Getting On With It

I was talking to my therapist last week about acting, which I sort of do, and he and I were exploring the possibility of it one day (far, far away) becoming more than just an amateur, "sometimes" pursuit, and making it a professional, bread-and-butter pursuit, since it's really the only thing I'm reasonably sure I do well, and it's definitely the only thing for which I'm qualified.

"How do you reconcile, though, what I think is your core belief about acting," he asked me, astutely crossing his legs and cocking his head slightly in the manner of an inquisitive Border Collie, "that it's vainglorious and indulgent?"

"Well," I said, "it is.  But, I suppose, if one is going to make the decision to pursue it professionally, you kind of have to just get over that and get on with it."

I feel that way about writing, too.  It can be purported to be done for the writer's own demon-wrestling purposes, but I think we all know I'm after the comments.

(Gimme.)

While the twins are napping, there are other things I could be doing.  I could be dusting the... thing in the dining room.  I could do dishes, wash bottles, clean the high chair trays, prepare lunch, organize... things.  But here I am, at the computer, writing.  Writing for the first time since we put our sad old dog to sleep.  That pain and that loss has subsided some over the weeks-- has it been months?  I don't even know.  But, after I'd dressed the babies this morning, and we were playing around with toys on the bed, as I was tickling my daughter's foot, I caught myself thinking about Finley.  My wife gets triggered when she sees a dog, who maybe looks like him, or maybe doesn't, around the neighborhood, or when she sees a "Science Diet" commercial on TV.  That stuff doesn't strike me in quite the same way.  Finley comes to me at random, quiet moments, times where his rough panting would have been the background noise, times where I wish that the babies, who are far more interactive, could have spent more time with him.

There's a lot of things I wish for, and most of those things center around time, and wishing I had more of it.  More time to spend with my wife and children.  More time away from work.  More time for writing.  I've been working every other weekend, that's Saturday and Sunday from 7am-3pm, friends, for more than two years now, and I'm so tired of having my weekend family time halved like a grapefruit.  I'm so sick of cramming things into my weekends "off" (you don't really have time "off" anymore when you have children, for those of you who don't and consequently don't know) and I'm fed up with disappointing my wife, who, good fortune be praised, actually likes it when I'm home.

That fact is part of what's stopped me, incidentally, from writing more-- either on this blog or as part of something else.  When I'm home, and the babies have gone to bed at 7:00 and I know we have to be in bed by 10ish or I'll be a drooling idiot at work the next day, and there are lunches and bottles and wash to prepare for the next day, how can I reasonably justify excusing myself from my love's presence while I shutter myself away in the office for an hour clacking away at the keyboard?  To be honest, I know that, if she really believed it was important to me, she wouldn't mind, but I can't justify it to myself.  I guess it's too vainglorious and indulgent after all.  I even feel guilty doing it while the babies are napping and there's no dog to walk anymore.  If I close my eyes for a moment, though, I can visualize all the dishes and bottles in the sink, and they're calling to me.

The babies are probably going to wake up soon.  There's so much in my head that I want to talk about-- no, write about.  I hate talking.  My voice is flat and heady and boring, and my words come out in a jumble of sleep-deprived fits and starts and half-cocked ideas and trailing off sentiments.  I want to write about politics (sort of) and George Takei Facebook bullshit and memories and dreams and my family but I don't really think I know them anymore so what would I say anyway and the mess in the basement and the crawling and the teething and the changing and the graying and the rolling and the tolling of the bells bells bells and I want to connect-- with you, I suppose-- and that's what we all want, isn't it?  Your time, your thoughts, your attention.  If you give me your attention, I will tell you what I am:

I am the very model of a modern major-general.

I am the monarch of the sea.

I have a song to sing, O!

I am a writer, I suppose.  One who writes.  I string words and thoughts and phrases and ideas together and I give you paragraphs and periods and you make of it what you will, and I like that.  I think I do.  I really think I like that.  If you give me two numbers and ask me to put them together, I will give you a fucking mess in return.  But words I can cope with.  I'll take words for eight hundred, Alex.

No, a thousand.

Give me a thousand: I have twins to feed.  

Fortunately, It's Just Something Else

When I was writing on this blog every single day for, um, for a very long time, it was inconceivable that there would come a time when I would write perhaps once a month.  Now that this time has arrived, it is inconceivable to me, now, that there was a time-- a very long time-- in my life where I wrote on this blog every single day.

Life; you're a real croquet mallet to the taint, aren't you?

I've been getting a lot of croquet mallets to the taint lately which, of course, doesn't make me special or martyred, it just makes me like everyone else.  I got rejected from a prospective job, my car that I bought three weeks ago started bucking like a horse and needed a repair that, if it hadn't been covered under warranty, would have cost $4,000-$5,000 to fix.  My dog died.  Work sucks.  And I haven't slept in approximately two years.  Yes, I know the twins are only 8 months old, but I count the time my wife was pregnant and thrashed around in bed in discomfort night after night, keeping me awake, and tack on another year of anxiety-ridden nightmares and evenings spent staring at the ceiling fan.

