Two Dogs, Two Operating Systems, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Inexplicable Background Processes

My beloved late dog Rogue ran Windows 95. Not the corporate deployment version—the home edition your grandmother had, the one that came on the Packard Bell with the cow-print box and somehow never crashed even though you were pretty sure it should have. Cheerful startup sounds. That jaunty little tune that promised everything would be okay, and mostly it was. She’d look at you with those eyes—Christ, those eyes—like she’d just discovered sunlight for the first time every single morning for fifteen years straight. Optimistic as hell. User-friendly in that way that makes you feel like maybe the world isn’t completely fucked, you know? She’d take her treat and wag and that was it, that was the whole transaction, clean and simple and somehow perfect.

(And here’s the thing about loving something that uncomplicated—and this is important, so pay attention—you don’t realize it’s uncomplicated until it’s gone and you’re stuck trying to parse the system requirements of whatever comes next.)

Wilco is some janky Arch Linux fork that nobody documented properly. Probably compiled at 3 AM by someone who was either genius-level talented or having a complete psychotic break, possibly both—the commit logs are ambiguous on this point. She’s got enterprise-grade core functionality (heel on command, can wrestle dogs three times her size, emotional intelligence subroutines that shouldn’t even exist in a rescue’s codebase) but the implementation is utterly fucking inscrutable.

Why does she guard the downstairs when I’m cleaning carpet upstairs? System logs unclear. Threat assessment matrix proprietary. Security protocols self-assigned and apparently non-negotiable.

I’ll be honest with you—sometimes I tell her, in that high-pitched voice you use with dogs and babies and people you love who can’t parse semantic content: “You know, sweet girl, some houses would’ve returned you. You’re running defective software. But we know you’re a rare specimen.”¹

And then I give her bologna.

Because here’s the thing about loving the weird Linux fork after fifteen years with Windows 95: you can’t go back to simple. You can’t un-learn how to read system logs. Rogue taught me that love could be easy, just this clean exchange of affection and treats and daily walks. Wilco teaches me that love is also—maybe primarily—choosing to understand the incomprehensible architecture, the mysterious background processes, the threat assessments that make perfect sense to her but look like absolute madness from the outside.

She checks in on me after wrestling 150-pound monsters at the dog park. This isn’t normal dog behavior. This is custom emotional intelligence code that some previous developer (the universe? trauma? genetic lottery?) patched in, and I don’t understand it but I recognize optimization when I see it.

Last week I filed my 300th Access to Information request. I’m currently arguing with the Canadian government about surveillance logs. I’ve got Federal Court cases pending that hinge on whether institutions can reasonably claim they didn’t look at my website when the server logs say they absolutely fucking did.

Of course I got the dog running mysterious security protocols.

Of course she guards empty rooms against threats only she can perceive.

Of course I tell her she’s defective and then immediately give her processed meat products as reassurance.

We’re both just trying to make sense of systems that refuse to explain themselves, her from her downstairs security post, me from my SKÅDIS pegboard workshop with too many 3D printers and a growing collection of federal court documents.

The difference is she’s better at it than I am.

She just guards. Doesn’t file motions. Doesn’t write blog posts. Just takes her position and watches the perimeter and occasionally wrestles something enormous and then checks if I’m okay.

Windows 95 was beautiful because it was simple.

This weird Linux fork is beautiful because it isn’t.

¹ She can’t understand the propositional content but she absolutely understands the prosody, the eye contact, the bologna. Which is the only layer that matters to her anyway. DFW would probably point out—and he’d be right, the bastard—that this makes the “joke” more for me than for her, which raises interesting questions about whether I’m processing grief or power dynamics or just the fundamental absurdity of the rescue narrative when the dog clearly runs the household. Gibson would just describe the bologna as “meat-pink, glistening with the sinister sheen of industrial food production, a cylinder of compressed desire.” Bukowski would say I’m overthinking it and pour another drink.