The dog is a scoundrel, an opportunist, a scamp, and he will exploit any weakness he sees or loophole he finds. He will take the high ground and then gloat at you. He’s a rogue and he knows it.

The dog is made of love. Everyone is his friend: his long-lost friend, his soon-to-be best friend, the friends he hasn’t met yet but can see way down at the end of the road, tiny specks but worth straining toward with every muscle, even if the effort chokes him almost unconscious. He knows friends are worth fighting to meet.

The dog is a lawyer at heart. If he finds even a small gray area, he’ll build an empire in it.

The dog is a genius. He knows things you don’t know, he remembers things you never knew in the first place, he sees things you can’t and he perceives things you never will, things invisible all around you, a hidden world that hangs in the air and on the leaves and in the dirt that to him is a technicolor 3-D map of the glorious. The most you can hope is to see it reflected in his eyes.

The dog is a joker and a clown, and he is funnier than you are.

The dog will destroy you, and your home, and your car, and your clothes, he will tear through you and them like tissue paper with his teeth and claws and tongue and saliva and fur and vomit and feces and his love and his eyes, a tornado of ecstatic destruction, a Shaker with four legs.

You will be scratched and bitten. You will bleed. 

The dog dances through the world, he dances with his toys, he dances with his food, he dances with bones and hooves, he dances in the field, and again and again he comes back to you and asks you to dance.

The dog is disgusting. He drinks out of oily puddles, he wallows in ditch water and he leaves fur wherever he goes. His tongue touches more things than his feet. There is sand in his fur, there is mud in his fur, there are leaves and sticks and saliva and bugs. His paws smell like corn chips. Sometimes he pees on his own foot, staining it yellow. He is a Play-Doh Fun Factory that produces urine and excrement of varying qualities and colors almost every time he moves. He is prone to parasites, internal and external. He is a shaggy bus of germs. He is a vector.

The dog does not respect privacy.

The dog is from another world, a world you can never reach, a better world, a world where all the laws of everything are different. It is the world you dream about, the world you were meant to live in, the world where all your childhood friends have gone. The dog is a time traveler, the dog is a wormhole into the past and though you can’t walk through you can smell the air if you concentrate.

The dog does not understand some of the most basic concepts. He does not know how to get out of the way. He pushes the ball into your hand again and again but is unable to release it. He looks like an idiot when he sits in the driver’s seat, grinning ear to ear, and he doesn’t even have the key.

The dog is pure. When he is happy, it is pure joy. When he sleeps, he sleeps a dog’s sleep and dreams a dog’s dreams. He has made a deal with you, more than 20,000 years ago, that you will protect him, that you will make sense of this world for him and that you will keep a safe place in it for him. This world. He believes you can do this, and he believes it absolutely and without doubt, even though you don’t deserve to be trusted.

The dog will save you, if anyone can.