I tell people that I haven't slept since 1984, which was the year I finally understood that my mommy and daddy weren't going to live forever.  They say there's truth in every joke, and, if you look at pictures of me at around that age, there are black rings under my youthful, sparkly little eyes.

I'm emotionally drained and physically exhausted.  The heat around here has barely let up in two months and I struggle to keep my eyes open during the day-- they're all dried out from the excessive dependence on decades old window air conditioning units that struggle and wheeze like a COPD patient huffing and puffing to walk ten feet.  I need oxygen.  I need... something.

My dog needed something, too.  He needed something more than pills, something more than Glucosamine-rich food.  He needed something more than time and care and love.  He needed a miracle, and you can just ask the Catholic Church how short they are on those these days.  We kept him going longer than we should have, longer than was humane.  Did you know your vet can put your dog on the canine equivalent of hospice care?  Well, they can, if you're cowardly enough to go along with it.

We were.  For a couple long, sad weeks at any rate.

I knelt down on the floor of that tiny little room-- no bigger than our twins' nursery-- and I held him and stroked his thick, gray fur and I thought to myself, this is the most I've touched you in months.  And I felt sick.  I just kept rubbing his head and all the way down his back, as clumps of his fur came off in my hand and fluttered to the floor.  I was fine at reception.  I was fine talking to the vet tech.  I was fine when they brought him back in, the catheter inserted in his arm, like a condemned green mile prisoner deposited into the chamber.  When the vet came in and asked if I had any questions, my throat became thick and I shut my eyes and tears sprayed onto my glasses.

"How long will it take?" I asked.  I was surprised he understood the question, because what I heard was utterly unintelligible, but I guess a lot of people must ask that.

"Not very long at all, maybe a minute or two."

"Jesus," I said.

The Propofol went in first.  Goodnight, Finley.  His breathing had become so loud and harsh and raspy, cagey, throaty, labored, awful in the past year-- it was everywhere I walked.  When we would be upstairs and the baby monitor would be on downstairs, all it would pick up was his breathing-- like a lumberjack sawing through a stubborn oak.  I close my eyes and I can still hear it.  His head thunked on the blanket covering the floor in seconds and his tongue fell out lazily.  I stared at it, and I was shocked at how repulsed I was by the sight of it-- undignified, disorganized, vulgar.  I wanted to push it back into his mouth, like the doctor who put the coins over Lincoln's eyes, but I couldn't move.  The phenobarbital came next and fast-- the overdose.  The end.  Dr. Peters put the Littmann on Finley's chest and said,

"His heart's stopped."

His heart.  My heart.  I still could hear the relentless clatter of his breath.  Only I could hear it, I guess.

I'm so tired and run down these days I haven't had time to grieve or process or anything-- I suppose that's what this is.  This blog used to be the place I would come to and sort out life's idiocies and its beauties, where I could make fun of the world and myself, where I could come to identify with that part of me that still clung desperately to the notion that I was a writer in some way.  Now, I don't know what it is, or why it is.

I still can't get over how fast it happened.  He was fourteen-- eighty-eight in people years.  He was my first dog ever and, at 32, I come downstairs in the morning and I don't know what to do.  Make coffee, I suppose.  The English make tea-- the half-Israelis make coffee.  We have hairy arms and hot tempers and we drink coffee and we get on with it.  While taking a walk today with my father's sister who is visiting from Australia, I lost one of the baby's hats.  It's somewhere, on some street in our neighborhood somewhere-- some sidewalk.  I pushed them in the stroller while they slept and my 70-year-old aunt with her squeaky voice and her artsy glasses followed diligently a half-step behind us.  She casually mentioned that, in the early 70s, she fell in love with a cousin of hers and, when he was arranged-married off to someone else, she overdosed on pills to try to kill herself.  I wanted to stop pushing the stroller and turn to her and scream,

"WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN YOU TRIED TO KILL YOURSELF?!  ALL DAY LONG I WORK WITH ASSHOLES LIKE THAT-- WHAT ARE YOU TELLING ME?"

But I just said, "uh-huh-- wow" and kept pushing the stroller along, petrified that, if I stopped and thought about it, it would become real.  Something to deal with, a thing to confront.  Fortunately, it's just something else to write about.

That's all.

The Long, Slow End

Right now, there is a dog upstairs with me in the office as I type out these words. Her name is Molly. We call her Molly McButter, because, really, she basically looks like a stick of butter. When we adopted her from the Morris Animal Refuge, she was called "Miley", but we weren't going to have that happy horseshit. So we changed it. She didn't get it for a little while, but then, she did.

