Being the continuation of InstaPunk and InstaPunk Rules
Eloise Photogravure
Get link
Facebook
X
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps
A book I was going to write in her honor. Never got
around to it. Worst words in the world for a writer.
But I did write this not too long ago…
Eloise Adamantium
We have this pug named Eloise, whom we rescued from the side of a county road in Salem County, NJ. She was standing in front of a guardrail and looking runnerish. So we stopped and tried to approach, reassuring as we asked her to stay still. With typical pug cooperation she lit out across the road away from us and into the path of a large SUV. Correction. She ran headfirst into the front wheel and tire of the SUV, which knocked her several yards across the asphalt. (Didn’t check the hubcap for a dent but probably should have.) When we got to her, me cursing the blameless driver all the while, she was shaking herself and getting ready for another escape attempt. Caught her. She had some cuts but she was doing what we would come to know as a pug squirm. There followed half an afternoon of seeking out a vet open on the weekend and when we did they took her in, stitched her up and told us to come back later. We explained she wasn’t our dog. “Good looking pug,” they said. “Maybe three years old. Somebody is probably looking for her. We’ll spread the word to the pounds and let you know if somebody claims her.”
Nobody did claim her. Well, at the end of the required waiting period we did claim her, paid her hospital bill, and took her home to a house already filled with two rescue greyhounds and assorted rescue cats. Neither one of us knew from pugs. Not sighthounds obviously. Not shepherds or setters. Not terriers. Something completely different. We discovered what amounted to a pug cult on YouTube, people who had pugs and nothing but pugs, who seemed to rule the roost, the refrigerator, and their enraptured owners. Okay, we said. Live and learn.
That was 15 years ago. She’s 18 now. Working on surviving our tenth canine rescue — seven greyhounds and three terriers, all of them agèd or at least aging. She is not a typical pug in two ways. First, she has never once been top dog. She has had to learn to put up with the size and majesty of greyhounds and Scottish Deerhounds. As well as the automatic dominion of Scotties and cairns. Second, she is not fat. (Even the Westminster pugs are fat — disgraceful.) What she is is indomitable, jealous as hell, eternally hungry, and seemingly invincible. Come dinner time, she gets so excited she often head-butts our cairn, who is impervious but offended, because he’s crazed to get dinner too. (When you have old dogs, this is always a good sign. It’s when they stop demanding dinner the way a bank robber demands cash in his shopping bag that you start worrying.) She spends her days like a greyhound, snoozing on the couch, sleeping maybe 14 hours in every 24. Twice a day she jumps fearlessly to the floor, often on her ass, to charge downstairs for breakfast and dinner. When it’s time for other outings, she is almost unable to move, has to be pulled, pushed, lifted, and eased to the floor, where she staggers stiff-legged to the stairs. There are times when she loses her footing on the stairs (no, you can’t help her) and she tumbles a few steps, kind of like a small bouncing medicine ball, arriving at the end just fine.
Here’s the thing. She weighs maybe 20 lbs according to the scale. Our 8-yo cairn Sidney weighs more than 30 lbs (and then some… he likes eating too). Eloise is a lot harder to pick up. She seems to have more specific gravity somehow, like the equivalent of a dog-shaped bowling ball. When she returns after an outing she announces her return to the couch with a pug bark, then — after being hoisted HEAVILY up — a pug hip or body check that can take the wind out of you, and a face washing procedure indistinguishable from a repeated series of head-butts on your knee. Worse, when you are trying to move her off the couch, it’s almost impossible to do. Like she’s magnetized to the cushions.
So I have done some research. Saw all the Wolverine movies. Why did no one claim Eloise, the handsome pug pup? Why did they leave her on the side of a road where her chances of mortality were, well, significant AND deniable? Thinking somebody has been genetically altering pugs, creating a new breed we could call Pugverines.
The only explanation that makes any sense,
We have one. She may never die.
**********
Just sharing. You know. The way we do on Facebook. Eloise is as “Meta” as they come. Have I qualified for the New Age Tech that will save all the billionaires? Sure I have.
We grew old together. Eloise, me, and Pat. Both spry when we met. Both crippled at the end.
