...minnesota...

...the ballad of footeastman [part six]...

CansaFis Foote

Dec 14, 2023

If you haven’t been following along, below are some links to snapshot portions of my life as I moved from bachelordom in Cher wigs to a burgeoning ALF & email assisted romance. You don’t need to read what came before to know what comes next, but you will need to read what comes next to continue reading because that is how reading works.

PART ONE – https://cansafis.substack.com/p/hungry-like-the-wolf

PART TWO – https://cansafis.substack.com/p/bad-paradise

PART THREE – https://cansafis.substack.com/p/alien-love-forms

PART FOUR – https://cansafis.substack.com/p/and-she-was

PART FIVE – https://cansafis.substack.com/p/home-is-where-the-art-is

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“Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”

-Groucho Marx-

My first pets were all short lived.

I would collect caterpillars in ice cream containers filled with water and airholes and return overnight to find them zombified to the roof of my sherbert tub. I watched a hamster for a weekend only to have it give birth and eat the babies heads first, the cage a grotesquerie of tiny innards hung horribly.

My animal governance seemed the harbinger of life’s end, so I took to petting inanimate beings instead, adopting a wall full of troll dolls to pat, prod and poke at. I wasn’t sure if I could ever be a steward of life maintenance, but as Dr. Ian Malcom growled chestily in the underrated documentary Jurassic Park, “Life, uh, finds a way”.

15 years later I would meet my first puppy.

In 2013 my dancing and drycleaning partner Charles the Charlie, aka “Chizzmo” Chassquatch, decided that his dog was going to have babies. He had his dog ever since he had hiked the Appalachian trail, and kept her unfixed until he knew he had enough friends who might need puppies. There is no reality in which any friend does not need a puppy. Puppies are small furry love givers of infinite cute, four legged opportunities to febreze the farting din of the day.

His dog was a good dog.

My ladyfriend, a wonderful woman named Champagne or Sarina pending on where you met her, first met his dog at a small smoky house party. The antique steel fireplace was lit with free redwood and the chatty room filled with bongo beating. A white speckled wet snout nudged her from front to back of the event, scented to a nub of sausage that sat tooth teetering on the edge of a stove. Sarina obliged the nosy dog’s wishes and shared the meat nugget. The dog, a hound mutt who liked pub crawls, thanked her with a hand lick before moving onto knocking over beer bottles and drinking whatever boozed sauces spilt to the floor.

His dog was a good and smart dog.

Now I feel rude because to this point for having introduced his dog only as a dog. No dog is only a dog. Across millions of parks in a million towns and on or at the foot of a million couches, sits a Fido, a Tito, a Milo or Lido. A Barry, or Bruiser. A Socks, Buster or Barnwell.

In certain cultures a dad might call his son boy, even when the boy has long since become a man (or a woman). But you should never name a dog, dog, just like you shouldn’t name yourself myself. If you named yourself myself that would make you me. And if you are me then you need to help us move on.

Chizzmo’s dog was named Alabama. Alabama Gravy Racecar.

"If names are not correct, language will not be in accordance with the truth of things."

-Confucius-

We met our puppy the day he was born. He looked like a hamster and given my past I was wary he might get eaten by his mom, the aforementioned Ms. Gravy Racecar. Or maybe even by Chizzmo in some ravenous late night snacking mistake.

It was a pleasant surprise to find out that dog moms don’t eat their dogs head first, but instead just gobble their baby ooze and lick them clean until they’re puppy enough to do it for each other. I’ve covered the goriness of children elsewhere1, and will confirm that the world of baby dogs is just as perverse and grotesque.

**…the beasts feeding on soiled papers carrying “****the news**”…

We were gifted the first born of the litter, which when I say it out loud, “the first”, feels as though there is some great significance. But in reality it just means my buddy’s little snout was closest to Alabama’s birth hole during the puppy exodus.

‘Bama had two dalliances in order to get her litter. She had street sex with a labradoodle named Woody, and boned open air at a dog park with a Vizla named Ziggy. I’m not sure if it is fair to call dog sex boning giving their affinity for treats of that variety. I’m not sure it is fair to call any type of sex boning. But they boned and it worked.

