Austin is Organic and I Eat Wood

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It’s been a while since I’ve written, my apologies. I’m assuming that Trevor asked me to write because his beard is greying and his look resembles the pseudo-homeless French intellect he has striven to look like since he was 13. He was listening to “Last Thoughts on Woodie Guthrie” yesterday and I think I caught him gesturing with his hand just before he reached for his whiskey. I can only quote my favorite band in an attempt to show my contempt for his chicanery; foux du fafa, Trevor, foux du fricken fafa.

I’ve been wondering about our current predicament, mulling over whether I should have told him that there were bed bugs sucking the lifeblood from his veins for hours on end every night. I suppose it was petty of me to be upset about the fact that he kept blaming me for bringing fleas into the house, like I was some sort of mongrel. It did pain me a bit to see him scratch the skin off those scabs he had been building up, but alas I have a pretty action unpacked life so I just let him figure it out himself as I watched the drama unfold. I was woken one night by the sound of him sprinting around, then saw his naked body flash across my blurred vision as he opened the back door. Well, we can get to that part later.

I have finally settled in here in Austin, “a blue-berry in the tomato soup”, according to some ken doll named Rick Perry. I don’t really know if I would call it a blueberry, probably something more like a hemp seed or a granola biscuit. Either way, tomato soup tastes like shit. A golden retriever on H Street told me that her human has been buying “organic.” Organic rice and organic rapeseed apparently make for a delicious post-jog snack. Builds muscle. That’s interesting, because I eat organic grass and organic squirrel carcass and have not seen any muscle gain yet. Maybe its my lack of self-delusion that prevents me from buying into this marketing campaign designed to make humans think that they are helping the planet and their bodies by buying “naturally grown” products in stores with a carbon footprint that would make Winston the Basenji God beak into a sneezing fit. Here is my advice; go outside, pick up a supple looking branch and dig in. My stomach has never been healthier and I eat through three or four of those nutrient rich, organic, humanely grown, bark covered wood treats a day. Oh and don’t worry about recycling because when you are full you can just rest your Sequoia Succotash against the house and come back for it later. Oh and by the way, Winston doesn’t exist, so just get over it.

The house is in shambles. Trevor made what he calls an “executive decision” to sublease the house out to a couple of hipsters or hippies or some strange H word that means people don’t shower. “Don’t judge a book by its cover” he said to me. Like I gave a shit who lived in the house while I was vacationing up north for summer. I’ve tried so many times to throw myself into the creek that runs past the place in hopes that I could be swept back out to sea and home to Puerto Rico. I digress. Apparently this couple turned out to be less hipster and more herder. After kindly asking if they could keep and old cat in his room for the summer, they made the “executive decision” to house a rat farm, a python snake, and two cats in the home. Oh, and the aforementioned bed bugs. I’m not sure if the bugs were pets or just travel companions, either way they are about as entertaining as any houseguest we have ever had. I was naming them until I ran out of names, then I just separated them by gender, put a sheet over the females making it harder for them to get to the top and then watched as the males mocked them as they got bigger and fatter. Then I ate a couple males to even the score but it turns out that blind chauvinism tastes like organic horse hoof curated in natural cow shit.

Trevor was covered in bites and his hours that were supposed to be dedicated to grading his students discussion posts were consumed by violent outbursts of scratching and cursing his Winston, someone the humans call Lord. Weird name right? You would think with all the funny names they have they could have come up with something more thrilling and that didn’t rhyme with bored. Anyway, apparently this Lord guy is almighty and if you don’t scream for him to have mercy every once in a while the doggy bag hits the fan. 

