Caviar Alpo

Wait a minute. Can you hear that sound? That spinning sound that sounds kind of like your hard drive. It's Jack London spinning in his grave. It came to me last night, making its way across mountains and lakes, seeping through the neon glow of cities to find me walking a Bichon with a dog sweater.

I told my girlfriend I wouldn't walk the dog, Mackie (short for Machino Matthews, Peachy boy, Ragu) if she dressed him in that ridiculous outfit. I look down at the poor pup and he looks back up at me with that "I don't care what I'm wearing as long as I get to sniff your underwear" look in his eyes. He doesn't seem to mind, in fact it seems as if he even thinks he's some kind of fashion plate. He sits there in his classic pure bred French arrogance, barking at me in quick little barks. At times I swear I can hear him call me bourgeois. "You Americans have no sense of fashion."

Perhaps he's right. If the dog doesn't mind why should I? Who am I to stand in the way of his right to creative expression through fashion. If he didn't like the outfit, he would certainly try to get it off. Case in point is his rain slicker. He wiggled his way out of it, growling with indignation at having been subjected to such an intrusion upon his good taste. "If you think I am going to wear that, you are most assuredly wrong."

The sweater, an argyle preppy reject from an eighties young republican rally, gives him an air of intellectual aloofness. When he's wearing it, he is the most enlightened dog on the block. During walks he seems to be sniffing for Byron under every tree. We head to the corner on our midnight walks and he refutes my take on Eliot's theory of Objective Correlation and I tell him his ideas seem rather antiquated and we laugh. His conservatism is rather interesting given his young age (just over six months), but the world always is more concrete to the young.

So I let him be and he begs me for a sip of wine and a slice of gouda, perking his ears and tilting his head at the words "smoking jacket." We lay on the bed and watch Charlie Rose and he feels the pain in the refrain of the latest Jewel single. And when Jack London comes intruding with the call of the wild, the puppy and I just smile and lay back in our decadence; cultured, sophisticated and far away from the frozen tundra.