God dog.

Photos, video, and editing by Meade. The soundtrack is in the public domain, but here's the music Meade would use if it were easy to get permission from The Incredible String Band, which I'm nearly sure they would grant. Feel free to mute the sound on Meade's video and play the music at the link.

God — "one of most popular words in urban dictionary."

"Did you know that the word god has over 500 definitions?" That's definition #6 (of 647, as of just now).

1. God 1805 up, 425 down
An entity whose opinions on the consumption of pork has been a matter of hot debate amongst the world's religions...

2. God 392 up, 110 down
Universal scapegoat.

When people can't justify their actions through reality, they justify their actions through God

3. God 22594 up, 9000 down
A guy who talked to some Jewish guys, some Christian guys, and some Islam guys, and accidentaly caused more people to die than anyone else in human history. And people wonder why he doesn't talk much to us anymore.

4. god 1301 up, 539 down
dog backwards.
person1:"Hey look its god"

person 2: "No thats a dog"

I arrived at that page in Urban Dictionary because I Googled "God Dog." It's a song title. Here's the song, by The Incredible String Band. If you were in existence back in the 1960s, maybe you had "5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion," "Hangman's Beautiful Daughter," and "Wee Tam and the Big Huge" (which you can buy — in one $35 boxed set — at Amazon, along with all your other Black Friday items). Me, I still have all of that on vinyl, and yesterday Meade dug up some old live-concert CD — old, but not as old as the vinyl — and got the iMac playing "God Dog," because we'd just been out on a long Thanksgiving walk with our (borrowed) dog-named-after-a-God Zeus:



She will not learn language/nor will she bear scorn/but she is the best little dog
that ever was born.

That song and another song on Meade's live-concert CD had lyrics about unborn babies, and I said that abortion rights ideology — which says that any given pregnant woman holds the sovereign power to determine the humanity of the entity within — has eclipsed the old cultural expressions magnifying the unborn child. "God Dog" has "I have lain in the womb of the rocks cold and chill/while she speaks in my heart with the voice of the hill." And the other song — sorry I haven't successfully Googled the lyrics — spoke of an unborn baby safe and warm within the womb, which made me think about how the womb isn't — within abortion rights ideology — a safe place to be anymore. It's a place where your humanity depends on the will of the Goddess of the small universe you still inhabit. She, being autonomous and free, has the power "to define [her] own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." In that legal landscape, there are no wandering hippie minstrels singing songs about unborn babes.

Meade says there was a hippie pro-life movement. He remembers hippies urging women not to have abortions and saying give your babies to us and we'll give them back to you whenever you want. I don't remember that iteration of hippie values, I don't know how the urging would have been done in pre-internet days, and my Googling fails again as I try to research the hippie pro-life movement. As I'm writing this paragraph, Meade phones in from Frautschi Point, where he's walked with Zeus. He's returning my call, which I made to get permission to publish the photograph (above). I don't extract the needed reminiscences about hippie times when there were subcultures in the counterculture. I was stranded in the north country (Ann Arbor) and he'd sojourned into the backwoods of North Carolina.

I can see from my window that it's blustery in the backyard, and it must be raw out there on the Lake Mendota landscape. Are Meade and the god dog cold? Meade laughs and says little. The god/dog — who will not learn language/doesn't talk much to us anymore — says nothing.

Have some Psapp.

I've been listening to Psapp. I love when musicians play objects that are not musical instruments. Many years ago, I saw the Incredible String Band perform a song where instead of drums, they just had an old trunk. I can't remember if they kicked it or what, but it seems to have imprinted a lifelong love of music made with nonmusical objects. Psapp is perfect for me:

[T]heirs is a cosy, dusty, otherworldly realm -- a clutter of home-made toys, doll's house ephemera, somnolent cats, glinting laptops, and incalculable bric-a-brac of mysterious provenance. And that's not to mention the duo's veritable junkshop have of arcane musical instruments and "sound emitters" that range from gleaming pianos and pot-bellied ouds to children's xylophones, dusty retro guitars, farmyard noise-makers, mechanical ashtrays and squeaky rubber poultry...

(Oh, yeah, remember the "famous ashtray" in the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann"?)

Here, watch the video for Psapp's "About Fun." It's fun. Maybe you'll think it's twee. I like twee... sometimes.