Of Coffee With Spot

If you were having coffee with me, I would welcome you to my corner of the internet, feel free to look around. “What about dogs you ask?… I don’t have a dog don’t worry about it__ Oh whats this? Its not mine but it seems to have adopted me…”

Its my neighbour’s dog you see, we call him Spot… Could be becausehe kind of looks like the long lost love-child of a Spotted Hyena and an African Wild Dog.

To be honest Spot used to freak me out just a tiny bit but I have gotten used to seeing Spot around. Spot spends more time at our house than at the neighbor’s. There is a Shona Proverb that goes “Chakafukidza dzimba matenga” which literally translates to what covers houses is roofs or is that rooves 🤔my grammar might have died with the Queen.. (too soon?) Anyway the proverb is meant to convey that you can never truly know what happens inside one’s home behind closed doors. Long story short, Spot prefers our place.

Spot shows up on our stoep like clockwork whenever I scrap clean the leftovers from dinner. Reminds me of Pavlov’s dogs from Science Class. Remember the experiment on Classical Conditioning where dogs were conditioned to unconsciously associate neutral, unrelated events with being fed. Similarly Spot expects to be fed whenever he sees me, checks my hands for a bone or treat, and immediately rushes over to an old pot that has become his feeding bowl.

Once, I went over to my neighbour’s to borrow an axe and he said he was using it, even when he clearly was not using it, people can be strange… While I was walking away I happened to mutter under my breath, we helped feed his dog least he could do was lend an axe for two shakes, he was lucky I hadn’t poisoned the dog for trespassing… I suspect he heard me, ooopsie.

Spot had dug a hole in the fence between our two houses… After that encounter I found the hole mysteriously repaired and for the next couple of days Spot didn’t come over… The hole eventually opened up and Spot started showing up again… Apart from exchanging greetings with the neighbor not any other word has been said…

If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that conditioned behavior isn’t just a phenomenon limited to the realm of a science.. It happens all round us sometimes unwittingly, how you smile when you hear a notification from your phone before you even see what they are saying… or the algorithm that zombifies us bringing all sorts of information to our fingertips simply because you looked or liked something…

If you were a fan of the monarchy you have probably run into all sorts fun moments from the life of the late Queen, the inn she spend a night in over fifty years ago, the royal Corgis and the Dorgi which she bred herself apparently. If you are not a fan of the royal family then you have probably been seeing the ugly underbelly of the monarchy, the legacy built on a foundation of oppression, the toxic family dynamics.

We are conditioned to be triggered into a response and without thinking we even become a part of a cycle, feeding into a behavioral frenzy that reminds me of how sharks are said to react when there’s blood in the water. 🦈

There was a Royal Communication that went viral which was claimed to have been a response to our president’s request to attend the royal funeral… Its surprisingly easy to imagine how people reacted to this document without taking time to confirm its authenticity.

 The letter has since been dismissed as fake news by our government and the UK embassy in Zimbabwe and clarified that our president was free to attend the funeral. Unfortunately due to prior commitments, the president would not be attending the funeral but instead the ambassador and Minister of Foreign Affairs would attend on his behalf.

If you are having coffee with me I would ask if you ran into the travel arrangements for the Queen’s funeral where heads of states where to use buses and coaches for logistics and safety reasons…. while of course President Biden retained use of his beast limousine.. if life were a movie and we had super villains blowing up buses with world leaders that would be such a fiendish scheme… *book plot!!!*

I would have chuckled and kept scrolling and laughed a bit at how for some presidents this might have been their first bus ride since school days, maybe never, a small taste of how the ordinary people usually travel; except that I saw remarks on how it was only African presidents that used the buses and some even went on to point out that they even made the president of Zimbabwe drive the bus… totally not true by the way.

For the record, the Zimbabwean president was not at the funeral, the image is a file image from when the president was commissioning a shipment of ZUPCO buses. I am however mildly curious what prior engagements stopped him from going to the funeral and low key wonder if perhaps being told they would have to travel in buses contributed to the decision to not attend…..

Whats been happening in your neck of the words?

~B