Right now, there is another dog in this house, but Finley isn't upstairs with me in the office. He's downstairs, in the living room. Incessant panting and sporadic yelps that echo up the staircase indicate that Finley wants to be up here in the office with me and Molly (well, okay, probably just with me) but it seems that Finley's upstairs days are over. On Thursday night, for the first time since he came bounding stupidly into my life in March of 2003, he and passed an evening on different floors of the same home.

If you could affix a lighted taxi sign to his hind quarters, it would flash "Out-of-Service". His back legs just aren't functioning anymore. They are atrophied, quivering shadows of their former selves. In the morning, he cannot rise up of his own strength. I have to scoop my hands underneath his big old gray butt and force him to stand up, while he tries to brace himself on his two front legs, which are going, too. I won't pretend that, once, I didn't accidentally shove my finger into his cornhole. I washed my hands five times that morning, but that finger smelled for hours.

Recently, the situation has crept perilously towards untenable, especially considering the impossible-to-blink fact that we've got twins on the way, and they are going to require scads of our time and attention, and having an ailing, failing dog on our hands, who is miserable, unpredictable, frequently unmovable, is, well, troubling.

On Friday, I thought Mrs. Apron and I were taking him to the vet for the last time, and that all we would return with was a leash. But that didn't happen, partly because Mrs. Apron declared herself unready to part with our big, gray friend. Partly because the vet encouraged us to try a last-ditch effort of Tramadol, anti-inflammatories, a new diet, and glucosamine supplements.

Is this going to reverse the damage that 13 (or is it 14, or is it 15?) years have done to deteriorate this dog's muscle tone, will it reverse or at least stabilize the probably severe joint pain he is enduring at every moment? I don't know. I have lots of doubts but, really, I don't know.

And maybe I'm a coward for not insisting that Finley be put to sleep in our arms as we sat on the floor of the vet's office and cried ourselves blind, like so many other dedicated and foolish and lovestruck pet owners have done before us, and will continue to do after-- but I don't know about that either.

I suppose that every pet owner ends up writing something like this, sooner or later, or, at least, they think about it. They feel it. They go through it. This is something you must go through as someone who loves an animal. I've owned a dog since 2003, but I've never gone through this-- the end.

The long, slow end.

I don't know what this is supposed to look like, all I know is what it's supposed to feel like. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing, to protect my dog, to protect my wife, to protect myself. I don't know if I am to follow doctor's advice, or defy it.

In her post about this, my wife went back in her memory and shared on her blog memories of Finley, from when he was young and spry and fun.

I can't do that. I won't let myself go there. It's rather the same way that I won't take out old pictures of my wife and I, when we were new to each other-- not because we were happy then and we aren't now, but because I'm too afraid of looking back. When I was a boy, I would bring my baby album to my mother, climb up on the couch with her and say, "Mommy, let's reminisce." I had a vague notion, I suppose, of what the word meant, but I didn't realize that you can't really reminisce until you've grown old enough to experience memories in a more tremulous, fragile and, oftentimes, painful way. When you get older, I guess, there is that knowledge that what's passed cannot be repeated-- not the expression or the sentiment or the emotion or the circumstance. You can look at wedding pictures and you can even go back to the place where you got married, and it can feel good, and it can feel sweet, but it will never feel the same way it did on October 22nd, 2006-- it just won't.

And you can go back to the dog park, too. But Finley has to stay in the living room.

Let's Reminisce

If you are fortunate enough to be blessed with a dog, or perhaps even twice blessed with two, then you know the axiom, "Let sleeping dogs lie," isn't just something clever to say.

It's not even that clever.

A sleeping dog is a beautiful, taciturn thing. Well, okay-- sometimes it can be a grotesque thing, I'll admit. When Finley sleeps, all 68 pounds of him, he thrashes and twitches and snores with all of the feverish intensity of a gored ox. He looks quite epileptic, as all of his limbs erratically jut about, and it seems improbable that he's enjoying any peace at all. Of course, the optimist might say that he's dreaming about himself as a puppy, twelve or thirteen years ago, gallivanting about and racing through the imagined fields of his youth, with unbridled exuberance and glee.

Oh, my darling. Oh, my pet.

Molly asleep is a thing of beauty. Of course, she's pretty stunning when awake, if you don't mind me fawning and falling all over my own dog, but asleep she is magic. When she curls up onto your lap or falls asleep on your chest, there is just nothing in the world like it. The moments before she falls asleep are edible. She will brace herself up on my chest with her forepaw and stare into my eyes, struggling to keep her little head up, as if to say, "Why? Why are we not in bed yet? I... I don't understand." And her eyes will close of their own volition, slowly, and the head will droop, and that'll be that. Her breath makes a gentle whooshing noise, soft and warm, and she's quite gone.

But, life goes on around her. The dryer buzzes and demands attention, we have to get up from the couch to make lunches for tomorrow, the remote slides out from under the blanket and falls onto the hardwood floor, and the beige head and the gray head jerk up. Canine slumber is disturbed. And it's our own little domestic tragedy.

