This is a perfect opportunity to start writing again. What happened this morning, I mean. It’s really just one page from a book of morning shenanigans that go on in my 700 square-foot apartment daily, those events that unfold from the fog of sleep, before squinted eyes and hair standing on-end. Here’s what happened first: Natalie had to carry the dog down to Jared, the owner of what I like to call a dog school. It’s not a school in the technical sense, which is to say you don’t (if you are a dog) go to this place and learn things. You go there and sniff the asses of dozens of other dogs and…well I really don’t know what else you’d do, run around in circles among them I suppose. There are people who are so curious to know exactly what goes on in places like this that kennels aim web cameras at the dogs and hook them up to web sites where curious owners can spend hours they might otherwise be doing some drudgery at the office learning exactly whatever the hell it is their dog does at the dog school. I call it the dog school because, even though I’ve never peeked through a web-cam eye to keep tabs, in my imagination it is a place that incorporates many of the same social phenomena (anxieties) that I once was surrounded by in grammar school. Trying unsuccessfully to make friends with certain dogs you think are cool, or hot, unsuccessfully avoiding others. Rejection both ways. A fair amount of fighting. And I also feel sort of like the father of a dysfunctional child when I take my fifteen pound dog, who looks more than a little like the head of a mop, downstairs and walk him to the bus. Yes, there is a bus. Jared shows up at my house driving a dog school bus, with all the other kids in back. And yes, my kid is dysfunctional.
One of the ways he’s dysfunctional is that he squirms quite a bit when he’s the least bit annoyed. You’ll try and pick him up, because that’s what you do with little dogs, and he’ll flop around like a fish, most closely mimicking the fish’s violent back-and-forth head motion when removed from water. You have to clamp down with your elbow and squash his ribs a bit, and if you don’t get him just right, he’ll wiggle right out of your grasp. Even Jared, the owner of the dog school, who is so highly trained in all-things-dog that I think he might actually be a dog in a human suit, couldn’t hold onto him a few days ago when Spike was doing his fish routine and flipped or flopped out of Jared’s clutches and fell on the top of an open cage door (this is the Time Out Cage, which I could explain, but “time out” is a pretty universal concept and let’s just say Spike spends a decent amount of time in there). The cage door had a small piece of metal protruding upwards which I assume was the latch (I constructed all of this in my mind as Jared described it over the phone) and Spike tore himself up pretty good. He earned a nice long gash on his stomach, that little area inside his leg that I’d probably call the “leg pit” if you want me to be specific. The gash was worthy of a half-dozen stitches and a “drainage tube.”
(The drainage tube is bizarre to me, mainly because I’m not a veterinarian. The idea is to allow for all of the foul substances that accumulate in a wound to drain out of it, which makes sense, except that the tube is open to the air. It’s an open little tunnel that leads right up into the center of the wound! How does this work?)
This all happened on Monday evening, while I was in class over at the school for humans, which meant that Natalie had to go over to the dog hospital and pick up Spike by herself. Spike wasn’t doing his fish routine when she picked him up because he’d had a fair amount of downers pumped into him for the stitching procedure. Imagine if they hadn’t done that, drugged him up I mean. Spike surely would have gotten a stitch in his ear and one in his tail.
But he snapped out of his grogginess upon arriving home and perked up enough to be in a lot of pain and give Natalie a hell of time as she tried to clamp him with her elbow and get him to swallow a pill of some kind. (By the way, haven’t they come up with some other way to get antibiotics or whatever else into a dog besides a large pill? How the heck is anyone supposed to get a dog to swallow a bad-tasting pill? I suppose you could lube it with Vaseline and then poke it into the back of his throat, but come on, even if you’re the dog’s owner and you’ve established you’re on the Alpha end of your hierarchical relationship, you don’t really want to go poking your hand into a mouth full of sharp teeth do you? And try and cram a bad-tasting pill down there, while the dog gags and his eyes water? I mean, if he decided he didn’t want to do that as much as I didn’t want to take cough syrup when I was a kid he could easily give me three or four puncture wounds. He could effectively make sure I NEVER tried that again. And we’re in the twenty-first century now, and we’re listening to huge libraries of music stored on devices the size of credit cards with no moving parts, I mean, couldn’t they come up with a gel or a liquid with a little bit of bacon grease in it? How about an antibiotics-infused milk bone? Anyone who wants to market this, you can have that idea for free).
