The Creature

The creature approaches.

Within its mouth it carries a spit-drenched ball made of felt.

As you reach for its head, the creature bends away, its body language signaling an unwillingness to make eye-contact. It does not desire your hand, not while it is carrying the ball. (Frankly, even if it’s not carrying the ball you find it hard to tell whether the creature enjoys being touched, or is just neutral to it.)

You pull back.

Perhaps two minutes later the creature spits out the ball, putting it somewhere it believes to be accessible to you.

It is not accessible to you. It’s not even visible. Rather, it’s half-beneath the chair you are sitting on, and out of reach of your hand. The creature has a limited understanding of chairs. (This doesn’t surprise you. You know that the creature may fail to recognize you if you wear a hat. In a sense, wearing a hat makes you a type of chair, you think.)

The creature sits, the ball positioned on a straight line between you. It looks at you.

Two more minutes pass before it lets out a little whine. Then the tiniest of wruffs.

You take pity, shuffle forward, extend your arm, and pick up the ball.

You toss it in the general direction of the kitchen, from the conversation pit. The apartment isn’t exactly tiny (enough for a small family, the creature, and guests), but its size is hilariously spread out across four stories.

In other words, ball-space (=> pitch-speed) is limited.

This does not slow down the creature.

It’s been waiting for this moment. It’s been watching. The instant the ball leaves your hand, its paws start scrambling in place, and the sound of claws skidding and scratching on wood veneer fills the room. Scritscritscritscritch.

The creature accelerates towards the ball and then, like a Looney Tunes character stumbling onto ice, skids again in its futile effort to slow down, before finally chomping onto the ball with a surprisingly targeted movement.

The play repeats several times, before the ball finally ends up somewhere the creature cannot reach. The creature looks back and forth between you and where it suspects the ball is, letting out quiet whines at irregular intervals.

You pick up a second ball, play with it in your hands, then toss it, but to no avail. It must be that first ball, at least until it finally forgets about its existence.

The Creature is called Toast

Toast is what scientists would formally refer to as a Mexican street mongrel type dog creature mutt thing.

There is not much to say about Toast.

He gets easily excited, but then struggles to know what to do with his energy. Knock at the door? He will start barking, race towards the door (hardly a rare property for dogs), and then grab something (preferably a shoe or sock) and carry it with him as some sort of doggy stress-relief toy that he just has to have with him whenever someone new shows up.

He doesn’t want you to take it, he doesn’t drop it in front of you hoping you’ll pick it up, he’s just carrying the sock, whining excitedly into it while doing a little hyperstimulated tippy-tappy tapdance with his front doggy pawsies, or running up and down the stairs.

Sometimes, when given the opportunity, you can find him watching other dogs from the sidelines, unsure of how to get involved. Sometimes he likes the idea of play, gets a bit too into it, and then doesn’t know what to do when the dog he’s playing with pushes back.

Toast

This dog (like many others) has no dogs he regularly gets to play or even interact with.

The closest he gets to meeting other dogs is being walked a few times a day, and getting to see them on the other side of the road.

It makes me wonder how many of his oddities are downstream of a lack of socialization.

There is something to be said about getting all the toys, healthcare and food you need, but if it came at the tradeoff of having no one to talk to, you would probably be miserable.

Toast is helpless to do anything about his situation.

No, it’s more than that. He’s not even capable of understanding, let alone articulating what his situation is like. He can communicate acute discomfort, that’s about it.

Toast is a limited creature. He will never be more than what he is right now. He will not transcend his limits. He will never be the hero in a sappy story about a dog dragging a baby out of a burning building, or detecting a gas leak and alerting his owners.

This is all he is. He cannot understand the factors that determine when he gets fed, or whether his owners will move. He has no concept of societal changes or technological progress.

We live in a world in which we have access to more toys than ever, modern healthcare, an abundance of food options, and a pocket rectangle with magical functionality that obsoletes face-to-face communication¹.

Unlike Toast, we are capable of articulating what it is that diminishes us.

In this, I hope that we are more different than alike.