As a general rule, I try to let sleeping dogs lie in my own personal life, too. If there is a situation from the past that caused me grief or pain, I try my best to let it go, to not hold onto anger or sadness over things that happened that I cannot change. I try not to seek people out from the annals of my own personal history and pick up old fights or rehash careworn arguments. Likewise, I'm not someone who especially likes to engage in the nostalgia effect, either. Recently, my wife found a bunch of quite-forgotten about photographs (you know, actual ones-- like, that were developed in a drug store) of she and I when our relationship was younger than it is now.

"These will make you pretty schmoopie," she said, offering me the packet.

"But, I'm already schmoopie," I replied, looking deeply into her eyes.

I don't know what it is, but I just don't want to go there. And so I didn't. I didn't look. The packet of photos sits on top of a green filing cabinet in our office, leaning up against a sewing kit my mother bought Mrs. Apron for her birthday a year or so ago. I guess I just like to let sleeping dogs lie, even if they're nice dogs. Good dogs.

Stay.

I wasn't always this way, of course.

"Mommy," I used to say, "let's reminisce about when I was a boy."

I couldn't have been more than ten or eleven when I would make this request. And my mother would dutifully pull out the photo album that held the images of a long-ago time when a small boy with a large head absolutely covered with long, fine strands of light brown, almost reddish hair could wear a luridly-hued striped shirt beneath Osh-Kosh overalls-- with bell-bottoms.

And my mother and I would leaf through these pages together, in her bed or on the living room sofa.

Me as a doctor for Halloween-- 1986. My father had carefully applied a felt red cross to the breast pocket of a white button down shirt of mine. I wore a brown clip-on necktie, green pants, and in my hand I clutched a plastic, tan briefcase used to house colored markers. A large red cross, also in felt, was emblazoned upon the briefcase. I looked at the camera with a gaze of utter seriousness, as if I were about to perform a craniotomy on one of my stuffed penguins.

My birthday, 1987. I had just opened a package that contained a beautiful white teddy bear, dressed in a black vest and topped with a black bowler hat. I named him "Oliver," after Oliver Hardy. Of course.

There are others, yeah, just like there are in the albums of your past. I could go on, but I kind of like to let sleeping dogs lie.

As I blogged about a little while ago, last month I capitulated and joined modern society and bought myself a new BlackBerry Curve, letting AT&T put a choke-chain on my soul for another two years. It's not that bad and, sometimes, when they tug on it in just the right way, it feels kinda good. The phone plays the theme from "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" when people call, it shows pictures of my family and my friends when they call, it browses the internet with startling speed and efficiency, it keeps my text conversations in that charming little bubble format, and it sends my Gmails, my Yahoos, and my texts and my Facebook updates right to my pocket where, evidently, they all belong.

In short, in matters vegetable, animal and mineral, my phone does everything I want it to do.

It also does something I don't want it to do.

Every now and then, the phone will blip, indicating that I have an email from my Yahoo account. And I'll look.

Sender: Dave B.

The first time it happened, my heart absolutely stopped. It was as if a voice were calling to me from the dead. Not dead, of course. Just from long ago and far away. My former best friend, who stopped speaking to me-- what is it-- almost three years ago now? It's hard to remember.

And I mean that.

I was utterly confused and frightened and sad-- why could he be contacting me all of a sudden? What did he want from me? Why is it that when I'm about ready to put him behind me this stupid motherfucking piece of fake chrome and plastic boops to announce his return? And then I looked closer.

Send Date: April 22, 2006

In the past month, three old emails from Dave have popped up on my phone, all from 2006-- maybe the height of the powerful friendship we shared together for so many years. One email, also from 2006, popped up just a couple days ago-- from the florist we hired to create the flowers for our wedding. And, as touching a memory as reading that one way, I deleted all four emails, because, sometimes, this dog just wants to sleep.

Chicken Toothpaste

As someone who spends a significant portion of time with delusional individuals, I am sometimes unsure about whether I am delusional myself.

You know-- I'll think I hear someone calling my name, and all I'll get is a roomful of blank stares. I'll lie in bed awake at 3:06am convinced, after hearing the smallest creak, that masked gunman are going to enter our home, "Patriot Games" style and place unsolicited bullets into our brains when it's just my wife getting up to use the bathroom.

On Tuesday morning, at the vet's office I was almost convinced that I was delusional yet again when the vet advised me to commence brushing our two dogs' teeth with chicken, um, toothpaste.

Surely you jest.

"Make it a game for them, you know, make it fun!" the blonde, bearded man with the jaunty smile said as he dropped his black Littmann stethoscope on the floor. I noticed that he had an unusual amount of chest hair, for a blonde person, positively billowing out from inside his opened shirt collar.

Hmpf, I thought, if I had an issue like that, I would close up shop nice and tight and wear ties every day. Of course, that is precisely what I would do every day anyway, if I didn't work in a place where psychotic people could potentially use said neckwear to strangle me.

