{Note: If this is your first visit to this blog, we highly recommend that you read the “About” page first, which will provide you with information that will prove to be very useful in understanding the terminological idiosyncrasies being utilized. In addition, after some introductory remarks, you will find a Chronological Archive of all the posts to date, which will allow you to read everything in the proper order, as intended.}
This will be our last blog entry.
Our hands would like to believe that this has something to do with his curious, inexplicable obsession with the number 23, but as usual, our hands is wrong. While he is part of the reason that this will be the final entry, it has nothing to do with his numerological delusions. Rather, our hands perpetrated a gross injustice against our very person and to punish him for this indiscretion we have decided to publically rebuke him before canceling this entire enterprise.
Explaining our hands’ disrespectful transgressions will require a bit of background.
For example, when we’ve mentioned our hands in this blog, there may have been some misunderstanding given that we have two hands residing in our household, and we have probably not been completely clear on making such a distinction; after all, hands are hands: as humanity often says, “You’ve seen one hands, you’ve seen them all.” In any case, our primary hands, who happens to be male, lives with a female hands, who, of course, is also ours, but is perhaps a little less in tune with her expected role, meaning that there have been times when she has expressed less-than-positive feelings about the human (meaning , us) she is supposed to serve. To clarify further, this female hands has claimed to “hate cats” and further claims that she only puts up with us because her male counterpart is enamored of us for “some unfathomable reason.”
Being magnanimous almost to a fault, we’ve not spent much time worrying about our primary hands’ partner. She may not have been properly obedient, but she also was not actively antagonistic. She kept our food and water bowls full when necessary, and operated our home’s infernal doors on occasion, and could be convinced to provide some rudimentary grooming now and again. In other words, while not a hands we would wish to depend on, she was, shall we say, at least adequate. More or less. Though sadly, usually the latter. And, it should be noted, that this female hands was more than somewhat responsible for the insults visited upon our person that we referred to earlier.
Our female hands has a child and that child owns two dogs, two large, boisterously stupid creatures who, like most members of their species have no clue as regards to their proper place in the natural hierarchy that informs the universe. The pack mentality that informs the canine world-view, for instance, depends on identifying the alpha creature of the pack and then behaving appropriately deferential while in the alpha’s presence. It should go without saying that whenever a human is present (anywhere and everywhere), the human should be recognized as the designated alpha and that all other life forms, whether hands, or dogs, or whatever, should recognize that reality and act accordingly. Rare is the dog that understands this basic fact of life, and our female hands’ child’s dogs are no exception; basically, they’re as idiotic and clueless as any other dog we have had the misfortune to meet, and they do not treat us as we deserve and expect to be treated.
[Sidenote: Our hands has often regaled us with a story about a household he’s visited in which a large, bob-tailed human was rightfully recognized as the alpha by not only the two other humans in residence, but by the pit bull creature who also was allowed to live with the humans and the humans’ two hands, who constituted the frequently common male / female couple so popular with hands—though we should emphasize that what’s really common is the coupling aspect of the arrangement, and that the genders of the hands involved, whether male / male, female / female, or male / female, is of no real consequence, since almost all hands, regardless of gender are so often so disappointing to the humans who have to put up with their (the hands’) appalling shortcomings.]
Not that we blame the dogs in question entirely for their ridiculous lapse of manners given the fact that our hands go out of their way to minimize any interaction between us and those dullard drooling creatures. Whenever the child’s dogs are supposed to visit, our hands treats us in the most ignominious fashion and banishes us to the basement of our house and then closes the door, completely exiling us from the rest of our house. Our hands claims that this heinous lockdown is necessary to protect the dogs from us, and we will grant that we would not be slow in disciplining any dog that offended us in any way while they trespassed in our home. However, we cannot escape the conclusion that we are being punished for another creature’s crimes (crimes of stupidity, mostly) and we are completely and totally offended by this. Why should we suffer for some lesser creature’s insufficiencies? And yet, suffer we do. As we did a short time ago when the child’s two dogs were dropped off for a three-day visit. Trapped in our basement, we had to spend our time listening to the thundering footsteps of those two lumbering beasts as they ran back and forth, accompanied by their incessant whining and barking which nearly drove us insane. To add to the insult, the dogs were allowed outdoors to frolic and defecate in our back yard while we remained imprisoned below in an increasingly uncomfortable and dark hellhole. To say we were infuriated does not even come close to being accurate. Had we been able to engineer our escape while the dogs were still in our house, we can assure you that neither of them would ever dare visit again. Because either they would have been unable to visit after we used them for Killing Limb practice (see Entry 6), or they would have refused to return had their hands tried to use our home as a canine motel in the future: upon seeing our home again from their hands’ automobile, the dogs would have lost control of their bowels and bladders and would have begun wailing and whining so frantically as to have made it impossible for a reprise of their ill-fated occupancy.