That night he “discovered” the bedbugs, which is kind of like when white people “discovered” America; it’s not really that he discovered them so much as he finally realized that his bed was round and other creatures had been living on the other side for way longer than he would like to admit. He feverishly scanned his sheets with his reading lamp until he let out a banshee like howl. Like a cow-prodded praying mantis he pranced from one end of the house to the other screaming to Lord and someone called Damnation. His white skin was about all I could see as he did knee-highs across the living room, then he opened the back door and sprinted out completely furless. I didn’t see him for a while, so I had time to go back to my regular evening entertainment of watching the male bedbugs have unfair advantage and then congratulating them when they reached the top. I saw this once on a TV show called C-Span: The House of Representatives. Really boring show. Lord this, Lord that, if I wanted to watch self aggrandized delusional egomaniacs proselytize I could go to another Business School tailgate with Trevor.  Nevertheless, I am still upset that he paid a 1000 dollars that could have been used to buy me treats to heat the house and kill all of my bedbug friends. He also used vinegar to clean the freezer and the rotted flesh left behind by the frozen mice that the Hucksters fed to their python. Alas, all of the good smells are gone and the house has no more fun playmates. Humans have no room for fun.

This is Trevor’s last year at Public Policy School. Makes me wonder where we will go next. Wherever it is, I really hope that they have bedbugs.

(Singing) The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round, the wheels on the bus go round and round, all the live long day.

I woke up singing that song yesterday. There is no explanation for why the repetitive children’s jingle was looping through my consciousness as I roused from a deep sleep induced by excessive consumption of ice cream the night before. In recent months I have found it increasingly hard to ignore the ice cream stores as I stroll past them; the Argentines make an exquisitely creamy ice cream, heavy on the tongue but smooth as it folds in layers down your throat. I am tempted by practically all of the flavors, but find that my favorite combination is the black forest – chocolate ice cream with cherries and chocolate chips; the banana split- a delightful combination of real banana and vanilla ice cream; and the dulce de leche- a butter scotch like ice cream that is considered the crown jewel of South American treats. This combination could bring any creature to his knees. The smooth and creamy flavors are practically the only respite I have these days, flying me out and away from the trepidation and uncertainty of life on a magical milky carpet.

We have moved again. This apartment is nice, you know, something in the suburbs with a balcony and a view of greenery that promises higher salaries and fewer mutts. In fact, there is a doggy breeder visible from my fifth story balcony. From morning until night I can watch the French poodles at breakfast and tea as they enjoy the fountain that pitter-patters in the center of their English garden. Yes indeed, here in the open streets of Vicente Lopez, as the neighborhood is called, I can wander as a free dog should. I don’t mind having to speed poo so as to avoid the commentary of old Captain One-Tooth who sits on her patio at Vergara and O’Higgins, and I no longer find it rude when finely combed Bichon Frises glide past me without so much as stopping to notice me. I’m sure they have their reasons for having to skirt around so quickly. After all it is hard to keep up around here. One day you are proud that you have a new shiny red leash and the next you find out that the Shepherds have an eco-friendly biodegradable human extension cord.

The neighborhood is alive with friendly little children and it has a real local feel to it. Just yesterday the grocer ran to grab photos of his Pomeranian master to show to Trevor. At the video store, the owner is an expert on East Indian calisthenics and has offered to give classes as a part of her monthly discount package. The exercise routine must relieve her from feeling stress about the fact that she owns a business founded on thousands of bootleg copies of Hollywood films. The pace in town is slow enough so that I can send Trevor into the store all by himself while I wait outside and smell what the Rottweilers had to eat last night. They usually go for steak, but sometimes they eat milanesas to mix it up.

Trevor has been playing lots of soccer in the city so he often takes the train in and leaves me be so that I can siesta and contemplate the fact that I only have 10 years of life left. Of course the public transportation is fantastic out here in Vicente Lopez. There is a train just one block from the house and about seven different bus lines pass nearby and fan out to anywhere you would want to go in the city. The 60 and the 15 head towards Palermo where we used to live and where the canine and human nightlife goes down. The 30 goes down the coast of the River Platte and through the center. The 161 stops right in front of the house and is the color red, my favorite. And of course, as I already mentioned there is Trevor’s favorite, the train.