"Make it... fun?" I asked Dr. Furrychest, cocking my head, as a dog would.

"Sure!" he said, picking up his stethoscope and slinging it lazily over his left shoulder-- the reason it had fallen in the first place. "Put some on your finger and let your dogs go bananas over it! Then, stick some more on your finger and slide it all over their teeth."

I was so preoccupied about the impending bill that would have to be settled at the Counter of Financial Devastation in just a few minutes that I was barely listening anymore. I grew confused. What was I putting on my finger again? Was it bananas? It was getting awfully hot in that exam room.

"After a while, they'll start to look forward to tooth-brushing time!" he announced, grinning like, well, a Lab.

"Haha," I said unenthusiastically while Molly, our youngest and most impish dog jumped up on Finley, our oldest and most curmudgeonly dog's head, "that's funny."

"You may think that the idea of brushing your dogs' teeth will be like some kind of a circus, but trust me, they'll love it!"

Ah, I conceded in my head, but, will I love it?

There are plenty of things you think about when deciding to move into one neighborhood or the next. We spent three years living in the Germantown section of the city. We used to find discarded condoms and crack vials on the sidewalk in front of the house where we rented a charming and gorgeous apartment. When deciding to move into the suburbs, you think about things like real estate taxes and school systems and proximity to on-and-off ramps. You think about elementary schools for potential bobbers and whether the roof's been done in the last five years. You think about growing up and growing old. You don't necessarily think about schlepping your dogs to an upscale veterinary practice where they propose doing cardiac workups on your dog because he's had a heart murmur for the past seven years, and where they talk about funny things like chicken toothpaste.

Or was it banana toothpaste? I can't remember. The bill for both of them was $532.05, I can recall with little to no effort.

And that's no delusion, baby.

Earth, Salted

Being human, as I am, I am diligent about some things, lazy about others.

My mother and I will sometimes chat after 9:30pm and, in the wintertime, she invariably asks me if Finley and Molly have been out for "their last walk."

I put this phrase in quotes, because it is, essentially, a joke. "Their last walk" is anything but, especially when it's as cold as Witchtit, Kansas. "Their last walk" usually consists of me or Mrs. Apron opening the front door and shoving the old dog outside to urinate on the pachysandra that constitutes our front yard, and leashing up the young dog to do exactly the same. Maybe some day she will be able to go out there without a leash on, but I expect we're at least 4.5 years away.

Anyway, after nearly two years of dog pee, the pachysandra has, um, suffered. Last night, as I stood in the doorway watching Finley eliminate urine all over one section of brown schmenk that was, two years prior, vibrant and lush green pachysandra, I thought to myself, "Here I am, at 30 years old, feeling guilt over the wanton destruction of my own property." I've made it, kids. Middle age is here. Pardon me while I go trim my ear hair.

Really, though, there is a circular swath of land on the right side of our pachysandra that is wilted, brown, awful, disgusting, and it's, um, large. It calls out, "Here live two lazy shitbirds who cannot be bothered to take their dogs on a proper walk down the block because it's dark and it's cold and they really shouldn't even be allowed to have dogs anyway if this is the way they treat them and, while we're at it, they really shouldn't be able to own a house with a pachysandra lawn if this is how they treat it. Let's hang them."

We're pathetic. I mean, Jesus Christ-- it's pachysandra. One of the heartiest, most durable, most brainless-to-care-for subshrubs out there. Pachysandra's Wiki-entry refers to it as "leathery" with "coarsely-toothed" leaf margins. And yet, we've managed to assassinate it. Drenched under a relentless stream of steaming hot dog piss, the pachysandra that graces our front lawn was doomed from the moment we closed on this house. Sure, we've made improvements inside. We've stripped tons and tons of old lady wall-paper, we've put in a serious closet in the master bedroom, we've even de-Jesuified the house and put our Jew stank everywhere, but we just couldn't manage to keep that pachysandra alive. And, for the first time in my life, I am suffering from an acute case of horticultiguilt.

Seriously. We suck.

An Open Letter to My Dogs

Dear Molly & Finley,

Do you remember in "The Jerk" when the Chinese-stereotype-man advises Steve Martin, "Mister-- don't call that dog 'Lifesaver.' Call it 'Shithead.'"? There are times when I wish I could name one of you Shithead and the other Fuckface. If it weren't for the fact that we lived in suburbia, I might do it. They wouldn't care in the ghetto. I mean, look at what they call their kids.

(I know-- I'm such a racist-- but let's save that for another post.)

The two of you are really a handful. Finley, just you by yourself, with your near-constant ear infections and your allergies and your propensity to consume large quantities of soy milk and broccoli, you kept us plenty busy enough. We just didn't realize it. I can't believe that your mother and I were so passive and complacent that we thought, "Hey-- you know what we need? Another dog!"

