On the internet, no one knows I’m a dog
- Mar 16
- 9 min read
“If you only knew how many rocks she’s made me jump on. That Witch is full of nothing but snark and pictures of me sitting on rocks. Let’s get another one of us kissing. Muah!”
Once the Witch’s appetite was satisfied, we still had to wait our turn to use the trail while a group of triumphant hikers flopped the last few steps to the summit. As soon as the first one saw the mailbox, she turned around to encourage the friend climbing behind her.
“Come on, Deb! You can do it! Just a few more steps!” she cheered.
They hugged when Deb arrived, then both turned around. “Come on, Pam! You can do it” the first lady and Deb cheered.
When Pam arrived, they were ready for her with a group hug and Pam cried for a second. Then, the first lady, Deb, and Pam turned around and cheered, “Come on, Zara! You’re almost there!”
When Zara’s hug was over, they all turned again. “Come on, Rita!” the first lady, Deb, Pam, and Zara cheered, like they were handing out medals at the end of a marathong.
“We did it! We did it!” they congratulated each other when they were all standing beside the mailbox. They asked Lily to take their picture so they could remember the shared moment of triumph.
Lily and Mom divided up a stack of witches as the ladies arranged themselves in their assigned positions. They assumed the pose that all women of a certain age use in pictures.
“If you look the same in all your portraits, the only thing people are going to look at is the scenery,” I coached. I gently red-rovered through them to break up the pose, and Mom snapped a few pictures of their surprise and delight. “Those’ll be the ones you like the best,” I promised. “You’ll see.”
Even though the Authorities were constantly reminding us that we were all in this together, it was easy to forget about togetherness when the boogeyvirus had you cooped up in your crate all alone. The Women of a Certain Age sharing their accomplishment together gave me an idea: Maybe if everyone joined in celebration when we were all set free, the togetherness of our shared victory would erase all the loneliness that came before. When the boogeyvirus was finally gone, I resolved to congratulate everyone I saw with an exuberant “You did it! You did it!” until there was a smile on every muzzle-free mouth in the world.
To practice, I greeted every person I met on the way down with a big smile and a cheer. All the cheering kept me very busy, so I let Mom supervise Lily. She needed the talking practice anyway. Friendship didn’t come easily to Mom, and she’d hardly barked to anyone outside a screen since we saw Boss Charming.
“I don’t even want to post on social media anymore. I’m connected to so many people through Oscar that I never would have met otherwise.” Mom scratched at the irritation around her bee sting. “Usually I like reading all the different perspectives from different backgrounds around the country…”
“Dogs bring out the best in everybody,” I told Lily. “Especially when the dog is me.”
Mom didn’t like it when my talents overshadowed her genius for finding the worst in everybody. She plowed on as if she hadn’t heard me. “… But now I’m seeing a side of people I don’t want to see. There’s so much ugliness out there.”
“It’s true,” Lily agreed. “All I can look at these days are the cute animal videos. Have you seen the one where the parrot talks to Alexa?”
“No, I missed that one.” The parrots in Mom’s thought bubble were featherless and repeated uglier things than Alexa was allowed to say.
“She only clicks the stuff that makes her angry,” I explained.
“That’s the trouble with social media,” said Lily. “People always had freedom of speech, but now everyone has a built-in audience, too.”
“Don’t I know it!” I butted in. “Isn’t it great?”
Lily continued as if she couldn’t hear me either. “It means that you can say things that you would never say in person. You get validation from some people and baited by others, but you never see all the people who don’t engage. After a while, the only opinions in your feed are from people who think exactly like you.”
“Or people who trigger you,” Mom said from experience. She noticed her scratching and wiped away a spot of blood.
“That’s not what it’s like on Dogstagram,” I said. “Dogstagram is like Black Twitter, but for dog issues. Mostly whether there’s equal opportunity in booping, whether or not to conjugate verbs, and if it’s really that dog’s birthday today. They’re very complex topics with good arguments on both sides and—”
“I know I could just unfollow people,” Mom interrupted. “But isn’t that part of the problem? Nobody talks to each other anymore.”
“You met Lily on the internet and you’re talking to her right now, remember?” I said.
Mom kept on ignoring me. “How are we going to find common ground if everyone is shutting out the things they don’t agree with? Isn’t it better to have the conversation yourself and form your own opinions, rather than someone else telling you what others think and how you should feel about it?”
Mom was doing that thing she does, which was my cue to un-bum everybody out. “I’ve been letting you tell me what to do for years and it’s working out okay for me. You know what’s the best thing about dogs?” I didn’t leave time for them to guess, which could take all day. I had a point to get to. “Everyone knows we’re there to take their side. Sometimes I tell a story about one thing, and a Friend agrees with me even though they’re thinking about something totally different.”
“You could leave them be until they drop off your feed,” Lily suggested.
“If people are seeing all the right things and still arriving at the wrong conclusions, you’ve got to correct them,” Mom moaned. “Otherwise, how can you hope to fight all the dysinformation out there?”