Here’s the thing. I have always made my predictions a point of pride for their accuracy. This time I failed. Eloise died this morning at age 19 going on 20. I was wrong. She was human after all.
Time, I suppose, to back all the way up, and see why I made the prediction I did.
The vet said she was about three when we got her after that collision with an SUV, about a month after our wedding. She wasn’t really a fit for us in the grand scheme of things. At the time we had greyhounds, which are the exact opposite of wriggling, eager, demanding, hip-checking, head-butting pugs. Greyhounds love you but maybe not quite as much as the couch and the Heaven of racing no more, because just resting is so, well, restful. Greyhounds are beautiful, even with their ear tattoos and racetrack scars. Pugs are, well, you know, pugs.
We’d seen a TV show once about pugs and their fanatically devoted owners, who seemed to be happily bullied by them, content to let these (not so) little canine martinets run and sometimes even ruin their lives. Was this going to work? Guess it had to. God’s plan and all that. First, though, we had to name her. Took our cue from the only literary source that seemed to apply. Kay Parker’s Eloise.
The one on the left, not the right. She was never a Weenie.
The book begins, “I am Eloise. I am six. I live at the Plaza.” Followed by lots of mischief, skittering up and down halls, between floors, tormenting the Nanny and the Tutor. Were we prepared for such a persona with our racetrack veterans?
I forgot. We also had a Scottish deerhound. Name of Psmith. He was a bit like the P.G. Wodehouse character named Lord Emsworth. Peer of the realm type stuff. He raised his eyebrows at Eloise. Sniffed her a bit, then lay down for a nap. He was four times bigger than she was.
The Empress of Blandings? I kid. Both deerhounds loved Eloise.
He proved to be a calming influence, as were the greys.
Here’s how Eloise might have put it if I’d ever gotten around to writing her book:
“When you’re surrounded by sighthounds, you’re not going to get much more than occasional attention. Dealing with this is not covered in the Pug Handbook, although all-around adaptability is. Pugs are honest. That’s number one on a fairly long list of what you have to adapt to. They’re bigger than you, faster than you, and God knows, better looking, at least in conventional terms. You become content with being background for long periods of time. The fancy people dazzling up and down the Plaza’s corridors and under the crystal blaze of the chandeliers of romance are shadows that you learn are destined to come and go like movie stars, while you keep skittering and mischief-making when you feel like it. So I lived through seven greyhounds, two deerhounds, and three terriers from the barbaric land of Scotland. Survived them all. Loved them all in my own taciturn way. They never undignified me. To my recollection, only the biggest deerhound, Raebert (who was as close to God* as I’ve ever been), ever made space for me on the couch or his bed on the floor.
*Except for Psmith. Who was God without the anything that makes pugs feel small.
And I even consented to posing with Raebert for photos with sunglasses, but they never dressed me up in sissy-girl outfits. They saw the latent clown that exists in all pugs, and I was happy to have fun with them. What I had that the other dogs I lived with didn’t have was near-human patience and longevity. In the end, at the end, they —the humans— will love you for having been with them through such heights and depths of drama, death, beauty, and even poetry. When you know they do finally love you for sure, for your loyalty and quiet love, you can go to your own reward, pug mission accomplished.”
**********
She really was going on 20 when she went to her reward. Not much video, not enough surely, but this is a taste…
So this morning she’d had three bad days in a row. She’d been through the same losses in recent months as we had been. Max the cat, Elliott the cat (a great friend of hers), and Sidney, the indomitable cairn, who died in my lap just like Cassie the cat before him, while Eloise watched. She knew I wasn’t walking much better than she was. There for all the deaths, including Elliott a month before, whose muted dying wails I knew she’d heard before and I heard from her last night.
He’s not torturing. He’s squeezing, telling them to let go.
After Sidney, I guess we betrayed her. Unless we didn’t. We got two much younger small dogs. Mere seven-year-olds.
And a new throw of the dice — Zippy the Papillon….
We weren’t trying to replace Eloise. But maybe she thought so. And maybe she knew they were younger than Scotties and Cairns on their last legs she would have to console us for.
