Does a Government Have a Tail?

Hi everyone! Right now I’m looking out the office window, sitting on Ted’s desk while he types away. What does he find to write about, anyway? Everything Ted and Jane do is so boring. I hear them talk about the stuff that goes on at the office, at school, at the coffee shop, blah, blah, blah.

Speaking for myself, I concentrate on important stuff, such as the man who sometimes sleeps on the side of the road across from our gate. Now that’s something to bark about. Or the big project they just finished here at the house: the landlord put in a new steel fence between our house and the house of the chubby German lady next door. It’s OK, she knows she’s chubby.

Last Wednesday the landlord told us they were taking down the old fence; ugly corrugated iron and eucalyptus wood. Two days, he said, just two days and it would be done. Two days! How about seven days? That’s what it took. And all the while, I couldn’t check on the drains where the mouse lives, I couldn’t look under the gate, I couldn’t check out behind the water tank to make sure the mouse wasn’t there. I was stuck in the house! By myself! Alone!

We need a dog’s union, that’s what we need! Better working conditions. What, you think I don’t work? Well, since the doorbell at the gate broke, who is going to let T & J know there’s someone here? Me, only me. My visitors need to be promptly admitted and I have the responsibility of raising the alarm. Do you have any idea how many naps I’ve had interrupted because I am burdened like this? Plenty, that’s how many.

The new fence is nice, especially the wider space they left at one place near the front gate. I can now comfortably sniff next door, a serious lack in the old design. You have to know what the neighbors are up to, right? Right! But they can never know what we’re doing. That’s private, whatever that means.

The young man who helped build the fence smoked, that’s what Ted said. He had this paper he put in his mouth and then lit it. He did it a lot, so often that Ted had to give him a box of matches. One time, he was using this stinky, sticky paint to make the fence look better . . . and he was smoking at the same time. The stink from the paint was bad for his liver, Ted said, and the paper burning was bad for his lungs. I hope his liver doesn’t drop out his something or other, like Ted said it would if he keeps that up. But if it does, I hope I’m there, ‘cause I think it would be kind of cool.

A guy named Tesfai is staying with us. He goes out every day and fights with some guys called the government. Then he comes back, sometimes all mad, and said the bureaucracy is messing up the country. From what I can see from the balcony, it’s the sheep, donkeys, and goats that are messing up the country. Sometimes some people, too. But if there’s something called a government messing it up, I haven’t seen it. Of course, I don’t really know what a government looks like. Does it have a tail?

I will talk to you again soon. Soon as something new happens. Of course, I don’t always know when something happens, or when it does, I sometimes don’t know what it is.

Roscoe