Heart of a Dog Page #3

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and they say, "Um, is it gonna be fun?

Because if it's not gonna be fun,

I'm just not interested."

It was so strange the way it happened.

Almost overnight,

there were soldiers

everywhere in the city.

Where there used to be

just maybe one policeman,

now there were groups of soldiers

with machine guns and riot gear.

Almost immediately, it became normal.

They began to blend in.

Nobody talked to them,

but they were everywhere, like ghosts.

And I thought,

when did that start to happen?

We're trying to prevent it from happening

instead of having to deal

with it afterwards.

So Homeland Security began to breed dogs.

When the puppies were 13 weeks old,

they were sent to prisons

to be trained by prisoners.

The smartest dogs were

drafted to work with police

on patrols and on bomb-sniffing squads.

The Homeland Security slogan,

"If you see something, say something,"

sounds like something

the Austrian philosopher

Wittgenstein might say.

And his books are full

of cryptic sentences about logic

and about how language has the power

to actually create the world.

If you can't talk about it, he says,

it just doesn't exist.

After the "see something,

say something" slogan

had been around for a while,

someone from Homeland Security

must have had second thoughts

about asking people to report

on each other all the time.

I would have loved to have been

at that Homeland Security

PR brainstorming session

when they decided to add

this phrase to their slogan.

There are so many trucks

in my neighborhood now

carrying information and data

on the way to secure storage areas.

Iron Mountain started

as a network of caves

for growing mushrooms

and gradually turned into

a bomb-resistant storage facility

for corporate documents.

After World War ll,

the company began inventing new identities

for Jewish immigrants

who arrived with nothing...

no papers or, at most,

their old library cards.

So Iron Mountain created all sorts

of new documents for them,

and they became instant Americans.

Lolabelle was a mall dog.

She came from one

of the high-speed puppy mills

that breed dogs in batches

and then sell them in malls.

She was bought by a couple

who were in the middle of a divorce.

And no one could take her.

The woman didn't want her,

and the husband didn't want her.

And the boy wanted her, but...

Nobody really wanted the boy.

And so the man took Lolabelle

with him to Canada,

where he spent a month camping and crying

and thinking it all through

and talking to himself.

And Lolabelle rode

up on the bow of the kayak,

perched on the front leading the way

as the man paddled along

and tried to figure out

what to do with his life,

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