The trains were built by the British a century ago and go the wrong way on the track. When Trevor explained to me that in the United States the trains run the other direction on the track I thought he was using some sort of euphemism to explain the inevitable separation of parent country and present superpower as one becomes more conservative in the face of growing skepticism of modern capitalism and the other attempts to confront a financial crisis by revisiting depression era democratic socialism. Of course, in Argentina all tracks lead to the port, so it doesn’t matter which side the train runs on, the cargo will inevitably end up being sent to China where it will be consumed by a people ambiguous to modern democracy, whose magnetic light rail system is eons ahead of anything that Britain or the United States could dream of building. But knowing Trevor I think this logical and yet cutting irony completely escaped him; he just hates having to sprint to the other side of the tracks when he realizes that he is headed in the wrong direction.

We are living in a near utopia, but of course sometimes even the most perfect seeming of places has a kink or two that needs working out. One of these kinks revealed itself quite abruptly last night, and has left Trevor in a post traumatic “I love everything about life” phase that has me ready to uncurl my tail in exasperation. As he tells the story he was returning from a night out with friends, unaccompanied by Tami who has escaped his claw like grasp and taken a work trip as far away as possible to the southern tip of the country. He explains that he chose to take the 15 bus because it travels the second half of the journey back to Vicente Lopez on the highway, making it a much faster option than the other buses which go along the city avenues and stop quite regularly to pick up singing teenagers just out from the clubs. It was on this highway stretch that “it” happened. As he describes, the bondi (bus) was traveling along just fine gaining speed on the homestretch when all of the sudden the right rear wheel, just under where Trevor was sitting, dislodged itself from the axle. The passengers watched as the enormous wheel danced past the bondi and out into the left lane of the highway.

While most women and children remained calm I can only imagine that Trevor was whimpering like a little baby as the bondi spun around in circles in the right lane of the Panamericana (the highway that stretches from North to South across the Americas). As the sparks flew and the scraping metal raked his ears Trevor explained to me that he imagined that the last thing he would see was the back of an old, fat, bondilero (bus driver). But the bondi came to a stop and the bondilero opened its doors so that Trevor could burst out onto the highway and kiss its tar-covered lanes with a passion that no bondilero had ever seen before. Apparently unconcerned that the wheel was no longer attached to the bondi and was in fact splayed out in the middle of the highway, the bondilero left the engine running while the passengers waited for another bondi to come along. Trevor walked home, as the incident conveniently unfolded a quarter of a mile from his stop. He thought of a poem on his way back and begged that I put it in here for everyone to see (I apologize in advance).

Oh bondilero.
If you were in Mexico you would wear a sombrero.
If you were in San Francisco you would drive along Divisadero.
Oh Bondilero.
If you were Jamaican you would read my tarot.
If you had wings you would be a sparrow.
Oh Bondilero.
The Egyptians call you pharaoh
The afterlife you do harrow
Oh bondilero
Please tighten the bolts that attach the wheel to the axle next time
Seriously, what the fuck?

Yes, but Trevor will surely get over this minor glitch in the utopia and we will return to living the life. Oh, who am I kidding? I spend my days one social hour after the next watching arrogant poodle cockamamies whimper and whine like the Kardashian sisters at an Oklahoma gun show. The people in this neighborhood wouldn’t know variety if it hit them in their refined European faces. Earth to Argentines; Milanesas are fucking steaks that are ironed and sprinkled with breadcrumbs on top. Am I the only one who notices these things? If I see another old lady with a smirk on her face I’m going to eat through her plastic surgery like I did the living room wall in the new apartment. And yes, I have a wall eating addiction. At least when I bite the dust I will have had one or two studs in me. That’s more than I can say for most of these dames around here.

You can call me ungrateful; a Puerto Rican street dog who complains when she is flown to the Paris of Latin America to live her life out in parks and on balconies with a view. But then again, you don’t have an insolent and confused Spanish speaking Oklahoman liberal calling you Sugar Butt from dawn until dusk. This guy makes up unintelligible songs that follow to the melody of the American National Anthem and then forces me to hold my paw to my heart when some weed smoking asshole named Bode Miller wins a downhill skiing event. I’m sorry if I don’t follow mindless sports and adhere to the feverish nationalism that characterizes young and reckless countries like the United States and Argentina.

