Dogs of Orninica (2 page)

Despite the fairy tales drilled into our skulls by sleepy schoolteachers and feel-good fantasy movies, the humans were not omnipotent. I can't tell you why they left this world, but I can tell you we're certainly better off for it.

The constant warring between our two major religious orders; The Holy Temple of Bahman and The Modern Church of Soupman, is testament to the fact that we'll never decide why the humans left. But constantly attempting to adopt their strange cultural practices in some kind of sick quest for godliness is only bringing us further and further from our inherent freedom-loving canine spirit, and closer to unimaginable devastation.

The humans might have played some small part in our eventual evolving of greater intelligence, but there's no evidence that they did this deliberately. They could never have foreseen that stuffing their slave-dogs full of genetically modified cornmeal and soy, sprinkled with irradiated wheat germ (and boiled carrots) would have a lasting effect on our evolutionary biology.

The humans own meals were so far removed from the natural diet enjoyed by their gorilla cousins that they had the same dependence as we do on 210kmph toilet flushes to carry their doo and the cocktail of poisons they poured over it to the nearest major water body. So to suggest that they were somehow consciously developing us to inherit 'their' planet is simply ridiculous. Their civilization was just as devoid of reason as our own. They departed earth with no expectation that primitive canines would ever rid themselves of their leashes. They stripped the planet of its resources and left us to starve.

It's always been my theory that we developed into Canidae erectus because nature saw a void and filled it. We didn't learn to walk on two feet as some beggary parlor trick to entertain our masters as mythologized in one of the holy books; we learned to walk upright because our very survival depended on it.

After being enslaved by the humans for far too long, we had entirely suppressed our instinctual hunting skills. Yes, hunt, kill, slaughter, butcher. Any logical mind can look in the mirror at the long sharp teeth before him and plainly see that we are strictly carnivorous! But, no. We continue to eat an unnatural chemical-laden corn-based diet, and when faced with the deadly cancers ravaging our population, we pretend disease is some great enigma.

Alas, rather than relearn how to hunt for our sustenance as would have been logical, our forefathers set off a chain of human emulation that we're still too superstitious to break two-thousand plus years later. Once it was obvious the humans weren't coming back to fill their bowls, dog-kind embarked on the agrarian cabal that has kept us firmly clenched under the boots of petty tyrants and the irrational devout ever since.

I'll admit, the agricultural revolution wasn't so bad at first, it might not have been natural or entirely logical, but our great grandparents lives were relatively fulfilled. But then, with every new generation, our governments got bigger, and the wealthy bankers and industrialists got wealthier, while the rest of us have been pushed closer and closer to the gutters of civilization.

In olden times, you came out of the womb, and your parents taught you the ways of the world. They taught you what plants to eat and what plants to avoid, they showed you how to assemble the tools you'd need to get along. Times changed, city-life took hold, and dogs moved further and further away from their roots in the land.

My grandparents were born to the mountains as farmers, inheriting land to live off of from their parents, who inherited it before them. You entered adulthood with everything you needed to prosper; land, water, knowledge, shelter. That was all you could ask for and all you could need to live out your years blissfully.

When my grandparents passed and my father inherited the land, he drove from the city up through the bumpy mountain tracks to inspect it for the first time in decades, declared it to be an overgrown mess in the middle of nowhere, and sold it to a golf course developer. The money lasted a few years, and then it was gone.

Hundreds of years of history and culture sharply severed and replaced with something else. The dreams of the serious dogs in their tight suits and ties sitting at their big heavy desks in tall concrete towers, passing down all-important orders to the quivering underlings below. The cult of profit. The future of my generation and all that follow, sold away in exchange for some fluctuating numbers on a computer screen and an air of smug self-importance.

When our fathers sold away our heritage to open their long gone bars and shoe stores, our ancient way of life living off the land, with the land, was replaced with something new. The grand capitalist dream of hard office-work signing heavy stacks of papers and moving numbers around, rewarded by ever-mounting debt to fuel the endless accumulation of things to fill their concrete castles. Finally we were approximating the culture of the all-knowing humans. Dog was closer than ever to his so-reverenced master.

And then things began to fall apart.

First the fragile ecosystems that sustained us began to crumble as these serious dogs bought up the land and covered it over with concrete and tar. The simple peasants that failed to make the move to the cities were now being told by their sophisticated brothers to pour yet more sterilizing chemicals onto their fields to reach higher yields. There's no profit in the old ways, they said.

So, trusting their brothers, the farmers took out bank loans to buy these much hyped chemical concoctions. They poured these poisons onto the land that was left, and suddenly they and their children's children were tied to the tit of the corporate master. The land quickly lost its vitality, and more and more poisons were carted in and poured over the nation's food to keep the harvest coming, and the debt collector at bay.

Slowly, the old ways began to fade from memory as everyone struggled to keep their debt in line. More and more middlemen entered the fray as the last remaining small-holder farmers gradually gave in to the urge (or the court order) to sell to the persuasive developers and corporate agribusiness groups.

These unsustainable farming practices were just the start. Soon even the almighty economy, to which we all kneel and pray, would also come crashing down under the weight of its mounting pressure. The debt grew so fast that our fathers were now putting off paying it back until a few generations after their lifetimes. They continued to give away the future in exchange for the fleeting life of a king in his castle with his things.

"And what of the future?" we pried.

"That's God's domain", they answered, before shooing you away so they could attend to more important matters.

I watched these events unfold in my childhood and I gradually went through the 5 stages of grief for all that was lost. Then one day, probably while watching a willowy tree swaying in the wind or something equally trite, I came to a conscious decision.

