Coda Dog Speaks

Coda Dog has a flea. Just one, not more than one, not less than one. One tiny flea. Coda Dog, if you must know, despises this one flea. Despite my best efforts to find, remove, poison, or otherwise eliminate this flea, it persists. I can see the flea occasionally, a tiny brown fleck on her thin brown coat. I'll pick at it, it will leap off my finger to her back again and vanish beneath an eigth of an inch of fawn fur.

Coda Dog turns her head and says to me, "Goddamn it," in her squeaky voice (think of a red-headed, freckled kindergartener saying "tangerine!" -- ok, now, stop thinking of that, it's awful)..."Goddamn it!" See, Coda Dog can cuss. She has an impressive array of foul words. She employs them to great effect via her ears, brows, and snarls.

I figure if dogs can understand language, then I can understand dogs. The Brain, of course, tends to disagree. He claims it is simply the cunning of forced evolution. We, he states, have bred dogs for thousands of years. We, he declaims solemnly, have simply selected and bred for dogs that do the best job of convincing us that they understand what we are saying.

In other words, it's a trick of genetics, an illusion.

Goddamn it.