At any rate, as they were ripping and tearing, she began finally to leave us, maybe knowing she’d be seeing us again before too much more time passed. Don’t know, can’t say, although she heard me say on that last night just how much we’d always loved her, throughout those many years of devotion, a canine witness to all our loves and losses among dogs and cats. A few pics to conclude…
Always ready, always there.
Friends. Even with effing terriers.
Not a lie. They all loved one another.
Yeah, it’s always like this. The imperative of tenderness.
Probably already throwing hip checks and head butts in the new place..
This post was last updated at 1:18 PM, Monday, July 7. Latest entries are “Responding to a Post by Michael Smith,” “Sometimes They Drag Me Back in,” and “An AI video Hoax to be wary of.” The Instapunk Times is hot off the presses... NEW: Undernet Black was updated recently. This will be a pinned post in perpetuity, but it will be updated continuously, just like all of our lives. The title — “My World and Welcome to It” — is stolen happily from James Thurber, who is known as a humorist, unabashedly untrained cartoonist, and dog lover. He was also subject to melancholy, a drinker of note, and something of an outsider (in his own damaged eyes at least) as an Ohioan, born and educated, who became a fixture in the glamorous Algonquin Roundtable of Manhattan writers and playwrights. I can relate to all of that but the fame and the lifelong journey to blindness. I believe he was likely the best writer of the gang that gathered in the Algonquin Hotel in the 1930s...
Il Douche as the lefties like to call him On the first day of Summer, 2025, it’s time to take stock on what is and is not going on in these United States of America. The desperate remnant of what used to be the official Democrat Party is still trying to depict Donald Trump as an anti-Democratic authoritarian fully engaged in the process of destroying our Constitutional protections against a single executive ruling by decree and the tactics of terror. We’re five months in now to the second term of this president, and it’s appropriate to demonstrate what could have happened in that time and did not. The pic up top is of Mussolini only because there’s a superficial physical resemblance between Il Duce and The Donald . The more accurate comparison for our purposes is with the favorite avatar of the left, Adolf Hitler and His Nazi Party. People with Internet access, even Democrats, can confirm to themselves that Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933 by means of an electoral ...
There’s a serious article in the works on the current state of AI technology, but this post is mostly a fun way of showing how a sheaf of new apps are playing with its capabilities. It’s probably closer to Whwt most people imagine AI to be than the experts who are alternately promoting and fearing its life-changing potential. Not a bad way to prepare the soil for the planting of some new ideas later on. Saw the article posted above and was immediately reminded of a cartoon app I had used on the Fovernor of California about a year ago. I was happy enough with the result because it did resemble the Governor, but that didn’t stop me from using his name to open the post and make sure readers would recognize him on the steps of the Capitol. I made a number of cartoons for future reference, some of which I subsequently used when a given subject’s behavior was cartoonish enough. Why I have something like 65,000 image files It’s called exploring the technology. I do it all the time. I use what...
Click the graphic to go right to The Glossary I know there are those out there in the Facebook Universe who do come to look at the longer thought pieces I generally reserve for IPR and other of my websites. The traffic here, by the way, is not chiefly driven by Facebook, which accounts for only 17 percent of the IPR audience. This post, though, is primarily for you FB friends who may want to see one of the taproots of views I regularly express about the UniParty, the decline of the rule of law, the nexus of media and left-leaning government institutions, the assault on Judeo-Christian principles, the abortion debate, and the ongoing war between and among victim classes in the United States of 2023. Now that may sound like a dose of medicine, but it isn’t. The Glossary at Shuteye Nation was a satirical work of a little more than 10,000 words, presented dictionary-style, words and terms in alphabetical order with their definitions. It was written in the year 2000. With the possible excep...
Magnetized Obsidian? Back when early attempts to destroy the Trump bid for the Presidency had already failed, media pundit Don Surber coined a new term to describe what he was starting to notice. He called it Trumpenfreude , an odd phenomenon in which the most rabid Trump haters fell victim to various misfortunes in their own careers. He thought it might be a coming trend. For many months he checked in with new instances of such mishaps. Some Hollywood star who dissed Trump in public had a big movie flop. A congressman who repeatedly ranted about Trump lies got caught up in a hometown scandal involving fraud and, um, lots of lies. A sexy singer who sneered at Trump’s conduct with women had a sex scandal of her own. The various Trumpenfreude outcomes were too dissimilar to one another to be the work of some set of Nixonian White House ‘plumbers.’ They just kind of happened. People screwed up. People failed at some ambitious attention-getting stunt. They got sick. They got humiliate...