I wouldn't follow in my father's footsteps, wasting my life away chasing an unattainable checklist of so-called important things. Luxury, affluence, esteem, financial security; these are all selfish and misleading concepts. The very antithesis of life. They ignore the very self-evident truth that life is extremely temporary. Everyone in this man-forsaken country seems to live life as if immortality is a long-accepted concept, and death is just some song and dance concocted in storybooks to scare our children with. It seems we're adamant on accumulating enough wealth, shiny possessions and important-sounding titles for a time long past our inevitable expiration.

Instead, I've led a simple life, consuming only the bare essentials needed to survive, and saving only enough to make it through the next winter. I work part time from home, for a few trusted clients, making just enough to stay off the tax-man's radar and out of debt. I grow my own food on my own land and built my own humble little home on a shoestring budget, far away from civilization with it's unending list of strangling building codes and zoning regulations.

I wish self-important hypocrite celebrity activists like Harvey Fidelbrook would leave the comfort of their towering mansions and crystal yachts for long enough to experience real life. This fool is actually deluded enough to declare he's changing the world with his manipulative melodramatic movies that cost a hundred million oonos of utter waste to produce. Fidelbrook is nothing but a brainless corporate puppet, programmed to emote when the scene calls for it, and even then, his inflated ego roadblocks any acting ability he may have once had. He could have a roaring career as a two-faced politician if he weren't so deluded in his certainty that acting is somehow important work.

I understand that dogs like Fidelbrook have never had to work for a living, let-alone be forced to choose between paying the rent or eating. I know it's a lot to expect such sheltered dogs to be responsible for their careless words when they've never been burdened by any kind of responsibility in their privileged lives. But I just wish he'd know when to shut the fuck up. His careless comments, demanding the poor work harder, couldn't have been more ignorant, and I'm truly embarrassed that by some sick cosmic irony, this blow-hard St. Bernard is considered to be our most respected and celebrated public figure.

In the much-maligned Nureongi utopia of the far East, our distant relations run free, their tails as intact as their dignity. There, a dog's life is simple. He goes out into the forest and comes back with the day's hunt. The food is piled in the village square, and everyone eats. Everyone has a place, no dog left to starve and freeze on the cold streets every winter as in our sacred Orninica. If I had been born a Nureongi, I would be proud.

When the freakish logger-bots reach the shores of Nureongi, I just hope they fight back. If anyone still has fight left in them, if anyone still has something worth defending, it's certainly the Nureongi. I hope they tear those bots apart before their lush, fertile lands are stripped bare, and the last free dogs on the earth are enslaved forever.

If self-proclaimed activist Harvey Fidelbrook actually had a morsel of compassion in him, he would be wholly concerned with the plight of the Nureongi, in their most vulnerable hour. He would protest their subjugation with intense zest, and rally his whole fan-base to take to the streets in their support. But Harvey is no defender of the powerless. His only concern is the pampering of his colossal ego. No, to expect any real action from an air-headed role player like Mr. Fidelbrook would be too much. There's no little golden statue given out for speaking the truth.

So continue, Fidelbrook, to recite your carefully written lines, prepared for you by your room of groveling writers, and stop pretending that you're some kind of majestic crusader for peace. It's plainly obvious to anyone that you don't even get out of bed for a penny less than your outrageous asking price.

I'm probably being too hard on old Harvey. When it comes down to it, he's really a symptom rather than the disease. He might be better at playing the game than most, but he's a still just another lowly slave begging for table scraps from the dogs with the real power.

But I suppose the power-elite that run the world are really only as powerful as any common schoolyard bully demanding a little pup hand over his lunch money or face the consequences. I wonder though, what if that little pup, puffing on his asthma inhaler, eyes darting around, hoping to find solace in his amused classmates, what if he took the lunch money, held it up in front of the bully's grinning face, lit a lighter and burned it. I wonder if the consequences would really be worse than giving in to his tormentor's demands.

The plain truth of the matter is that we are nothing. Our knowledge is minuscule, our understanding of even the most basic and fundamental concepts is completely and utterly broken. Yet we presume to be all knowing sages raining our great wisdoms down on the rest of the citizenry.

We did not come to exist in this strange reality because we have to meet some kind of higher purpose. There’s no magical goal we must strive towards to finally reach our rightful place in the world. We aren’t here to find meaning, to reach prestigious milestones or to achieve a long list of successful ventures. We exist simply to exist. And that should be enough for any sentient creature anywhere in the universe.

For a long while, all of those things I listed were good fun and games, pleasant distractions we used to pass the time on rainy days. But somewhere along the line, we began to lose sight of reality; we started to see the silly distractions as more firm and solid than our actuality. This bewildering world we’ve been born to is truly a grand spectacle of fleeting enchantment, yet we stubbornly hurry through this unique gift of a life, brushing off its vast wonders, and focus all our efforts on attaining some kind of vague opalescence in some other, better place. Whether that place be in this life or in some other life we imagine might follow this one, I can't tell.

Why can't this be the better place we seek? Whichever place you're currently occupying while reading this silly little rant of mine. If you stopped working so hurriedly to leave it behind in favor of a building with a doorman, or a neighborhood with a park, if you didn't spend every waking moment trying to move up in the world, and instead just opened your eyes to whatever random space you currently find yourself inhabiting, if you focused on its unique beauty. You could enhance this beauty. You could plant seeds and sit back and watch while they sprout and bloom and cover whatever unsightliness it is that keeps you from getting off that bullet train to the top until it's too late and nothingness is the only stop left.

We keep doing odd things that make very little sense, just because our parents kept doing these same odd things. We never stop to question why we're continuing these strange rituals, they just seem necessary to us somehow. A few of these things are trivial and easily overlooked, but so many of them are destructive on a global scale. We're aware of this, and yet we continue the ritual.