I am one and a half years old and I have lived in more apartments than Tiger Woods has had lovers. One day I’m rolling around with a nice Jack Russell named Borges and the next I’m supposed to be bathing with a band of banditos in a three ring circus water fountain that looks like the Bellagio after WWIV. Do the wheels fall of busses in Paris? When it rains in Paris, do the police get out inflatable boats to usher humans across major avenues in hopes that they do not get swept away by the surging rivers? I’d like to see the Arc D'Triumph with little French marines floating beneath it. Of course we wouldn’t want the French marines to come out and try to accomplish something, they might break a nail and call America for emergency rescue.

If human intransigence were not so omnipresent maybe they would see the solution to their problem. Exchange the poorly attached bondi wheels for floaties and flood the streets. And for god’s sake, quit dressing me up in a fucking hat that says princess on it. I’ll be your princess when you wear a leash around your overgrown neck after listening to a manchild sing about how you shit in the street to the tune of the doe ray me song from Sound of Music. Oh, and by the way, IM A MUT, not a frou frou poodle from the suburbs! The wheels on this bus stopped going round when you named me after a Puerto Rican frog that chirps like a battery drained pull string doll.

Note from Trevor: I have just read over Coqui’s blog entry and I apologize for her sour attitude. My little Sugar Butt does not represent my feelings or attitudes about politics or life in general.

For those of you who do not know me, I am Trevor's master, and he is my human. He has asked me to write the first entry in this blog because he is ashamed that everyone else is on twitter and he is just now catching up with the blog world. He probably wouldn't have thought of starting this blog if it weren't for his sister who started one several months ago. Her blog seems to have inspired some sense of romanticism within him. Most afternoons I see him sitting at the window next to the dining table, looking outwards as the traffic zips past, muttering Byron lines he read last week. I'm sure he thinks this blog will be the spark for some revolution that will have the masses graffitying his oversized head on the sides of all of the highways. He doesn't know that Che Guevara was just a dirty English Sheppard's human. Che went to Bolivia for revolution? ha. He went because Sir Lancelot was suffocating in the Caribbean.

