Flash friday 2-28-14 one dog year (though I swear I've done this one at least once already, like last month) in Flash Friday

It started with one dog, the year of very bad luck, it started with one dog. We paid a thousand bucks for the stud fee to have Clarisse bred with Spike, a pedigree Norwegian Elk hound with ten blue ribbons. I don’t think dogs can distinguish blue from yellow, which doesn’t mean much, not when it comes to studs; the AKC doesn’t check. Don’t give them an MRI or an SAT. The dog walks past the judges and --- shit, I don’t know. I just know the puppies would have sold for between two and four grand.

I don’t think I’d like the kind of guy who drops four grand on a puppy so he can enter him in an AKC beauty contest. I don’t have to like a guy who writes me a check for four grand. Academic anyhow, it didn’t happen. Clarisse had the one puppy and hemorrhaged. A dog litter is supposed to be bigger. A dog isn’t supposed to be born with dysplasia and colitis.

I don’t mean to sound cold; if Clarisse was my dog I’d be rending my hair and on the floor kicking and crying. She was the girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, the bitch who screens my calls. I don’t know if that was bad luck, I probably dodged a bullet there, but at the time it was a bullet I had put in the chamber, and often, and called her sweet nick-names and might have said I love you a time or two right before or after sex. Shit maybe during dinner, I don’t really remember, she’s the bitch who screens my calls; she lost a dog and puppy.

I lost my job too. Ok, I didn’t lose it, it’s right there where I left it, it’s just that security escorts me out when I try claiming it. It makes that fifteen hundred dollar stud fee a twisting knife. I hate bitching about money, makes me feel petty and I’m sure it’s some kind of jinx; bitch about money and bad money mojo comes. Boy you forget to enter one insurance premium and lo and behold a motherfucker up and dies, family sues the company and the company fires you. It’s not like they would have gotten out of paying if I had entered the premium the day I got it. Fuck.

Oh, and my car quit running. So, that’s not really bad luck, that was just shitty maintenance on a car that’s been terminal for three years. You might even call it good luck, three years of good luck. Oh, yeah, and my landlady died, which is pretty bad luck for her loved ones (ok, so there is no plural, I’m not even sure there was a singular, but I think she had relatives) but sort of good luck for me too. I’m six months in arrears on the rent and no one has broken my knee caps yet. Not really good luck, but a postponement of consequences (no one is really going to break my knees; they will really kick me out and change the locks).

I have this bump in my armpit too. Haven’t seen a doctor, waiting until next year. This year it’s probably cancer, next year, maybe, it’ll just be an ingrown hair. I don’t know, cancer wouldn’t be so bad, I mean dying this year would sort of be good luck. If this shit, this one dog year, is the worst comeuppance I’ve got, um, coming and uppancing I’d say that was pretty lucky. Most motherfuckers have to suffer their entire sentence in this vale of tears. Would have been even luckier if I had cancer while I was still with the bitch that screens my calls, then she’d have lost a dog, a puppy and a boyfriend. Only nine more months, right?

Freedom is not a word for nothing left to lose. Losing all your shit is a phrase for nothing left to lose. Freedom is a word for, um, shit, possessing freeness or something.