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.

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.”