What is a blog, without talking about your pet. I know many bloggers (that is, 'we the bloggers', the 21st century digarati pioneers who are defining and advancing the sum of all human knowledge by writing in our little girl diaries every few days)... I have to kick this habit - start a sentence, add some commentary in parenthesis (I've always hated that word), and soon just too many words have gone by. This leaves you drunkenly swimming up stream, unable to smoothly get back to your point of origin to spawn. Which reminds me of the key difference between drunks and potheads - a drunk is always struggling to get back to some original important point, yet unable to avoid further sidetracks. Dope, instead, turns the reality of drifting aimlessly into something that feels much more like accomplishment. Ok. Your pet. Actually, my pet, and just what is the deal with pets anyway (fyi, this sudden return to the pet subject is known as the salmon ladder technique in literary circles).

Have you ever read about the bird that gets free meals because it looks like baby birds from another species? This is known in nature as mimicry. Actually it is known in English as 'mimicry' - nature is not sentient, and birds barely are (we're talking glorified chickens here). The inside of this paticular bird's mouth is the same color as the mouths of baby birds from an unrelated species. So when no one is looking (except the biologists), it slips into the nest full of hatchlings. When mother bird comes with a worm, it opens wide, chirps, and more often than not gets the loot. Easy meal. Ok, one important lesson here, sometimes 'the full of shit bird gets the worm'. It gets worse - some will lay their similarly colored eggs in a nest to be hatched and raised, unknowingly, by others. That happens a lot in rural prairie towns as well, mostly to fathers, but not always. This also happens with humans and other species, although the image that probably just flashed through your mind is something else. This is pets.

Does this thing lead anywhere? Well, birds are stupid, but we know that. I think this more subtly means, that if there is a possible free meal in nature, something will find a way to eat it. Which brings us, finally, to pets. People have, hubba hubba, HUGE fucking brains, right? We study and laugh at the follies of these other species. However! Within this huge brain, is the ability to personify things. We see faces in car grills, happiness in plants, mother in nature - and we see children in pets. And pets know it. Dogs and cats have evolved just the right mannerisms that a humans 'giant brain' will extrapolate a few nervous impulses into a full blown person, usually their own flesh and blood in fact. This generally results in a large number of free meals for said pet. Cows, of course, do it the hard way; by turning their ass into delicious T-Bone steaks. Chickens have a symbiotic relationship with eleven herbs and spices that have helped them proliferate. There are no other animals on earth that raise the young of another species for the pleasure of it, but there are plenty that get tricked into the deal - which are we?

The loophole at work here is that humans depend on being able the imagine things they have never seen or heard of before - all our progress, and even the odd TV script must come from this at some point. It even is important for us to believe in things that we know make absolutely no sense - religion gives us a common identity where none exists for example. Outlandish myths can help us explain and predict things we don't actually understand. And before you laugh at religion and cavemen, do you believe that technology will make the future more peaceful? Are you just ignoring its miserable track record (and mostly military foundation)? Do you think democracy is a great way to choose leaders ? Yet you still may feel our democratically elected leaders are mostly pinheads with big egos. Maybe not, but if you are honest, there are hundreds of things you know to be wrong, but believe anyway. Believing them helps you more than it hurts you, so our brain has kindly shielded us from dwelling on the logic. It is mental mimicry - irrational ideas mimicking logical ones for mutual benefit. So are you being duped by your pet?

<next day> I've woken up and reread this, and I'm afraid it stands up to neither science nor the morning light. What was I thinking?? I've eaten dog food and it tastes like crap - evolutionary pressure would always push a species away from kill floor sweepage, not towards it. This chain of proof leads irrevocably to the fact that pets are in fact the minions in this deal, and our free will reigns supreme. In the latest fall fashions. Beer in hand. Things are what they seem.