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wonderful to be a deer
Tuesday, April 16 2002When you come across a group of school children in Brooklyn, chances are good that most of them will be black kids. If I'm walking Sally (as I usually am when I'm outside), I can always count on a few of them to react in terror to the sight of my dog. Mind you, Sally isn't the most threatening-looking dog in the world. Sure, you can tell there's some Pit Bull woven into her hybrid vigor, but she weighs about forty pounds and, outside of the park, has little interest in anything but pee stains and discarded french fries. Gretchen suspects that the black kids are more fearful because the dogs tend to be a bit scarier in the tougher neighborhoods from which they hail.
But mixed in with this fear is a certain amount of fascination, and black kids are also more likely to want to pet Sally and engage me in conversations about her. This didn't happen to me today, even though I passed a massive throng of kids heading to the zoo. But another dog walker, a youngish woman with two scary-looking Rotweiler/Pit mixes found herself in an amusing conversation with some of them about which of her dogs belonged to which gender. One of the kids said he knew that one of them was the girl. One of the other kids wanted to know how he knew this and he explained that it had something to do with the fact that it was wearing a pink collar.
Today the weather is hot and unusually pungent for this time of year, all the more so because of something foul Sally rolled in this morning in the park. I'm not sure what it was, but I has to wash brown stains out of her blue collar. Happily, the fragrance resembles old rotting mushrooms more than feces.Taking advantage of the beautiful prematurely-warm weather, I took Sally on a bike ride all the way to Prospect Lake (on the other side of Prospect Park). We sat on the edge of the water dangling our feet in the water (well, I did at least) until some adolescent homies in spotless gangsta gear showed up and began obnoxiously skipping rocks a couple dozen feet away.
7th Avenue was teaming with humanity when I strolled down there at around sundown. I made another foray to Barnes and Noble to take advantage of their free library services.At around 1am this morning Gretchen flew in from San Francisco, and, despite being exhausted from her big crazy day in the hot April sun, Sally threw her usual one-dog party.Gretchen and I found ourselves talking about tubal ligation and other irreversible methods of birth control."Wouldn't it be great if you had to do something [in addition to sex, obviously] in order to get pregnant?" Gretchen mused. I had a sudden idea for a form of magnetic clamp fitting over the fallopian tubes that could be opened with a special magnetic girdle, but that was as close as I could come to an idea for such a switchable fertility system, at least for heterosexuals. For homosexuals, of course, it's easy: the deliberate act necessary to have kids is heterosexual sex. A gay man might have to look past his partner to a gay porno (and possibly hold his nose at the same time - you should have seen my pantomime!) - but it's impossible for him to father a child accidentally.[REDACTED]
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