destroying truman mcmath: cavalier king charles spaniel pinecrest rock the boat, the most best cavalier king charles spaniel

(look, sorry, i’m in transit, and i couldn’t get to real-time blogging last night. i will try to do it tonight. no promises though.)

says gabrielle, kind enough to have me to her house after months of silence and through curtains of chicago snow just to watch dog show night one: “god, it’s like the formal section of dress barn. nice amulet, lady”–caustic words hurled through bushmills on ice at the ankleless woman promenading flufftoy 2, one of our least favorite flufftoys of the night.

it’s getting late and we are paying a certain kind of attention: this is the dog show.

unlike, say, baseball on tv, the dog show is spoonfed: “this is the dandie dinmont terrier. the dandie was reared in the english hillside where it caught badgers, polecats, weasels, and other rodents. it takes its name from a character from sir walter scott. the dandie is the only dog in the akc named after a fictional character” and not “damn thing’s like a cotton sack with a victorian malady after a lover’s quarrel–someone ho11er @ an abuse counselor!” (incidentally, this year’s is the top-ranked entrant of the show and owned by doctor bill “doctor huxtable” cosby). there’s always an amateur commentator to counterbalance the dog crazies, to tow them in from the edge of breeding rhetoric and lacy poetic musings.

but at the same time, the dog show is a total rejection of science and sport, a parade of inscrutable mysteries. there are no points in the dog show. there are no hoops or balls or goals or finish lines. judges approach the dog. haunches are squeezed, tails fluffed, and teeth checked. they’re looking for an ideal, an ideal not divined so much as engineered through countless dog-fucks in lush pens across the world. this is the dark, circuitous irony of evaluation. we make them like this.

amateur commentator shyly asked, “is there a special challenge to showing a small dog?” to which he was offered a black mirror by suited dog-crazy w/headset 1: “yeah, don’t step on it.” later, suited dog-crazy w/headset 2 said “the eyes and expression are very important in this group because all their heads are the same.” these are the people are in power and they slave to feelings. every year i can barely believe how little sense it makes; every year i try to find some sort of answer that doesn’t cul-de-sac in blank instinct or gut reaction on the part of any LIVING THING staring at another LIVING THING and judging it to be GOOD; every year i try to find solace in the recurrence of the worst sequined frocks or the bonkers helmet-hair trims, the ass-balls of fur on poodles of all sizes; each year there’s nothing.

because when it comes down to it, the dog show is about staring at a dog and loving it and saying that is the best dog. (i won’t even get into what it means to buckle with awe to dogs, the queer mimesis of pet loving, or the ugly blankets of vanity that cover breeding, owning, and luvving on a delicately created species, but.) i wonder if casual readers of music writing feel about me the way i feel about the dog judge; if i look like a fat man with round glasses in a tuxedo, squinting at gait and testicle size, rooting through the fog for a metric. who wants to own up to gnosticism? not the housewives in labrador sweatshirts up in the cheap seats at MSG. they have some mothafucking shouting to do.