We’re cooking with gas now, aren’t we? Are you still wondering what the hell happened to me this morning? It’s really not even that big a deal now, you’re going to get to the end of the story scratching your head. But it’s funny to me, so here it is. What happened was, Natalie went to take the dog down to Jared who was waiting downstairs, not in the dog bus, but in his own car. Jared showed up to chauffeur Spike personally to the dog school—not so Spike could play with the other kids, obviously, not with that sewed-up gash on his stomach. For not only would Spike be in danger of opening the gash again, but the other kids would certainly make fun of him if not be entirely freaked out by him. That’s because Spike is now wearing a lampshade. I’m sure you’ve seen this before—although they’re commonplace I still can’t get over how absurd lampshade-wearing animals look—but Spike’s rig is not just a typical lampshade. The problem was that he was wiggling out of the lampshade; we couldn’t keep it on his head. So we tried this inflatable inner-tube looking collar (picture a circular life preserver around his neck), which would have been fine except that it didn’t work at all and he chewed his stitches clean off and we had to take him back to the dog hospital. Seriously. Finally Jared innovated a combination inner-tube lampshade, first the inner-tube, then the lampshade, which fits into the tube, so that together they form what looks to me like a bicycle horn. One of those things clowns are always honking at the circus. Spike’s head is in the bell of the horn, of course. Dog lampshades are absurd, but this contraption is so ridiculous I feel humiliated just looking at him. And even this getup almost doesn’t work. When he reaches around to chew his stitches he can nearly reach them, he can probably even taste them if he extends his tongue enough. But it does the job. And so Natalie was carrying a dog’s body with a clown horn where his head should be downstairs to the waiting Jared and his dog limousine this morning at around 7:00 am.
It’s important to mention that it was particularly cold this morning. With global warming, the perpetual el Niño, we don’t have as many cold days as we used to. I don’t mean chilly days, I mean crack-your-teeth cold days. Seems like we just get a handful of them. Well this was one of them. It was make-your-eyes water cold. When the wind blew, you felt your skin tightening and maybe crinkling as if it were being vacuum sealed.
Natalie learned this first, with the horn-headed dog in her arms. She was still wearing her pajamas, she didn’t even put on a robe. She was dressed like that because (A) she didn’t know it was freezing before she went downstairs, (B) she thought she’d just pop outside really quick and hand the dog off to Jared, and (C) she’s ever so slightly lazy when it comes to small things like this. (She’s a tiny fraction as lazy as I am, it’s true, it’s true, but when it comes to the labor of something like getting bundled up for a brief trip outside she would never ever do it. Natalie doesn’t do chores under any other circumstances than when she absolutely has to, which is more than a small reason why I love her). At any rate, put yourself in her slippers and imagine how she felt when she rang the bell to be let back into the building—huff, huff, *breath steaming* it’s cold out here, huff, huff, *pressing buzzer* what’s taking him so long? *pressing buzzer again*—and no one let her in. I didn’t buzz her in because I was standing under a piping hot shower, contemplating something deep like my toe hair. Man, a good hot shower first thing on a winter morning sure feels good doesn’t it? I mean, is there anything better? It brings the blood to the surface of your skin, gets your circulation going and opens your eyes a bit and that hot massage on the back of your neck… It truly is one of the best things in life. This morning I lingered in the shower for an extra while, I just didn’t want to get out. When I finally did I heard this unwavering, high-pitched ring that I thought might be the smoke alarm. Or was it the buzzer of the timer on the stove, which you will accidentally set if you bump it with the coffee pot.
It took me a while to realize it was Natalie outside in her PJ’s with her forefinger frozen to the buzzer.
This is how things go around here.