Bama’s first born had the orange sheen of a vizsla mixed with the spotted hound blend of Bama’s muttiness. He was given the puppy name Fatty Fatty Boom Boom because he looked like a guinea pig stuffed inside of a sausage casing.

When humans get named there is often a story that accompanies its telling, for instance my pal John was named for a bathroom, and my other friend Lou for the same. But dog names don’t carry the same need for an origin. Yet here I am telling you one, and there we were, a sugar stunk puppy in our hands with our first order of business being to moniker him.

There are five rules to naming a dog.

1] Look at the dog

2] Consider what the dog would want to be called

3] Ask the dog what its name is

4] Take their advice and name the dog Woof, Bark or Pant-Pant-Lick

5] Wait until they are sleeping then rename them Snugs, Squish or Smoosh

After completing those steps you should be ready to name your dog again.

Dog commanders & advisors recommend a name with one or two syllables, hard consonants and avoiding command words. You don’t want to name a dog Sit-and-Stay unless you want it to run and never come back. As our puppy had already been named, we felt an obligation to give kudos on how he got here. We cycled the almanac of our minds before settling on Minnesota, or Sota for short.

Minnesota was a name that accomplished many things at once. First it accounted for his mother Alabama [by being the name of a state]. It also accounted for the fat of his puppy name, hearkening to an old chubby billiards guru named Minnesota Fats, made famous by Jackie Gleason in the movie, The Hustler. But pure mimicry seemed lame, so we replaced the Fats with Pops, and ensured our lameness would be even lamer.

That is another good rule in naming. If a name is lame, make it even lamer. Add a Jr. or a roman numeral 3 or “Chucko” onto it. CansaFis is a lame name, but CansaFis “Chucko” Jr. III is a horse with an abnormal gait [by definition even lamer2].

In most cultures names end at three words. You get a first name, a last name and a middle name. If you are extra lucky you might get a few hyphens. Stuck to a three name existence we spend the rest of our lives seeking out or being deigned nicknames like Dooger, and pet names like Sugar. We get forgotten names like Hey Guy and new names like Look Here. And once we pass the parlance of remembrance we settle on having no name at all. Who was that, we think? I don’t know, we forget. Minnesota was a puppy far too special to let the plodding standards of is, as in that “what is, is”, no-name him.

MinneSota Pops became MinneSota Pops McFatsaroni.

He moved into our house and immediately began acting like a penguin, scooting on his back legs and dilly dallying like a cold bird in tuxedo skin. We had forgotten his surname while crate training and cuddling, but added it back, so now MinneSota Pops McFatsaroni was MinneSota Pops McFatsaroni Penguin Gravy RaceCar.

He knocked a soy sauce bottle over onto his freckled white nose and for weeks had a stain. He started to sleep on his back and make faces like Bela Lugosi. His sweetness got softer, and in a little over a month our MinneSota Pops McFatsaroni Penguin Gravy RaceCar had become MinneSota Pops McFatsaroni Penguin Gravy RaceCar SoySauce ZigZag Marshmallow Sticks.

Names don’t need endings.

Maybe the world’s humanocentric problems could be solved by naming our children like dogs. If I ever have kids I could name them Fido Spot and Good Boy Fetch. When they misbehave I will give them nicknames like Stop, Please Don’t, Go to Your Room and Can You Please Not Leave Me Alone in this Senior Center. Their life, their story, will be right there inside of the name.

The name, MinneSota Pops McFatsaroni Penguin RaceCar Soy Sauce Zig Zag Marshmallow Sticks, reveals a lot. It tells me I can never go back home to Minnesota because it would confuse him too much. It tells me to never gamble against fat men who play billiards, because they will hustle me. It tells me to be sweet and sour at the same time, to pay attention to global warming, and to not only live a life in one direction. And even though we never need to call Sota his full name for him to hear us, we know that as time passes his name will grow, as will we alongside him. And his sister. But that is a story for another time [like next week]…