Yeah. Two times the shedding. Two times the shitting. Two times the baggies. Two times the food. And twelve times the ennui.

Walking the two of you together is enough to send me over the edge. Finley, you walk like my great-grandmother-- just minus the diabetic knee-highs and the carpet-like muumuu. Getting you to move it along is hardly worth the effort at all. I understand that you have arthritis and cataracts, and I wish I could apply for SSI for you, but I can't. All I can do is shove Chinese firecrackers up your ass to hope we can complete a walk in under thirty-eight minutes.

Molly, you are goddamned spazztastic. I can't handle you, nor can I fathom you. One walk with you around the block and it's very easy to see why somebody would stuff you in a Moses basket and drop it in the river. That little dance you do on your hind legs resembles ballet on crystal-meth, and, if you weren't doing it to wriggle out of your harness, I might find it charming. You have ADHD. If a leaf falls from a tree, or the wind rustles through the grass, if a neighbor opens his dining room window, if someone shuts a car door, if a praying mantis rubs its raptorial legs together-- you are immediately distracted. And the poop does not exit your behind, and you are not "safe." You are not considered to be "safe" until you have urinated at least once, (twice is preferable), and you have fecefied in the out-of-door realm. Otherwise, you are not to be trusted.

Never. To be trusted. Ever.

I look at normal people with normal dogs and I am sick with envy. How do they do it? How are they not constantly wrapped up in a tangle of leashes as am I? How do they effortlessly swoop down to collect poo when I am constantly struggling against your pulling or your stay-putting, the bag turning upsidedown, spilling shit all over the sidewalk? How is it that other dogs may want to lunge at the feral cats that prowl the environs of our neighborhood, but you two vault towards the felines with all the determination of a Professional Bullriding contestant? You have almost desocketed my arm on numerous occasions just because you think you want to eat cats.

Trust me, you don't want to eat cats. If you ever got close enough to them, they would swipe the shit out of your charming little faces, and really, maybe that's just what you need.

Guys-- I don't know what to say. You're exhausting. Petty, jealous, self-involved. It's like owning two Teen Moms. And I can't imagine that would be terribly amusing-- at least, after a while. Of course I love you, but if you happened one day to score some serious downers, I probably wouldn't complain.

I know there are no solutions here, and I'm sure there are things about me and Mrs. Apron that you wish were different, too. But theyr'e not. And you're not. Just remember to come up on the bed when the temperatures plunge and keep us warm and all will be forgiven.

Unless you pee on our faces, Molly.

Sincerely,
Dad

The Elephant in the Shorehouse

At around 5:00am yesterday morning, I awoke to the uncommon sounds of our elder statesman dog, Finley, making distressed panting noises, pacing about the floor, and generally behaving in a skittish, anxious manner.

I also, coincidentally, awoke to the uncommon odor of shit which, according to David Mamet, all train compartments smell of (vaguely). Our bedroom is not supposed to smell like shit because Molly, the puppy who is currently terrorizing the very marrow out of our bones, is crated during the night, and anyone who’s ever owned a puppy will tell you that dogs will not shit in a confined space, because they know two things, instinctively:

1.) That they are not in a train compartment

and

2.) That shitting inside a small confined space is gross, because, then, you have to lie down in it.

We had been feeding our dogs the bottom-of-the-barrel dog food for a while, and noticed that their fecal output was boulder-like. After I opined about this on my blog (because I am so uber-powerful, I can get you to read posts about dog shit), a couple of my well-intentioned readers suggested cracking open ye olde wallete and pouring some decent coinage into a higher quality of dog food.

My wife and I did this. One of the bags even said, “Venison.” Folks, I’ve only eaten venison once—my fucking dogs ate it twice a day, every day for three weeks.

The results (sorry) have been mixed (sorry). Molly’s shit seems to have normalized in quantity and quality. Finley’s, well, not so much. I’ve been Finley’s master (?) since 2003, and if there’s anyone who knows anything about his ass-leavings, it is I. Finley always, always, always pees before he poops (am I really writing this?) always always always. After consuming this allegedly higher quality food, the moment we hit the grass, he’s squatting to let out some serious Number Twosies. On a quaint walk around the block, he will shit four times. It’s a good thing I’m going to the gym, or I’d never be able to lift the poop bag, with all its requisite nuggetage.

Sometimes, I’m a tad pressed for time and I don’t have time to allow Finley his four squats in a given walk. Like yesterday, for example. So, against what I know was his better judgment and preference, he laid it all out on our bedroom floor in the middle of the night. Of course, as I swung out of bed, slowly realizing what had happened, I stepped in it, because I am the guy into whose eye birds shit, and I am the kind of guy who steps into his own dog’s shit, after he says, “Oh my God, Finley just shat all over the place.”

At least, at 5:00am, I still have the presence of mind to talk like a fag.

All that said, we have secured a dog-sitter for this weekend, because we are going away. On a vacation.

