keyword "connection" title "world wide woof" in misc. flash fiction

Sniffing is, of course, Dog Internet and that’s why they’re as addicted to it as we are to laptops and cellular, able to get by snuffling along low to the ground when there’s no other options but, man, when they get in that car with their head out the window, that’s what dogs call a high-speed connection! So much data they’re overwhelmed, can’t believe the wonders they’re sniffing out of the heavens, that’s why they grumble and grunt so when just walking about normal, those are the sounds of their mid-nineteen nineties telephone modems.

Still, for all they get out of a wind-filtrated information hook up like that, wi-fi for short, there is nothing like the direct feed they can attain with another dog by initiating an FTP upload via the face-tail port and really just sniffing up another dog’s business. That’s like deep diving through all the photos on your friend’s Facebook in one sitting! Dog cannot really know other dogs at all without a thorough FTP session once in a while. There may be more elegant ways for us people to exchange info, like USB thumb drives, but dogs can’t use those, dogs don’t have thumbs!

Of course, face-timing another server’s back-end is not the only way for a dog to take advantage of their internet. Another web-surfing approach is to wander around declaring their domain name on light-posts, fire hydrants and curbsides by lifting a leg and doing some quality streaming. This is mostly done in the medium of HTML, hyper-tuitive marking liquid, leaving their own browser histories for all the other dogs to use their search engine noses on. Oh, the high-speed streaming.

When in the middle of a good sniffing session, you know how sometimes they’ll forcibly exhale to clear their olfactory palate? That’s just the dog internet way of hitting refresh. Walk your pup for long enough, however, and invariably they are going to have to download. You may need to clear this cache yourself, depending on whether or not your neighborhood is cool with corrupted cookies lying around all over the place or not. My tip is to bring a bag with you or at least some kind of gloves to serve as firewalls protecting your hands as you deal with the fact that your dog has just logged-off in the azaleas.

Despite all of the ways I’ve described the dog internet as different from our human world-wide web, though, I hope the main similarity between their scent-based internet and our electronically derived internet has shined through nonetheless: while both webs of knowledge are essential and useful in our respective lives, at the end of the day, most of what is on both of them is just some of the most horrendously disgusting stuff you have ever seen in your life. Just so unconscionably filthy. At the end of the day, that one simple fact unifies all internets. Oh God. Not sure which is more repellant than the other, really.