saint bernard

You are shrunken down to a microscopic size. This is the only way to save his life. Feed the dog.

You are building a mountain. You are building the mountain out of glue and wax. Every time the sun comes out your mountain melts into the ground and the surrounding landscape of your building site, but every night you are at work again, sweating bullets and carving plastic shrapnel into your hands. After a number of months it is the middle of August and daylight stretches your mountain into an artificial flood, growing into the trees, suffocating small animals and children, you have become Public Enemy #1 and Mother Nature's hand reaches out from under the rubbery mold but she cannot reach you and you do not hear her cries. On your 365th night of work, your mountain stands 4,000 feet above sea level, despite extending 450 miles in diameter, and standing at the summit you know that you have done something and something is nothing anyone can take away from you. You stick a flag depicting your beaming face into the peak and call it America, the flag's pole eases into the mountain like pressing into soft skin. When you wake up the following morning you realize that you are the only citizen of America still alive, the faces of infant birds are Han Solo topography on your creation's surface, somewhere under meters of frozen plastic is your golden retriever. You wait 365 nights. Your mountain's peak floats into the Atlantic and part of it into the Pacific, your dog is encased in a thin layer of latex and is more of an action figure than a pet. You open it's jaw and it is fixed open. You are swimming in an ocean of stinking plasticine. Feed the dog.

You are riding the train. You are listening to pounding pounding techno music in your headphones, they are wrap-arounds but you're only wearing them because they're all you could find after breaking your earbuds. You feel a tap on your shoulder, it is the man sitting next to you, his hands express to you a desire to hear less of your music. You pretend to oblige, you move your finger in a circle in front of the iPod without actually touching it while nodding, and he looks straight ahead again as do you. In a few minutes, in a moment of glorious electronic beauty you feel another tap on the shoulder. It is the conductor, you show her your ticket and she shakes her head and insists you lower the level on your headphones. You nod, once again move your finger tip across the phantom wheel and turn away, but fifteen seconds you feel the tap tap tap again. Conductor woman. She is stern. You make a big show of it and turn the music down beyond what is necessary and can barely make out anything beyond the beat at this point. The conductor is contented and walks away - you are trapped. You don't know who to trust on this train. You don't know if the man next to you is a spy, if he'll report to the higher-ups if you turn that wheel back. At the same time, the sound of barely-audible pounding pounding techno music is like having sex with an iron condom, it's like beating off in a public restroom, it's like being locked in solitary confinement on New Years Eve, you begin to unravel. You consider your options. You wonder how wide the train windows will open. You wonder how train officials respond to threats. You wonder how old the conductor woman is. You wonder how much tension will make her bones break. The first stop is Greenwich. You are maybe ten minutes away. Quiet techno is like a pitbull biting your leg without letting go. In your back pocket there is a knife. In your ears are the loudest sirens you've ever heard in your life. Feed the dog.

You are going to the movies with your best friend. He is driving, he's had two drinks but you've had four or five and he's the best driver you've ever known. At the top of the hill he shows you what he can do -- he puts the car in neutral and starts to coast. The vehicle accelerates faster and faster, it's going 65 MPH and the turn's right in front of you but your friend seems confident. At the last second he tells you he's always loved you, you've never understood, and this will be your final moment together. He asks if there's anything you'd like to get out there before your life is cut short like brake lines and you can't think of anything. When the BMW hits the tree you go flying through your windshield - you were not wearing your seatbelt. He was. You land in a bed of soft and wet leaves. They are light shades of brown but begin to turn crimson and purple as blood pours from every inch of you. There are shards of glass deeply embedded in your skin, you touch your face with mangled hands and it feels like a hedgehog. When you breathe you spit bubbles of blood and tooth shards. Over your shoulder is a loud explosion. The engine has gone up in flames, the car is consumed, your best friend's face melts into the dashboard. You watch his eyeballs roll into the back of his head while his eyelids drip shut. You may not have much time, you could die at any minute, the amount of blood loss is unimaginable, you are swimming in it. You still can't think of anything to say. Two wolves stalk slowly towards you, they've appeared into the woods out of the night with glowing yellow eyes and a serene sense of calm and being that opens your heart. You begin to cry. Seven of ten fingers hang by threads of skin off of your hands, they are brown with coagulated blood, they look like sausages. They look like Snausages. The wolves did not come over to your draining body because they wanted to chat. Feed the dogs.

You are stretching canvas. You are pouring paint into water. You are blending the earth and the light of the day. You are melting the world around you into simple colors, you are taking off mankind's collective corrective eyewear. Everything is blue and green again. Everything is a single gradient, the natural and beautiful space between black and white. When you have sparkled white into diamonds in the sky, when your work breathes orange through reds and whites, you put your John Hancock in the corner and share it with your parents. Your mother smiles and your father frowns. They stare at it for a long time. Your mother asks you what it is, and then asks you to wait, wait, don't tell her. A minute passes before your father volunteers the information: It is dog food. Feed the dog.

