#   08 Oct 2021 // GX95  

Blackie the Dog ran up into the woods and satanists may have worshipped the devil with his leg bones and stuff …
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My first dog was a mutt I named "Blackie" because head to tail and underneath his fur was the color we all called black. I told him his name, but he didn't respond to it. You see, Blackie had to learn to associate that noise with himself through circumstance. You can't just say, "Your name is now Blackie." Unlike a human person, that gave him nothing to hang his hat on. That surprised me. Having nothing to hang my hat on regarding Blackie's true name, I started calling him every name my under-five self could think of, the idea being that I'd hit on the correct one eventually, and then Blackie would beam and slobber and gambol. Try and see if you won. That was a fun game. Name lottery.

Nowadays, we'd call that a brute force approach. My Dad [their form of address] set me straight: pick a name, any name, stick with it, and Blackie will figure it out through repetition and association. That's a different type of brute force.

Blackie dug under the fence and ran up the hill for a romp in the woods and ran into something and ended up just as dead as Dead as DEAD. I heard more than one neighbor float to my parents the idea that Blackie's demise was the work of Satanists who liked to go and enjoy the seclusion the trees afforded and drink cheap beer and smoke tea and flop around to rock music and stuff.

People said Satanists have a sacrificial preference for all-black animals, which made no sense because good, G_d-fearing folks the world over hate solid-black cats and dogs like The Devil, so you'd think the Satanists would want them for mascots rather than victims of their zany and deadly rites. I prefer to believe it was a snake fanged Blackie, as except for being dead, the cremains were right as rain.

Blackie had no way to communicate his pronouns and forms of address; and since I had assigned his name, I went ahead and assigned his pronouns as my role of the primary human in his life.

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