Sometimes I like to imagine that I am his sister or his mother for example. I imagine family dinners and board games in front of the television. Regardless, my lot in life was not meant to be one of luxury: slowly savoring French cheese and exquisite Bordeauxs as we laugh about the subtle yet sublime differences between one Mediterranean town to the next. Granted, the Malbecs and Cabernets here are supposed to be phenomenal, but I wouldn't know because he is never kind enough to leave me more than a spatter at the bottom of the glass. One time I did eat half of a leash which if I am not mistaken was curated in a nice 99 Mendoza Santa Ana. He was beside himself when the vet told me that they might have to operate to get it out of my stomach. If he thought that leash would do me harm he's got a lot to learn. I'm a Puerto Rican street dog; I had to eat ten day old rice and beans that I found in the dumpster with a dessert of post colonial-colonialism disguised as an Asociated Free State. Humans have no sense of irony, and I wouldn't have realized I was pooping that flimsy leash out on the crowded sidewalk if it hadn't been for the small crowd that gathered around to watch.
My girlfriends at the dog pen tell me that his mellow behavior is normal, that he needs a break from the stress and overall tumult of young adulthood pressures. They advised that I keep a close eye on him just in case he needs some cheering up here or there. Yes, cheering up is what he needs. He must be sweating from all of those hours he has spent reading Jack London's Sea Wolf, and I truly don't know how he manages to take me for walks to the park all of the time. I must be mistaken to interpret that small grin on his face as he sleepily mumbles goodbye to Tami every morning for happiness. I'm sure it is hard for him to let her go work every day while he watches season one of The Wire and drinks hot mate. He's a real saint for all he does for the both of us.
For example, the trip down to this enormous dog pen was really hard for him. He had to sit in a cushioned seat while I road for fifteen hours in the luggage compartment of an airplane in a plastic cage he bought at Wal-Mart. He says it is the only one he could find on the island, but then again he did not fall two feet to the ground of the airport garage when the plastic hunk of crap split in half two hours before the flight. And somehow working at a rock quarry for a year did not instill in him any sense of craftsmanship or handy-work, unless of course you call wrapping tape around a plastic cage until practically all of the breathing holes were covered some kind of solution to the predicament I found myself in at the airport. To quote that fat guy who lives with that adorable white lab (don't know what kind of mutt he is, but he sure is cute); "You know what really grinds my gears?" Well I will tell you what grinds my gears. Your recalcitrant human packs you into a plastic prison all the while telling you that "it is only a short trip", and then yells at you for leaving a small stool sample in the airport terminal after said plastic box breaks in two like a cheap rawhide after a couple of nibbles. Yo-Yo Ma plays the cello and I poop in airports, get over it.
I give the guy a hard time, but that morning had already left him with his hair standing on end. He had promised me one last walk on the beach before we left to this new place where he promised the dogs would be much more refined and a bit more stylish. And so, a couple of hours before we were supposed to head out and in the midst of his final packing spree he grabbed my new leash and we trotted out on a sunny day to my favorite beach. Before I continue with my story I just want to think back on the sand and those trusting tourists on that beach. They never knew what was coming to them. I still giggle when I think about the girl whose eyeball I licked while she was sleeping face-down on a beach chair while listening to her ipod. I really think she overreacted a bit. Screaming and running off like that was a bit drama queenish of her. Then again, I scream like a hyena going through a paper shredder whenever any animal larger than your average field mouse approaches me. Of course, if you think I'm squeamish, you should have seen those brothers of my human try and put a grocery store bag diaper on me when my time of the month came around. It was like watching the guys from Weird Science in the re-make of Clueless.
Anyway, after our walk on the beach we rushed back to the apartment to get things in order and to meet Edwin, who was going to take us to the airport. He was waiting for us when we arrived and offered to help Trevor with the luggage. Of course, after living in the building for five months its on moving day when the elevator goes out of service. Because the large mechanical box was non-functional Trevor opened the door to the stairwell and was about to head up when he saw a couple of plain dressed men calling someone. I suppose he assumed that they were calling about the elevator, because he made one of those stupid human comments like, "calling about the elevator eh?" One of the guys told him that they were just before the bigger one asked Trevor what apartment he lived in. As soon as he answered 4b that facial expression on those humans droids morphed into an aggressive interrogatory smirk. Here is the conversation as I remember it:
Man
"You say you live in apartment 4b? Let me see some ID."
Trevor
"Excuse me, who are you?"
Man
"I'm the police (shows shiny metal object), now let me see some damn ID"
Trevor
"Ok, here is my drivers license, can I help you with something."
Man to Edwin
"Let me see some ID""You don't have any ID?""Go stand in the corner."
Trevor in a hyper and squeaky voice
"I would like to know what this is about."
Man
"We have a warrant here for the arrest of the person who lives in apartment 4b of this building."

I don't really need to continue the dialog, there was a lot more squeaky demanding of an explanation from Trevor and increasing aggression from the officers. They were about to take Trevor to to the car before he convinced them to come to the apartment where he would show them his passport and convince them that he was not the man they were looking for. They had asked about a man with an Italian name and he claimed that mail came for the man from time to time but that he left it in the lobby whenever it did. I watch a lot of British mystery dramas and knew that brining them up with Edwin about to poop himself and three packed suitcases sitting at the door was not a good idea. Besides, the first thing they saw, apart from the getaway luggage, was a letter addressed to the man in question, which Trevor claimed he had accidentally mixed in with his mail. Now they were getting the handcuffs out. I could smell Trevor's heart in hit his feet when they explained that they had been told to arrest the dweller of apartment 4b 1300 Caribe Ave because he was accused of murdering a minor.
It was then that the moron finally told the guys he would call the owner who could explain that he was not the man that they were looking for, and that they should let him go before he curled up in the fetal position.
The call was successful and were were only delayed enough so that he did not have time to take me on a final potty stop, hence the aforementioned toilette incident.

Time to go to the park, will write more later.