what champions eat for breakfast

save our sod

we have two strays who have adopted us, warts and all, and have deigned to share their house with us while they sleep in the garage. they are one black and one white, named oleman and pretty, respectively.

digression: look, it's already been established that i suck at the giving of names. i can never think of some clever personality-based title for a dog. i prefer to name them tommy or chintu and then call them whatever nauseating epithet i devise later. examples of nauseating epithets: all words ending with -inju, all words starting with oosha-. as in, chinju and ooshachinju.

anyway. so we have these two people sleeping in our garage. they bark and keep the burglars at bay, in addition to joining the dog inside in providing ecstatic musical accompaniment to my arrival home. they follow us to the auto-stand and make sure no other dog or cyclist kidnaps us. they make sure the clothes on the line don't hang too close to the ground by systematically tearing up and sleeping on any article of clothing that might be within leaping distance. they also bark at the midnight watchman and the 5am milkman every. single. morning.

yes, they can be painful little shits sometimes. but then, so can every single person i have ever met. the difference is every single person i ever met isn't being persecuted and shooed at for returning to his bed. and this is exactly the fate that oleman is being visited on by my furious father.

some might say my father has grounds for hostility. this morning oleman tore up both our newspapers in an unprecedented act of humungously pissing my dad off. you don't mess with my dad's newspapers in the morning, this is just not wise. but oleman wasn't to know and as far as he was concerned tearing up newspapers was a pleasant enough occupation while it rained incessantly outside.

so this morning in addition to being sent to buy the 'papers, i also had to promise to Do Something About That Dog. pretty is still allowed because she didn't tear up the 'papers, but oleman is definitely a bad word around our house.

there is no way to keep him out of our house because a. he is oleman! how can i forsake him and b. he can highjump any wall you care to put up. in fact, after his operation (to prevent further puppyfication of the neighbourhood) he escaped pfa's high security dog enclosure by scaling a wall ten feet high. mr dattu, who called to give me the bad news, just couldn't get over this feat and i'm sure he's met his share of wonderdogs over the years.

i am desperately in need of advice. ideally, my father will see the error of his ways and come to love and cherish oleman like i do. but somehow i don't see this happening. oleman, being an old man, will not change his ways because he's heard that proverb about the old dog and new tricks. this means constant shooing will force him (oleman) to sleep next door in the stairway of the brahmin family that hates dogs and does not appreciate their slippers being chewed up.

personally i don't see why people are so fussy about their possessions, but i guess when your guests leave their footwear outside in respect it looks bad to have to return it to them in drool-soaked tatters.

so i have no idea what to do. he is an old dog and carting him off somewhere else, like the blue cross might do, would make him miserable and kill him, i am convinced. on the other hand, if anyone complains to the municipality, they will drag him off and kill him through more direct means.

so what, dear reading public of five, can i do? suggestions are hugely welcome. i know there is a bleeding heart story at every corner in your world today, but this one involves a dog. one of the cleverest i know and the sweetest senile delinquent there ever was.

i'll have what she's having

anyone seen the new set wet ads? you know, the body cologne that promises to render you 'very very sexy'. i've been watching a lot of tv lately and two ads from the set wet people have me intrigued.

if you haven't seen it, it goes something like this. two guys in two ads slather on large quantities of set wet gel, aided by sexy music and lighting. then they go about their business, only to return to their cubicle/bedroom to find random women orgasming into their headsets or sheets.

the point i think is that these perfumed gels are so damn intoxicatingly hot that female passers-by are drawn by the scent and find themselves climaxing spontaneously, regardless of the scenery. this can be quite embarassing, you would think, to have an overpowering screamer in someone else's cubicle, but the woman doesn't seem to mind.

perhaps she's part of the majority of women worldwide who have so much trouble finding themselves, she's happy to make the discovery anywhere.

but what makes these ads heart-rending is the message they might be sending out to impressionable young boys and girls everywhere. there are not many of them left, it's true, which makes the remaining ones that much more precious. is there a chance that ads like these will lead them to believe in the pervasiveness of the female orgasm? will they grow up thinking a woman is really quite simple to please, given the right perfume/wheels/soft drink/cooking range?

and you know it's not just the ads either, it's movies and music videos and everywhere else. in these setups perfectly hot women seem grateful for any kind of attention and will melt obligingly at the slightest touch or tickle. but then in real life, young boys who reek cologne and drive recklessly find the neighbourhood surprisingly deficient in girls creaming their pants. this must lead to some confusion and lots of tragic sex.

palms up

she liked girls better. to play, to talk, to laugh. it wasn't her heart that decided this initially, it was her eyes, her cunt, her skin, her salt. they'd been kissed, soured, rumpled and razed.

sex was the opening up of a present, everytime a gift of crisp fuzz and sleeping velvet. legs opening to reveal each time a haze upon the eye, the diaphanous pungency of memory, sheer recall.

later fingers of warmth meet around the skull. and the return is sad, with a surge so deep it washes away the tracks back home. slip, slide, climb, sink. and forget each time that a triangle is three corners rounding in on each other. there is no leaving, the fog has clamps of steel and carries only the anaesthetic of blindness.

so she keeps missing the signs she carved herself. she rises with the tide and rushes against rocks. memory is traded for the fading taste of now. how willingly the trade is made, with childlike villainy the deal struck. if you promise to hide well, i promise never to seek. memory will strain at anything for an imminent morsel of death.

and the now? the moment for which she has erased all possessions, her now is a slip of tissue and muscle, with sticky grabbing hands and shuddering reins. like an eldritch lock with keys of light and shadow, she feels her way in with scrambled senses, an insane voice guides her.
and she knows it's insane because the echoes announce the scream.

the kind of face only a mother could love

this is mac, who was named that for no sane reason or even any interestingly insane reason. it was just a name, people around liked it. i couldn't care less because i had a dog! a puddle of blackness with sad sad eyes. here, he's trying to sleep and being tolerant of the flash going off in his face. he is a very dignified dog that way.

unclenching

not writing for this long has been a hibernation, i feel sleepy and stretchy like dough. knead me in, roll me out, and pat me on a cluster of coals. all it will take is a warm nuzzle, and i'll rise like a colonel's drying moustache.

it's good to have the sleep drip off, it's nice to feel the sun on my opening palms, nice to tell the world again of caterpillars pausing nose in the air and of an origami swan's rasping flight. how chameleons melt peacefully on hot concrete and about tight fistfuls of red worms twisting in a monsoon orgy. about invisible provocations only a kitten can see and shifting corridors of wind only a swallow would know.

and this is where thought leaps free of words and words scramble for purchase on the rising slope of a sigh. if i could just put my finger on the heart of this knot, and tie the thoughts in with a doublelooped move. if only they wouldn't sprint so far ahead of the grasp of language. if only they would stick around and play in my lap a while.
a girl can get lonely, out here on a limb.

made my day

when asked to display her calligraphy skills, my friend's nine-year-old wrote this in her diary:
deepa aunty is one of the funniest peoply i have ever met.

all joined up and curly, it was. as calligraphy, it rocked. as a compliment, it made me overlook for once the aunty. check me out world, i'm funny peoply!