Fermented Mare's Milk

When I was leaving my parent’s house the night before E and I left the country, as I was scratching Paige in the same way I have when leaving my parent’s house for any considerable duration of time since going to boarding school when I was seventeen, I very purposefully told her not to die while I was gone this time. Not even dogs can control those things, I guess. News to me.

George Carlin once said that life is just a series of dogs. I got Paige as a gift from my parents on my fifteenth birthday, about four months after our other dog, a dachshund-beagle mix named Bonnie, died at the age of sixteen. I named her after Jimmy Page because I was fifteen and Hendrix was vetoed by the others present. My mother added an I in order "to make it more like a proper name." There are two dogs currently waiting for me in Ohio (or at least they’ll come home with me when I go to retrieve them; I’m not convinced dogs wait for anything in an emotional sense). Neither of them are named after guitar players (one a song by Mephiskapheles and the other thoroughbred jockey and Saratoga god Jerry Bailey) I got one of those two dogs on my twenty-fourth birthday—by coincidence, not as a gift—when she was one day shy of six weeks old and weighed less than ten pounds. She’s now a few weeks from five years old and just shy of a hundred pounds.

There’s no real narrative here, I just felt incredibly distant and wanted to type something below the photo. And I’m sad and heartbroken and feel a little foolish being so in the face of the world’s larger problems and as a result have no idea what to say. So.