You are playing table tennis against Megumi Aiko. She is the Japanese National Table Tennis Champion. You are the American National Table Tennis Champion. And you lose. You lose in three sets. She remains undefeated. Your coach will not look you in the eye. You feel betrayed by yourself, you feel betrayed by your country. After the award ceremony there is a banquet for the athletes, Megumi does not speak much English but she manages to congratulate you on second place and expresses good intention. She tells you that she feels no sense of pride in her victory, she only did what she was supposed to do, just as she only trained for 13 hours a day for 3 years leading up to the tournament because it was what she was supposed to do. If she was allowed to be happy she would be designing shoes and hanging out at the mall with her friends, she tells you. You tell her you love table tennis, you tell her that on some level she must too. She shakes her head. She is only 19 years old. She has an extraordinary career ahead of her. You are 29 years old, she has all but ended your career in her victory. There is something unAmerican about all of this -- you take her back to her hotel room and have your way with her. She resists but you have been told that this is custom among Japanese women. When she stops resisting after only a few minutes you feel reassured of this. After you come inside her you begin to put on your socks. When you have tied your belt she asks you to leave. You have betrayed yourself, you have betrayed your country. As you walk towards the door you see the gold medallion hanging from the doorknob. It revolves in slow motion although the air in the hotel room is still. The lights in the ceiling reflect in the face of the circle and move along the edge as it spins, you are watching a commercial for winning. It is most appealing to you because you are a loser. Go on, loser. Don't let her have the last word. Your hands are bigger than her hands. Your heart is louder than her heart. If it was yours, you'd keep it in a safe. You'd wear it every day of your life. You would stitch it into your skin. You are Iron Man and who is she? Fucking no one. Fucking nobody. Feed the dog.

You wake up in bed next to him. Although you can remember every minute of the night before there are significant portions you sincerely regret. Your first regret was calling him and then there were many more regrets to follow. When he wakes up he will be alone. He will look for you in the bathroom but it will be empty. He will check the kitchen but you will not be there. He will make a pot of coffee hoping that you've just stepped out for a cigarette but you won't come back. He will drink it after it has gotten cold. You will drive home. You will call your best friend and tell her everything about it, she will tell her boyfriend and he will tell everyone he knows. You will make faces and feel like pulling over so you can be sick. And at home you have a chihuahua. A fucking chihuahua. You have the ugliest animal on the planet living in your house and you LOVE him, he shits on the floor and bites your friends and your parents and you LOVE him, you love your chihuahua and your biggest regret of all is that you don't get home until after 11.00 AM, it isn't until almost noon that you can finally feed the dog.

You work at a big company and you are big and you are important until one day you are riding on a train and somebody has a gun. Somebody has a gun and you are hostage #3, you feel little fear because you are a big confident douchebag, you have enough money in your pocket to make any problem go away. Your captors however are of the idealistic variety. After a few minutes they make it clear to you that you are going to die. Everybody on the train is going to die. There are bombs, they have covered all their bases, they have already killed the conductor and all train personnel and in maybe two minutes, maybe twenty, it will be the right time and there will be a white light and shrapnel and then nothing. In your last moments you do not text your wife or your kids even though you spent the extra money for unlimited texting and the family plan. You do not text your mistress even though you told her you loved her between ten and twenty times last night, and only six or seven of those were in the throes of passion. You do not text a fellow employee, you do not text a college buddy. Instead you close your eyes and ignore all of those around you. You pull out your dick and begin to masturbate furiously. With your eyes closed, you see only pictures of women you've never met before, they flash in and out of your consciousness too quickly for you to make any connection with any of them. This is your last moment on earth. You are masturbating furiously but you will never come. Feed the dog.

You are in New York City on the hottest day of the year. You have fifteen blocks to walk but it feels like five hundred. You are walking slow because the entire sidewalk is in slow motion, businessmen and tourists begin to melt into the cement. Waiting at corners for lights to change, the people standing around you begin to blend into each other, every body in New York is one smeared face dripping sweat. On the thirteenth block steam rises from between grates and burns skin like a teapot. On the fifteenth block you are delirious and begin to scale the side of a building. You grab for flagpoles and window ledges and you make it up two stories before there's no where to go anymore. You try to squeeze bricks embedded in the wall but they slip out of your wet hands, you lose your footing and fall into the sidewalk on your back. Upon impact you sink into the cement, Your body is under ground, you can see up the skirts of all the beautiful and all the ugly women in New York City. They step on your face and your crotch with disregard. The only creature that notices you is a Jack Russell tied to a nearby tree, he approaches you and sniffs, licks your eyeballs. There's some hard candy in your pocket, bitch, and in a quick minute it'll be liquid. Feed the dog.

You are facing a lion in the Coliseum. They have not fed this lion for two weeks. You remember Daniel. You remember God has a plan. Feed the dog.

You are in Berlin, you are playing wingman to a St Bernard. You go to a few clubs, and around 1.00 AM the St Bernard is really hitting it off with a pretty young blonde thing. By complete accident you are very drunk and cockblock your best friend, you start telling the pizza vomit story. In two minutes the young blonde thing fakes an emergency phone call and disappears, your friend barks after her for her phone number but either she doesn't hear him or that's what she pretends. The St Bernard doesn't speak to you for the rest of the night, he doesn't speak to you when the bartender announces last call, he doesn't speak to you on the cab ride home you share, he doesn't thank you when you treat him on it. He doesn't speak to you in the elevator on the ride up, or when you're fumbling with your keys at the door for six or seven minutes. You know your best friend really wanted to get some tonight, that he's had a long week at work, that he really needed to blow off some steam inside somebody beautiful and strange. You feel pretty awful. The next morning you are both hungover, you have eggs and cheese and ham and shit, he's not gonna stay mad at you forever. Put the coffee on. Feed the dog.