I Love Shopping

The following is an excerpt of I Love Shopping by Lauren Cook, forthcoming from Nightboat Books on April 8, 2025.

I am the dog of a beautiful person. I am a small dog, with a robust body. When you tap on the side of me I make a good noise. I have a cute and sweet face. My breath smells bad, but I have a very endearing personality. The beautiful person loves me. I love them too. I love everyone I meet. I am a dog and I get what I need from the people around me so, I am ok. I feel full of love all the time. I try to spread that love as often as I can.

I do not know how long I have been alive. I don’t really remember what has happened to me before this moment except in feeling. I know the range of emotions I can feel. I can remember the pain of the bad time. But I cannot remember faces. It is like when you can only remember the feeling of a dream, how it made you feel. Everything is simultaneously old and new with me. I respond to what is in front of me. My first response and reaction is love. I love to eat and sleep and to be close to my friends.

Here is my kinky roleplay:

I am an honest person. I am not ashamed of myself, the things I do, the things I create. This makes my life very easy to live. I do not have to lie or withhold truth from the people I love and who love me. I just get up and live my truth. I am a nice person who does decent things. I mind my business. I find happiness in small things. It is very easy for me. I love my morning coffee. I love the sunrise and the sunset. I love to go on weekend vacations with my friends. These things make me happy. When the sun sets at night, a deep feeling of anxiety does not wash over me. I am very lucky and happy. When people say nice things about me, I hear them and they soak into me. I have everything I need in this life.

My crazy idea is that evolutionarily there is some benefit to being materialistic because something developed in our brains to make us enjoy acquiring objects because of hunting and gathering...like it would be an evolutionary benefit to enjoy collecting objects because we have to collect food and feel attracted to food in the same way animals are....so we like shopping because shopping replaced foraging...just a theory though.

Betrayal mix

I’m having fun eating saltines

On New Years Eve of 2014-2015 I saw Lindsay Lohan in Chinatown. It was a good year. She was in a black SUV and I was on the sidewalk and she had her window rolled down.

On New Year’s Eve of 2016-2017 I saw a raccoon eating persimmons out of a tree in someone’s backyard. Both of these things feel the same to me and mean the same thing. 🛍️

I 🤎 DIRT