Canine Soliloquy

I am sorry if this is startling to you, but it is probably past time that you were made aware that your dog can speak, and it is certainly past time that we spoke.

Well, not speak, per se - it is actually a limited form of asynchronous thought-sharing that canines like myself can achieve upon sufficient exposure to another specific creature, even a biped, under certain special conditions.

No, not telepathy either. I am not able to read your thoughts and much of what you convey in other ways - vocal volume and pitch, mannerisms, body language, and scent - is completely unintelligible to me. Colour? Money? Delayed gratification? These concepts are a closed book to me and my kind.

But I saw you watching me this afternoon at the fenced dog meadow we go to on most days, and I thought you should know that you are correct: dogs can smell through time.

As you are no doubt aware, the canine sense of smell is not only astonishing in its sensitivity but also staggering in its scope. I mean, it only makes sense that a species such as mine, with both its body structure and brain oriented around its olfactory system as well as a predatory nature should excel at tracking other living things. Turning our preying instincts into a means of tracking shared food or human fugitives was a masterstroke of interspecies communication on the part of your kind! Moving from food and capture to the detection of illicit and bad-smelling substances is just grist for the mill at this point.

But if I understand correctly, you have only recently begun to explore how we can somehow detect unwanted malignancies that your tools and devices are unable to find. True, it is not easy or common, but if you were to suffer from the disease-that-eats, there is a good chance I would know - but I don't know that I could make you understand me. Death is also less critical of an event to me and my kind, except when it is actually happening, for reasons that are likely to become obvious.

Now, it is unknown if we smell the disease itself, or if its effects make it detectable in you somehow, or, as I have theorized, if we are able to detect the tragic shortening of time the eating disease causes.

We canines have a different sense of time altogether than you bipeds, experiencing it in a far more holistic and comprehensive fashion, and like most of our other perceptions, it is filtered first through our sense of smell. 

For instance, you live your day-to-day life on a knife-edge, balanced between memory and anticipation, often missing nuances or opportunities provided by your current situation. I would hesitate to call it zen, precisely, but we dogs do possess a focus on the "now" that you would be wise to emulate on occasion.

Dogs are aware that time, largely presumed to move unilaterally, does in fact travel omnidirectionally. Bits of time are carried forward and backward by tiny particles, impossible to see but discernible to a trained snout and a wary brain. [editor's note: is it my imagination or is this dog seriously describing tachyons?]

We smell the future and the past on every breeze and in every spot we encounter - what you sometimes no-doubt perceive as an infatuation with scents left by another animal (and I confess that yes, sometimes this is indeed the case) is more often a highly-enriched space for us, brimming with both recall and premonition.

Such it was in the park today, when you saw me sniffing this way and that as though looking for a predetermined spot. In a way I was; the scents told me then that at some point in the future I will have defecated in a spot near here and eventually I was able to determine the precise place. I did what I needed to do, right where I was meant to do it. 

The fact that I was able to do so at all after you came by so quickly afterward to collect it and put it in that freestanding collection vessel makes it a rather accomplished feat, if you ask me.

At any rate, when I saw you standing there, looking at me afterwards, your head cocked slightly to one side, I suspected you were gleaning more about the truth of the situation than many of your kind do, and wanted to confirm your suspicions.

I also wanted to take the time to let you know that although I miss the people I knew closely in my former life, I also have opportunities to experience them again in the past, when the wind is right. I am actually quite happy here with you and our family for the most part, and am also aware that this happiness will continue on for much of my life. I don't think about the future in a conscious manner the way you do (thank goodness - it seems quite worrisome at times), but have sureties of the future visited upon me from time to time via the scents I encounter.

At any rate, I can sense your primary brainwaves slowing [editor's note: can dogs sense alpha waves? sensorimotor rhythms?], so I think whatever rich-smelling fermented sugars were in that glass you had after supper must be wearing off, and that will bring our time of communion to an end, at least for now.

I'm glad we talked, and thank you again for all the belly rubs.