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Memento Mori

I first saw the black-eyed dog when I was twelve. It was summer in New England, in Maine, back in the summer of 1981, and that cocksucking, sonofabitching cur with his dry scaly nose and snaggleteeth, that "fearsome hound of hair," as Kerouac's Old Bull Balloon would have it, followed me home from my great-grandmother's house after I'd finished mowing her lawn and talking with her over glasses of lemonade and a tin of pink mints.