The Wonders of Gerard

Sometimes I massage my dog’s intestines through the gentle rub of his furry belly in order to find out whether he truly has to go to the bathroom or if rather, he is just playing me.  We have a strange relationship, Gerard and I. 

Some people say he looks like me.  I suppose they are correct; we are both small, he is a French Bulldog, we have quirky personalities, and have enticing eyes – for him, his eyes attract people’s attention because they appear to be bulging forth from his smushed face, while for me, my eyes attract people because my eyelashes are rather preposterously long.  I guess the only major difference between Gerard and I, besides the fact that he is a dog, is that he is black and I am a partly Filipino, partly bunch-of-other-ethnicities human. 

Little do most people know, Gerard rocks the Polar Bear Thing; he’s black with white fur.  Hence, whenever people call Gerard the little white dog, I usually have to hold back bursts of laughter erupting from my stomach because of the innocent misconception.

This past year, I wanted to play on the fact that most people misconceive Gerard for another race, so I made him an Instagram.  Little did I know, that this halfhearted, almost satirical play on the app itself would become such a wholehearted, inspiring endeavor. 

When I first started Gerard’s Instagram, I predominantly posted strange pictures where Gerard’s sever under bite was astonishingly perceptible or where he looked like a furry, asthmatic demon because I had photographed him with flash on after he had gone on a long walk.  Yet, as weeks passed by and his account made headway, I had a ridiculous idea.  I would revamp Gerard’s pictures and use them for my IB Art Journal, under the storyline that he was a French immigrant trying to culturally appropriate to Western life.

And so, in order to make the pictures appropriate for IB Art, I started to really get into maintaining Gerard’s Instagram.  I began posing Gerard up against a grey wall, taking stylistically enhanced photographs, casting certain shadows across the point of view, and applying a specific concoction of filters onto the nearly finished product.  And then, as if the universe wanted to play a satirical joke back on me, people all over the world seemed to respond to Gerard’s new, artsy Instagram.  Gerard was making friends in California, South Korea, Argentina, and many more amazing, distant lands.

These friendly followers rapidly began to amount to something huge, and Gerard’s Instagram quickly became more famous than all of my family member’s Instagrams combined.  Gerard achieved such a degree of fame, that he actually became an affiliate and representative of not one, but two pet companies, Animal Hearted and Outward Hound. 

I was in shock, as was my family.  I could never have imagined that the images I was using as an angst-filled joke against society and for my high school art journal would become appreciated by my dog lovers all over the world. 

I suppose in the end, it was not the people who assumed Gerard identified as white that had made the largest misconception – it was me.  I had doubted that Gerard’s Instagram would become anything – that it would merely remain a joke known by a few close friends and me.  Deep down, I guess I had assumed that something I could make at this point in my life would ever amount to something as large and wondrous as Gerard’s account became. 

Boy did I learn a lesson. 

   - J. A. Kind