Sort of.

Actually, not really.

I can’t remember if I’ve written about this or not. If I have, sue me. And, while we’re in court together hiding behind our lawyers, bite me. Actually, bite my lawyer—that’s what I’m paying that asshole for, isn’t it? Anyway, a while back, my parents were at a silent auction—the one social event they attend in a given calendar year. The grand, mega-prize was one full week at a fully-furnished beach house in Brigantine. Nobody was bidding on it, so, to grease the wheels, my father put his name, oh, and $2,000 down.

He won.

Now, in a normal, pleasant, happy world, a week at a shore house would be, you know, something nice. The Gilbertian, topsy-turvy twist in this particular world of Apronism is that nobody, and I mean nobody in my family wants anything to do with it. In fact, up until a couple weeks ago, my father was ardently trying to sell the week at the shore to, well, anybody. Nobody wanted it because, apparently, it is cursed-- with our blood. This auction was won in January, and nobody in my family would speak about the details until, oh, last month. It was such a taboo subject that we were actually directed not to discuss it when coming to my parents’ house for dinner.

So we didn’t.

Nobody even knew which fucking week it was until the beginning of July. This, kids, is how we roll.

Anyway, my wife really wants to go. I was dicked out of a week’s worth of vacation at my current job (it will end August 27, and I am not permitted to take any days off until the termination of my job—after which, I can have all the days off I want— woot!) and my wife has lots of time off, but may be changing jobs, so that’s all up in the air. A weekend in Brigantine, with my parents and, potentially, both of my sisters and my sister’s husband and their baby, and now quite possibly my deadbeat uncle, alcoholic aunt and their college-aged twin daughters could be in the offing.

In the words of Gandhi: this does not tickle my wickle.

Regardless of its wickle-tickling properties, I have had to resort to asking a coworker to dog-sit for us. She recently acquired a puppy (which she had potty-trained in a week. Yes, a week. Can you smell the jealousy-pie cooling on the window?) and was, therefore, in my mind, ultra-qualified to take care of our canines. I asked her if she would do this for us on Monday, and she told me she would think about it. She walked up to me at work yesterday morning and stood in front of me without saying anything.

“Oh my God,” I said, “this is where you’re going to reject me, isn’t it?”

She smiled and said, “No, no, no—I’ll do it.”

I was flabbergasted. Stunned. Slackjawed. I actually almost cried.

“I just wish… we were actually going someplace where we were going to enjoy ourselves,” was all I could think of to say. She gave me a comforting rub on the shoulder and said,

“I know. Just try to have a good time.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You, too.”

When a Dog Enters Your Life...

Finley padded awkwardly into my life well over six years ago now. I had never owned anything larger, furrier or cuter than a guinea pig before, but I know I will always be a dog owner.

He's a funny little bastard. Tonight, my wife and I were giggling as we watched him consume his dinner lazily on his belly, like an opium-hazed prostitute. I'll bet you didn't know that's how opium-hazed prostitutes consume their dinners. Well, that's why you come to My Masonic Apron, isn't it-- for the edumacation?

Of course, owning a dog isn't all giggles and opium. It's hard work, too. Why, just the other day I picked up his feces. Twice!

Dog ownership is nothing if not expensive, as any dog owner who does more with his dog than lock him in the basement knows. It's even expensive if you ignore half of what the veterinarian says, like that echocardiogram and sonic ultrasound we were supposed to get for Finley. Hmmm... pass.

And then there are those legendary dog farts. Finley's, I feel, are especially eye-watering because of his specific dietary supplements. Evidently, dog food mixed with soy milk and broccoli has a remarkably high sulphur yield. I have had my nostril-hair singed off on more than one occasion by his ass-puckering stenchlettes.

Finley's especially nice to have around in the wintertime, when his fur-laden, elevated body temperature, 70 pound mass cuddles up against us in the frigid night. In the summertime, I kind of forget why we have him sometimes. Until, of course, I catch a glimpse of those beautiful, shimmering green eyes staring up at me with that soulful look that says, "Daddy, I Can Haz Soy Milk?"

You might think that the worst part about owning a dog is the vet bills. Or the stenchlettes. But it's neither of these things. It's the people you encounter when you're out and about with your dog. As Sartre so eloquently and succinctly said, "Hell is other people." It's certainly not dogs.

If you dislike people, you might be tempted to go get a dog. But beware, your contact with people will only increase after you acquire the canine, because they attract people. If you want to repel people, get a Fran Dresher and walk her around your neighborhood. Trust me, no one will bother you. Get a dog, though, and they won't stop coming near you, and they won't shut the fuck up.

