An Exisistential Pug contemplates spring (and DraftKings)

O P I N I O N

The poet T.S. Eliot wrote that “April[1] is the cruelest month, breeding/lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/memory and desire.” While Eliot’s juxtapositions[2] were commenting on the dismal and disturbing state of the modern world—while ironically alluding to Chaucer—his words speak to the simple sadness I used to experience each time spring rolled around.

Spring is supposed to be a season of rebirth and rejuvenation, a season of budding after a long winter’s despair, but until recently, I found myself struggling to form a smile in my advancing years.

While some of this is physiological[3], the bulk of it was spiritual ennui that I couldn’t seem to remedy without consuming large quantities of cheese.

All day I would sit and stare out the window from my perch on the back of the living room couch. I would watch as younger pups and their owners walked up and down the street in front of my house, “caught in the sensual music” of the season—as W.B. Yeats so precisely termed—and admire the hop in their gait.

I would sometimes raise my head to bark a greeting then stop before uttering a sound, stymied by the futility of the gesture. The Gray-Haired Man and the Blonde Woman work all day, so there were no afternoon walks in the sun for this pug.

As Eliot’s neurotic mess of a narrator J. Alfred Prufrock mused, “I grow old…I grow old…/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled[4].” I’m now well into my middle age, and spring would remind me of the things breaking down.

When I was a pup, bounding through the new grass, I would happily crap then roll on my back with my tongue hanging out of my mouth. As the poet Rita Dove wrote, “I was pirouette and flourish/I was filigree and flame.”

I inhabited a world made of figurative cheese.

Yet while some cheeses get better with age, my spring was an oh-so cruel reminder that I was becoming a “tattered coat upon a stick,” and there was nothing I could do to reverse this fate.

Ruff, said I, whimpering and weary and indifferent to the young pups passing the house.

But fret not, dear reader, as Alexander Pope penned, “hope springs eternal” in another form for me these days. Hope springs in the form of a gambling application called “DraftKings” that The Gray-Haired Man—the bozo normally responsible for writing this column—recently introduced to me.

Exasperated after a series of losing bets, The Gray-Haired Man asked me to pick a hockey game by licking the screen on his phone. I then watched the game with him, intoxicated by the potential for profit and the devastation of loss. In short, I felt reborn, invigorated and young again.

Then I won! And the Gray-Haired Man showered me with cheese!

Now, with the postseasons in both basketball and hockey, as well as the nascent baseball season—the sport the poet Walt Whitman coined “America’s game”—I’m alive with the budding trees! And cheese!

When the collie from up the street recently passed my house on its leash, I screamed, “Play the Pug Parlay[5].” And suddenly April doesn’t seem so cruel.

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[1] April also happens to be National Poetry Month.

[2] Nate’s note: Buster has a master’s degree in Modernist poetry.

[3] My face is flat without the necessary musculature to form a proper grin

[4] Of course, this is figurative. I’m a pug and I don’t wear pants

[5] Parlay teams from the great cheese state of Wisconsin, i.e. the Bucks, Packers or Brewers.