs. T.T. is still getting used to the language here in the better half of the United States. When T.T. says he's going to check the oil and the tire pressure in his truck, she hears 'ole' - as in old; and tar - as in Tar Heels. It doesn't make sense to her that T.T. is going to check the 'old tar presser'. Nor is she familiar with some of the expressions of the older Southerners. "I swawnee; you ain't got no more sense than a hant in Georgia" leaves her scratching her head. Along those lines, "Dumber than a stump-broke mule." has no logical definition. So it stands to reason that when she asked T.T. where the Butner-Creedmoor newspaper was, she misunderstood his response.

T.T. was busy on his laptop playing Mafia Wars on Facebook. When Missus asked him where the paper was, he didn't look up, just muttered what the Missus understood as "In the car, bitch." Missus stood there for a moment, her mouth agape - not believing her ears. Did her husband just call her a bitch? T.T. was paying no attention, intent on putting out a hit on the jerk that’d attacked him seven times in a row, so he didn't notice as Missus stomped out of the bedroom, grabbed the car keys off the counter and proceeded to check both his truck and her car. Now she's both frustrated and pissed off.

Missus slammed the car door, marched back into the bedroom and slapped T.T. up side his head! "What the hell?!" T.T. says, trying to maintain a grasp on the laptop.

"I asked you where the paper is." Missus said through clenched jaw.

T.T. was still trying to see past the stars floating before his eyes. "Are you crazy? I told you where the newspaper is!"

"Liar!" Missus screamed before turning around and walking out of the bedroom.

"WTF?" T.T. said, using computer shortcut language for "I don't understand what just happened." He looked at me, who'd been lying at the foot of the bed watching reruns of Lassie, and said "Must be that time of month!" T.T. rubbed the side of his face where the Missus had left a nice impression of her palm. I turned back to my TV show and didn't say a word.

Not only do humans lack the ability to communicate with one another, they actually believe they can communicate with animals. If I want a laugh, I'll watch The Pet Psychic or The Dog Whisperer on TV. The psychic or whisperer will tell the owner of the animal that the dog or horse is unhappy because one of the human kids took their tennis ball and didn't return it. What the dog or horse really said was along the lines of "Hurry up and get that camera off me; I gotta take a dump!" Because the expert hasn't a clue what the animal is really saying, they usually capture a bowel movement on TV.

The old TV shows are the best though. Timmy and Lassie could be out on an adventure playing in the woods and Timmy could fall into the only quicksand pond within a five states radius that just appeared on their property overnight. Timmy would flail about for a minute before sinking above his knees in the quicksand and Lassie would grab a stick in his mouth (Lassie was always a male Collie) and extend it out for Timmy to grab hold. If it was too far, Timmy would say, "Lassie, go get my folks and tell them I'm on the south forty - not the north forty where there's no quicksand traps and the cattle are pastured, but the south forty where there's three granite boulders that look like totems. Tell them I'm four hundred yards to the right of the largest totem, behind the bushes! Quick, go get my folks Lassie - they're in the East pasture picking worms off the corn, not in the West pasture gathering watermelons for the watermelon eating contest this Saturday at the Eakes' barn raising. Go Lassie, go find help girl!"

Lassie would say 'Woof' and off he'd run, leaping over fallen trees, passing pickup trucks on dirt roads, jumping over fences, stopping only to have sex with a sheep in one of the forties, and as he approaches Timmy's farm begins to bark an alarm. Timmy's dad will hear Lassie barking and say, "That sounds like Lassie!" His mom will say, "There must be something wrong with Timmy!" Timmy's brother will run out and meet Lassie and grab her by the face, saying, "What is it girl? Has something happened to Timmy?"

Lassie will say, "Woof" and Timmy's brother will turn to his folks and say, "Timmy's in a quicksand pond down in the South pasture, four hundred yards to the right of the largest granite boulder that looks like a totem. Lassie says we've got to hurry!"

The dad will say, "Everybody in the truck! Lassie, show us where Timmy is." and they'll roar off at 60 miles an hour, with Lassie staying out in front of the truck the entire time. They get to Timmy just as he's up to his chin in quicksand. Timmy's dad grabs a rope out of the back of the truck, forms a noose and tossed it over Timmy's head, (they weren't so concerned about child labor laws back then), then instead of tying off the other end to the truck and backing it up, he ties it around Lassie's neck, who by this time is wiped out from all this running, but courageously backs up slowly, pulling with all his might, until Timmy is within reach of his dad's arms. After Timmy's all washed up and lying in bed with clean sheets tucked around him, the folks will go outside and give Lassie a big hug and tell her what a good dog she is. Lassie will say "Woof!" which means "I want a stand-in if we're going to keep this running BS in every scene!" Humans crack me up thinking they can understand dogs.

I remember once when I was a pup that T.T. got down on the floor with his face close to mine and pretended to bark. "Woof. Woof-woof. Woof-woof-woof! Enh, neh, nenh!" It took me awhile to decipher what T.T. was saying to me. Although the words were in random order, they meant something like, "I want some crunchy hot sauce for my foreskin, please give me some now!" Once I told him what he said, he blushed and since then he's just talked to me in American. It's funny that animals can understand humans better than humans understand us.

Later Saturday night, T.T. and the Missus were laying in the bed not speaking to one another. Both were on their backs, arms folded across their chests, chins up, eyes closed. T.T. broke the silence first. "Why did you hit me this afternoon?" he asked. I'm lying at the foot of the bed listening. "You know why!" Missus said, a tear forming in the corner of one eye. "No I don't! I was minding my own business when you walked up and slapped me!" T.T. exclaimed. "What did you expect when you call me a bitch!" Missus replied. "I did not!" T.T. protested. "Did too." Missus retorted. "When?" T.T. asked. "When I asked you where the newspaper was." Missus pouted. "And I told you!" T.T. insisted. "It wasn't there. I looked in both the car and truck and it's not in there." The tear rolled down her pretty cheek. "Why did you look in the car when I told you it was in the garbage?" T.T. asked, totally perplexed at this point.

"Garbage?" Missus asked.

There was a moment of silence before Missus continued, almost in a whisper. "I thought you said, 'In the car, bitch." There was a longer period of silence as both T.T. and Missus realized that they'd made a mistake. T.T. was the first to snort, the bed shaking as his body shook in laughter. Then Missus started laughing. The harder one would laugh, the more the other would laugh until they were both in tears, holding one another. Missus stroked T.T.'s face and said, "I'm sorry." before bursting out into laughter again. They'd stop and kiss and laugh some more. It was all very embarrassing, so I got up and went back to my own bed.