In case you couldn't tell, I'm not really that into people. I didn't realize that my human-to-human contact levels would be significantly on the rise after I acquired Finley. Had I known this would happen, I might have reconsidered this new relationship. Before I got Finley, people generally knew instinctively to stay away from me when I was out walking around. I kind of skulk when I walk. I usually have my hands thrust deep into my pockets, my head is thrown forward like an aggressive hood ornament, my brow is furrowed as if I were concentrating on something (I'm usually not) and I walk at an inordinately rapid clip, whether I have somewhere important to be or not. Needless to say, I'm not the kind of person you'd see on the street and say "hi!" to. You'd be too concerned I might give you the finger or start yelling at you in some Arabic tongue.

Now that I have Finley, the scowl and the brow don't seem to deter anybody from accosting me with some time-wasting greeting, a blather or two about the weather, or an inane question or ill-conceived comment about the dog. I never know how to respond to these questions or statements, and I always end up saying something stupid because I'm embarrassed for them. I'm embarrassed that 6 year old children and 65-year-old retirees come up to me and ask "Is he a boy or a girl?"

I always want to answer-- "Why do you want to know? Are you single?"

I mean-- what the fuck is the difference to you whether my dog is a boy or a girl? I realize that there's not much you can reasonably ask about a dog ("Does he have all his original teeth?" sounds very strange) but, why do you have to ask anything at all? When you see someone walking with their spouse, you wouldn't stop them and go, "Hi-- do you believe all this rain we've been getting? Man! So, are you guys married or are you just fuck-buddies?" I mean, seriously-- what's with the questions? Leave me and the dog alone.

Oh, and he's a boy. Wanna suck his dick?

The other question we get about Finley a lot is "Is he old?" People ask this question because Finley is gray and people are conditioned to associate the color gray with oldness, the same way Catholics associate Ritz crackers with Jesus. Again-- why do you want to know? Do you want to help him cross the street so you can get a Boy Scout Merit Badge? Are you going to give him a prostate exam? Do you want to know if he has an Advance Directive? Maybe you're trying to buddy up to him in his autumn years so he'll leave you his collar in his will. You sick bastard. I don't want to picture you wearing his collar. That's disgusting.

Easily, though, the greatest indignity that any dog owner must suffer is the shame and ignominy that comes when your dog has his face buried in the crotch of a visiting human who is also a dog owner, and you must endure that most trite, automatic, idiotic, embarrassed and embarrassing of statements,

"Oh, he must smell my dog!" And it takes every ounce of jaw-clenching, teeth-grinding self-restraint to refrain from replying,

"No, he smells your pussy."

Things That Go "Uuhhluump" in the Night

Everybody has sounds that they just can't bear to hear.

For some, it's certain musical instruments (out-of-tune or otherwise), for others it's babies crying or nails on a chalkboard. For some, it's Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Whatever the annoying, grating sound is for you, it has the unique ability to inspire revulsion, irritation, and an unceasing desire to swallow thumbtacks. These sounds may not have any effect on anyone else, but, to you, they mean something definite and unpleasant.

For me, the sound is "Uuhluump, uuhluump, uuhluump, uuhluump, uuhluump."

That's the sound of my dog gearing up for a good vom.

This sound is particularly dreadful because it is a warning that usually comes too late-- there almost never enough time to do anything about it. Now, I don't want to make this all about me, because, obviously, if Finley is making this noise, he's undoubtedly undergoing turmoil far worse than my own, but the effect that this noise has on me is probably at least half as bad as what he's going through.

Mrs. Apron and I were curled up in bed in one of our carefully-orchestrated cuddling positions when I heard it.

"Uuhluump, uuhluump, uuhluump, uuhluump, uuhluump."

At first, you trick yourself into thinking that it's a dream. And then you think,

"But, wait a minute, why would I be dreaming about Finley vomiting when I was just dreaming failing a math test in fourth grade?"

Of course, you're halfway into this thought when you hear, "Aaarghfflpth!" which is the unmistakable finale to our dog's little intestinal sonata.

Time-check: 6:06am.

"Jesusfrugginchrisss," I mutter as I throw the covers off to get rid of the vomit the appropriate way before he gets rid of it in the inappropriate way. At least he had the decency to jump off our bed and throw up on the floor.

As I stumble around in my pajamas and bare feet in the dark I, the eternal optimist say,

"Fuggg-- I know I'm gonna stepinit...."

Dutifully, Mrs. Apron switches on her lamp and, squinty-eyed and hair all fucked up she peers around.

"Pile by the door," she announces before crashing, face-first into her pillow.

"Mmm," I acknowledge.

I wad up a handful of toilet paper, scoop up the warm, lumpy offering and toss it in the toilet, ridding the outside world of it with a flush. I hope I washed my hands, but I don't remember. I do remember getting back into bed and the alarm going off seven minutes later.

So much for pathos.

Of course, I'm not asking you to feel particularly bad for me-- no need to sound those violins-- after all, my boss was at home cleaning the projectile vomitus of both her husband and her grandson all afternoon so, really, who am I to complain? I'm just a guy talking about his dog, and the things that go uuhhluump in the night.

What are some sounds that turn your guts to stone?