What’s all the fuss about? Israel is only twice the size of LA. Not worth even half the attention, right? This may look complicated, and in the mechanics and timelines and geopolitics of it all it is, but underneath all the noise it really is simple this time. Iran is committed to the destruction, the utter annihilation, of Israel. They will never change their policy about this. Iran wants a bomb. No amount of wheedling, negotiating, or compromise will end this obsessive hunger. Israel wants to take care of them alone. Why? Apart from Trump in the White House, there is no one they can trust. The opposition party and even a big chunk of the Republican Party are willing to sell out Israel with intelligence leaks, stall tactics, and and everything conceivable to make Middle East conflict profitable for their purses and careers. Netanyahu, battling appeasing insurrectionists of his own, has decided this is his best and perhaps only opportunity to cut off the head of the snake. None o...
A key video that won’t load after a brief title flash in the time capsules below Yes, the President is standing on a knife edge that stretched all the way from California to Iran and beyond. I’m keeping an eye on it, as I’m sure many of you are too. But unlike the pundits and other seers of the mass media, we the people who live in the real world know that there’s not much we can do to affect what will happen in the hours and weeks ahead. We’ve already done what we had to do, which is elect the best available candidate for the job of making the tough decisions about how best to proceed in our interests. Beyond that, our responsibility is primarily to remain calm and do the work we’re best suited to doing. In my case that means writing stuff I think it worthwhile to write about as honestly as possible. That accounts for most of my time, but being as old and uniquely situated as I am, there’s also a continual overhead I have to pay in the form of what I call Reclamation ; that is, ...
By my watch it’s the third day. How to explain what Trump has been up to in the Mideast? He’s been doing what he always does. Working for the deal he wants after all the rhetoric and bluster and the moves and countermoves are done. What did he want? The safety of Israel, which is our only agent of Democracy in the Middle East. An end to the killing as soon and for as long as possible. And most of all, he wanted Americans to be as safe as possible from the deliberate and collateral damage inflicted by crazy people in the greater Islamic world. What were the obstacles he had to overcome? 1) Irrational, incredibly violent emotions on both sides, by Israel and by Iran and the organizational instruments it has used for 45 years to attack, terrorize, and otherwise intimidate Israel and its few real allies in the western world. 2) A seriously degraded U.S. intelligence capability, lacking both the political will and the human on-the-ground resources to discover What the Hell was really g...
Some illiterate mug sent me this at my FB page this morning. I know it’s a fake, because there’s no way the ghost of Time magazine could survive a defamation suit like the one ABC just had to settle for many millions with Donald Trump. Still, it reminded me that the Missing-in-Action opinion editors of the biggest mass media outlets are addicted to soliciting Worst President rankings from deranged left-wing college professors who have written books about the left-wing despoiler of the Oval Office they most admire. (One of them had Biden ranked at 17th best two years into his catastrophic single term.) The only reason why such lists are popular with the media propagandists is the inevitable punchline that Trump and Nixon are first and second worst in some order. Which is nonsense. Generally, people with any education ignore the lists because they’re predictable, biased, sloppily argued and cited, and transparently a provocative political statement rather than a product of scholar...
He’s gone. This never happened. Don’t tell me I’m the only who’s noticed. That would mean I’m having a psychotic break, into a state called dissociation. But I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. What I’m referring to is bigger than a solitary breakdown because it takes in too much to be one man’s delusion, no matter how vast his imagination. What I’m talking about is an increasing sense of unreality in the everyday experience of an entire population. No, not just a sense, an atmosphere that involves all the senses. Nothing looks, sounds, smells, feels, tastes quite right, and even time is out of joint. There are still connections, some glue that binds pieces together but the connections are twisting, torquing, breaking and reattaching in new ways. There is movement through time, but even the ticks of the clock are changing speed and pitch, mocking us all individually and collectively, so the only thing we can be sure of is that reality itself is becoming the globs in a Sixties la...
Comments