The Dogs Love Ice Cream and They Love You Too

It's a Lucy and Slippy day today because we were wondering if you would please go to the store now and get us some of the cheese and fried chicken and broccoli for us to be eating all covered in butter it's been so many times now we've seen you eating at the table and we want some too this is Slippy listen to me I have important things to say! Like ice cream ice cream ice cream ice cream ice cream please!

And me, Lucy, I have something to say as well.

I'm in the middle of reading The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken, and unfortunately I don't love it. I mean, I don't dislike it; I don't love it. But this quote I'm about to give you, it sums up a feeling I want to discuss.

McCracken writes: "Despite popular theories, I believe people fall in love based not on looks or fate but on knowledge. Either they are amazed by something a beloved knows that they themselves do not know; or they discover common rare knowledge; or they can supply knowledge to someone who's lacking" (10).

Before I comment on this quote can I just tell you something? The spell-check on Blogger wants to correct McCracken's name to gimcrackery. Before today I knew not of this word. How strange and wonderful - my life is studded, it seems to me, with gimcrackery.

Anyway. The quote!

Nope nope nope Miss Lucy Scarecrow you're too far off topic so it's me Slippy Mr. Pawsely to the rescue here to tell you some more things of which I know a lot about like love is a thing I know too and although McCracken might have an interesting idea and maybe you'll tell us more than verbal gimcrackery (I can learn words too!) but I know love and I know how to say what it is.

Love is you Lucy and your brown eyes and us together eating meat and dog snacks that pop and fizz in our mouths from fermenting which makes things all the more delicious like the bread we found on the street and the biscuits out behind the grocery store which we ate with such relish and look love is this dining room table full of food and you and me Scarecrow sitting down to eat together with dogs' napkins and dogs' silverware and nothing to fear because no one will come up ever to us with a rolled newspaper and no one will ever yank us on our leashes away and no one will ever again my Lucy cage you in a puppy mill because you are the sweetest most decent and kind doggy of psycho dogs I've known in my whole life.

Slippy. I asked you never to bring up my past. That life. It's far behind me now. It's a greyish blur that sometimes colors my nightmares, but that's it.

Let me get back to the quote. McCracken's ideas of love. I think she has an interesting thought here, but also that she neglects something of biology. For me anyway, love is molecular. You, Mr. Pawsley, and I mean no offense by this, wouldn't have been my first choice as a friend, as a companion. I might have, had we merely met online, dismissed you as a dullard. But here, with you, the heat from your skin and the static electricity zinging from your heart forcibly pull me toward you. You are, my dear, magnetic.

And I don't pretend to believe you love me for the things I say more eloquently, or my IQ level (although, yes, it's true, you have [several!] degrees and I have none - perhaps I'm street smart? Who, dear Slipper, gave you that PhD anyway? Who?!); you love me, simply, because you love me. We are entangled. Entwined.

And yes, of course, I want  ice cream ice cream ice cream ice cream ice cream too and dog treats and tuna and peanut butter and marshmallows and tacos, and perhaps this appreciation we have could be defined as a "common rare knowledge," but I rather doubt it. We just love each other.

Reader? I implore you. If you have any love for us as we have for you, give us all-every of your cheeses.  Now. I swear to you the prison guard hasn't been feeding us. Ever. She's never once fed us food. Hurry. Our time is running out.

We'll die without ice cream (but at least we die together).