“You appointed yourself the Referee of the Universe, not me,” I reminded her. “It’s not my job to think for them, silly. I’m just a dog. If you talk to a hunerd people, they’ll have a Jillian different ideas about the same thing, and each one has a lesson if you listen for it.” I hoped it wasn’t awkward for Lily that I was coaching Mom in front of her, but some conversations can’t wait. “Agreement is at the root of every disagreement. Even ideas that agree will end up disagreeing if you talk about them long enough.”
“Exactly,” Mom said triumphantly. “You’re just a dumb dog who doesn’t understand the nuance of all the horse droppings out there on the internet. You think that rolling in horse plop is fun.”
“Maybe you’d be less of a sourpuss if you remembered that every horse turd comes from a pony,” I pointed out. “You could argue forever about whose ideas are the best and never declare a winner. Love is what gives you the energy to get up and argue another day. Humans call it marriage. ” Then I remembered that Mom had won that argument once, and that’s why we lived alone now.
“You don’t roll in horse droppings, do you, Oscar?” Lily asked in a voice that meant she knew the answer was no.
“The idea would never even occur to me!” I wagged convincingly. “Dogs don’t have ideas, we have feelings. There are Jillians of ideas flying around right now and most of them are horse doo-doo, but there are only a few feelings, and we’re all sharing them together.”
“Which is why it’s so frustrating when people respond in ways that are so obviously against their own values and interests!” Mom threw up her hands as if she were throwing an invisible tennis ball over each shoulder.
“If we’re honest about our feelings, then we don’t have to convince people what they mean,” I said.
“We’re talking about facts, not feelings,” Mom grumped.
“Most of her ideas never escape her head, so she can’t see them change over time,” I ’splained to Lily. “If you trapped one of her ideas in a jar and compared it to its relatives still living in her head a week later, you’d see that most ideas are just feelings.”
“Facts,” Mom corrected again. “I don’t get why everyone doesn’t see things the way I do. If only they had better information, they wouldn’t believe such nonsense.”
“Creating an idea is a team sport,” I said. “You have to pass a feeling back and forth between a few different players before you start to find any truth in it.”
Mom paused her rant and aimed a doubtful look my way. “That’s pretty smart, Oscar. Where did you come up with that?”
“Lily said it a few minutes ago while you were thinking about what idea-feeling you wanted to tell us about next. You should really listen to her. She’s got some pretty deep wisdom under that hat.”
As the rainforest cleared and the muppet-like moss dried to dust outside the Wagon windows, I wished Lily were still there to watch the world change with me. After climbing back down from the mailman’s lair, Lily took us back to the Wagon and went home. Mom and I continued to the empty grasslands on the forgotten side of the state. Like California, Oregon has a forgotten half with even fewer towns and smaller mountains than Wyoming, Forgotten California, or any of the emptiest places you know about. You probably had no idea the Forgotten Oregon is there because almost nobody’s been there, and everyone who has forgot about it right away.
“Why isn’t Lily coming with us?” I asked. “Do you think it’s something you said?”
“She only came for a day hike,” Mom said. “Not everyone is into the kind of adventuring that you and I do.”
“You don’t think it’s because you tried to kill her with all that steepness?” I prodded.
“After what she did to us the last time we saw her…” Mom stopped to take the why I oughta out of her voice. “If she can handle 33 miles through those dunes, she can take a little steepness. Living without showers and toilets, and sleeping with your feet on the spare tire every night isn’t for everyone. Plus, if someone else traveled with us, they’d get a vote in our itinerary.”
“What’s so bad about that?” I wondered if I had a vote that I didn’t know about, too.
“We might go where they want instead of where I want. And what if it sucks?”
“You take us places that suck all the time,” I reminded her.
“Yeah, but it’s easier to deal with something that sucks when I have no one to blame but myself. Then I don’t have to hide how annoyed I am. There’s nothing more exhausting than pretending I’m having a good time when I’m not. And it’s even worse when the bad idea was mine. Then I have to pretend like I’m having a good time and worry about how the other person isn’t having fun. That’s exponential suck.” She paused for a moment to appreciate how much more real her feelings felt when she used math to describe them.
“Okay. Where to next?” I hoped it wouldn’t suck.
“It’s gonna be a long one,” she warned, kicking off a fresh round of the worry game to pass the time.
“You should probably give me extra dinner tonight then. So you don’t have to worry about whether I’m hangry.”
“The reviews said that we might be out there for 12 hours,” she counted. “That means all day.”
“You should know better by now than to,” I reminded her. Mom thinks her worries are special, just because she’s the one who thought of them. She can fill the whole world with booby traps and shadowy monsters just by expecting them to be there. That’s why silently yelling at other people who don’t notice her worries is important; otherwise they might never learn. Then again, if something unexpected happens, Mom might go on enjoying herself without even noticing that something’s wrong. That’s why it’s so important to look out for all the things that could go wrong, so that at the first sign of danger she can say, See? I knew it! I was right all along! I felt safer knowing that my travel companion controlled all the danger in the world.
There’s no way to deactivate an imaginary booby trap or vanquish a monster made of nothing but shadows, but that doesn’t mean that Mom can let it go. Like carrying a packpack full of rocks helps some dogs hike like good boys, I try to give Mom a job to soothe her worries. It doesn’t matter what the job is, as long as she feels like she’s doing something. “We can pack extra snacks if you’re worried,” I suggested.
Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.