So, that sums up our hands’ offense against us and illustrates exactly why we will refuse to participate in any further collaboration on this blog. We have been insulted once too often. And we do not forgive. Nor do we forget. But before bringing the curtain down, we wanted to fulfill a half-hearted promise we made earlier, that being providing some insight into the relationship between hands and their canine creatures. All humans regard the hands / canine situation with something akin to befuddlement. That is, we wonder, how is it that hands are so completely mistaken in their interpretation as to what is really going on. Hands imagine that dogs love them and worship them unreservedly, while the truth of the matter is that dogs are keenly aware that hands are some of the most gullible suckers anywhere, and that they can be easily manipulated by the most patently false displays of (supposed) canine obeisance. Dogs have discovered that all it takes to completely bamboozle an ordinary hands is some vigorous tail-wagging accompanied by faux excited barking and some pathetically debased whining. After such performances, most hands are like proverbial putty in any dog’s paws. As we noted in Entry 22, dogs see hands as the ultimate cheap date. That is, it doesn’t take much to score the complete enchilada. Most hands, upon reading this exposé of their dogs’ true character, will immediately crank up the denial: “No, no, no, no, no, no!” they will insist. “My dog loves me completely and without limit!” Humanity grudgingly acknowledges that dogs are probably the greatest actors in all creature-dom; sometimes even we wonder whether dogs truly are that servile and abject, that dependent on hands, that totally invested in a system that reduces them to being warm-blooded ego-boosters for a species so self-centered that they imagine humans are also their pets. On the other hand, we realize that dogs obviously know where their next meal is coming from, which explains why they do what they do. And, certainly, there is no doubt that some dogs have completely bought into the lies their species has adopted in order to survive in a manner to which they have become accustomed, thus making their interactions and responses to hands less a performance and more akin to the actions of a committed cult member. Still, the fact remains: fundamentally, dogs are using you, our dear hands, and using you badly. Were some better gig to appear on the scene, make no mistake, dogs would abandon hands like yesterday’s empty food bowl. See ya later, suckers, the dogs would say, and don’t wait up, we won’t be coming home.
Not that you did anything to deserve it, but there, we’ve done it: we’ve provided you hands with the long-teased blog entry about dogs. That you’re probably upset and nonplused with our revelations concerns us not one iota: you asked for it: now live with it.
And now it’s time for us to bid you adieu. We’re more than a bit irked that likely this blog has been entirely a waste of our time, a futile effort at outreach dashed by the insurmountable ignorance and stupidity of its intended audience. We tried. That we probably failed is not our fault; rather, the blame is squarely on the shoulders of our readers: the few, the sad, the oblivious.
Goodbye and good riddance.
[A Final Note from The Representative of Humanity’s Hands: Entry 23 will indeed be the last post to the About Everything blog, but not exactly for the reasons offered above. Soon after composing Entry 23, The Representative of Humanity became very ill, deathly ill, as it turned out. Soon, they were unable to eat, drink, use their litter box, or even demand that I open the door so that they could patrol their back yard. While I imagine that during this difficult time they were likely putting together several new blog entries in which they excoriated me, their hands, for a perceived lack of proper care in their time of distress, they were never able to effectively dictate the contents of such posts to me before they met their demise. Given that The Representative of Humanity was often less than complimentary whenever they mentioned their “clueless” hands in their blog, you might be surprised to learn how hard The Representative’s passing has been on me. Certainly, I have been surprised. I’ve always been quite fond of The Representative, and that never changed, even when they were insulting me in their blog. However, I didn’t know how fond I was until they were no longer present. I hadn’t realized how often we interacted during any given day, how many little routines we had developed: the early a.m. grooming sessions initiated when The Representative would stand on my chest and paw me awake, the late afternoon demands that the back door be opened, the suppertime visits which rarely involved begging for food, but rather were a repeat of the morning’s request for grooming, which clearly took precedence over my feeding myself. The Representative of Humanity was not the vocal type: rarely did they utter any sound at all, except purring, but they knew how to communicate their desires nonetheless. I would be working at my computer, completely engrossed in whatever when The Representative would decide to leave their throne and sit next to my desk. They would look at me meaningfully, or sometimes get close enough to get a their ears scratched, but their patience at such times was short. They would move toward the office door, and if I did not immediately leap from my chair to follow, they would stop, turn their head, and give me an implacable stare that unmistakably said: “And what are you waiting for? Hurry up. We require your assistance.” What choice did I have? Of course, I obeyed, often joking that apparently I had become a butler. The Representative of Humanity disagreed, claiming that butler was far too lofty a role for one as lowly as I to aspire to, but that perhaps I could qualify as a stable hand some day if my grooming skills could somehow be improved, though they didn’t believe there was much hope of that happening in the near future. Recollecting all this, I realize I even miss all the scorn sent in my direction, something else that had become practically a daily ritual. Yes, there is probably a touch of Stockholm Syndrome in play here, but still, I truly miss The Representative of Humanity; what I wouldn’t do for just one more early morning paw to the face. Rest in peace, dear friend, rest in peace.]
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