I don’t like my beer with a melon-flavored after taste. I should have driven past the turn-in to my tract, straight down a half mile to my usual watering hole and gotten a right-hoppy Stone IPA with an order of stinky fries and be done with it. Instead, I made that left turn, thinking I’d just go home and enjoy a cold one at home.
But the fridge had one whole beer left, a craft something or other with a fancy label and cursive writing, all in browns and mint greens. Lovely can, but the melon after -taste…meh.
New adventures. Plenty on the horizon what with a new business and an upcoming steady writing gig that actually sorta kinda pays decent money. Not that my pay is anyone’s fault but my own. I’m learning and growing in the trade while collecting some coin on the way. It’s a journey I’m strolling through.
And the dog? The Husky pup? Well, I thought after the 20th time of her escaping and the 20th hole she dug in my tomatoes (leaving the half-chewed Romas to rot in the dirt as a testimony to her dominance and betrayal) good riddance. I’m not playing go fetch her ass from the neighbor’s yard or the playground around the corner anymore.
But here it is, not even a day that she’s been gone at the vet’s for her, you know, obligatory non-contribution to the population of unwanted animals, and…I miss her. She’s my constant companion at my feet as I write or in and out of my door when I’m trying to clean or biting my hair and mat when I try to do yoga.
She’s a presence, a dufus in the doorway, a gazelle chasing the crows down the field past the monkey bars, and a dragger of filthy, smelly, ripped-up tennis shoes into my bed. She’s got me.
In the gaze of the other 