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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
My dog and I are playing a devious game of cat and mouse. Or mouse and mutt.
No, wait. I should be the cat. Except I’m allergic to cat fur. Can you be allergic to your own hair? Is that possible? Still, I wouldn’t want to be the mouse, either. So little and squeaky — I’d feel like a Kardashian. No, thanks.
Nope, neither of the options are good. Who comes up with these games, anyway? I’ll start again.
“My dog and I are playing a devious game of rabid gangster bull elephant and albino ninja liger.”
Ahem. My dog and I are playing a devious game of rabid gangster bull elephant and albino ninja liger.
(Oh, yeah. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.)
The point is this: we’re in a standoff. It’s after midnight following a Monday, and I should be getting to bed. But if I go to bed, the dog is going to get up and sleep in my spot on the couch. Because she’s crafty, MCA, like ice is cold. She’s crafty.
Seriously, I know her M.O. She’ll lie there under a blanket on the living room floor, pretending she’s perfectly happy. She’ll even make loud snoring noises to try and make me think she’s sound asleep, that she’d never stir til morning, and why wouldn’t I toddle off to get the long night’s rest I deserve for being such a kind and gracious owner?
(Yeah. The bitch can lay it on pretty thick, when she wants something.)
See, she would never try to scale the couch when my wife or I are in the room. She knows the boundaries, and they’re very clear. Couches are for people-sitting. Dog-lying happens on the carpet, and possibly under that ratty-assed blanket that smells like terrier farts and horse breath.
Am long as I’m here, the couch belongs to me. As soon as I leave, those boundaries leave with me, apparently, and the mutt clambers up into my assprint for a nap. We can’t stop her. She can’t be stopped. This pooch has had three paws in the grave, and still managed to climb through a goddamned jungle gym of furniture and sleep on the couch.
So the only way to keep her down is to be on the couch myself. Hence I find myself, several ticks past bedtime, locked in a glacial-speed battle with Princess Paws down there. It’s not as though we’re jousting, or sparring, or anything else. To the untrained eye, it would look like I’m writing and she’s soundly sleeping. And occasionally panting.
Also, farting more frequently than an unconscious animal has any right to do. Doesn’t metabolism slow down when you’re sleeping? Or even pretending to sleep? If the do farted any more often when she was awake, she’d be hovering a foot off the ground on an airy cushion of industrial chicken runoff and half-digested rawhide. Jesus.
And so we battle, more or less indirectly. My weapons are unquenchable stubbornness and chronic insomnia. Her arsenal’s filled with infinite patience and room-emptying air biscuits. Mostly, it’s a stalemate. With emphasis on ‘stale’.
Still, I do have to work in the morning. As in, later this morning, which is not the way I’d planned things. I should probably hit the sack, as of an hour and a half ago. But if I do, that mangy canine will be snuggled on this couch cushion faster than I can say, “I swear, I’ll sell you to an Indonesian falafel shack.” And who knows what slobber-jawed ass-licking incontinent horror she’ll unleash on it in my absence? I shudder to imagine.
And that’s why I’m sitting here in the wee hours of the morning, bitching to you about it. It’s only a matter of time until she falls asleep or morning is so close around the corner that my wife will get up and shoo the dog off my roost. I’m not saying I’m that stubborn — but I do enjoy sitting on a cushion where I know exactly what bodily fluids are — or aren’t — present, where they didn’t come from, and how long it’s been since something unspeakable was deposited there.
(This is why, for instance, I won’t sit at a booth in Denny’.
Oh, you think that’s different. And you’re right. It’s worse.)
So the game continues, as the clock ticks away. I’m getting pretty tired, and the dog does sound — and smell — like she’s in a deep funky sleep, so probably it’s safe to hit the sack. Maybe. Very probably maybe, somewhat.
Ah, I’ll give it ten more minutes. What’s a few less minutes of sleep, compared to being the master of my own furniture for a night? Long live rabid gangster bull elephant!
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(The ‘Eek!Cards’ explan.)
For those of you who missed the super-fancy Woe of the Road book reading at Books on the Square in Providence last night, I’ll give you a taste of what you missed by posting a few snippets. These are from my piece ‘Spring Broken‘ only, since I don’t have the rights to quote the other authors.
(Come to think of it, I probably gave up the rights to quote mine in the agreement, too. Or to post the book’s name. Or refer to myself in the first person.
Meh. I’m sure it’s fine. There’s even a “rough draft” of my piece deep in the archives, if you know where to look.)
Anyway, some snippets, in no particular order:
“My parents had trained me to have an immediate, instinctive, almost violent reaction to guilt of any kind.”
“My other friends backpedaled like a Tour de France clip on ‘rewind’.”
“We felt like cosmonauts, and smelled considerably worse.”
“I resolved to spend the rest of my vacation soaking — and likely sleeping, and quite possibly drowning — in the condo hot tub.”
“Because yes, Virginia — there IS a Jacuzzi Claus.”
Okay, maybe I’m starting to understand why you missed it now. Don’t be smug. It was still good times. Good times.
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(The ‘Eek!Cards’ explan.)
Completely Unrelated Saturday Anecdote:
Wife: What the hell is that music you’ve got on?
Me: It’s, um, a song in Russian from twelve years ago sung by an underage faux lesbian Russian pop duo.
Wife: *blink*
Me: *blink*
Wife: So, are you… listening to it ironically?
Me: Y’know, hon, at this point, who the hell can even tell any more?
It’s only a matter of time before she legally files for separate iTunes accounts.
Permalink | No CommentsI’ve been told — several thousand times by now, I’m sure — that sometimes I overthink things.
And it’s true. I’ll confess. I like to lift the curtain, to see what’s behind what is. I want to know the ‘why’ of things, how a thing has come to be, what might have happened instead, what could happen next, and what it all means. That’s just how I tick.
Of course, sometimes there’s nothing behind the curtain. It’s just a stupid curtain, and when you lift it, you wind up with your pants down in public.
I should probably connect those dots, from ‘overthinking’ to ‘public depantsing’. Lest you think I’m all weird or something.
(Oh, shut up. I know what you think.)
At work this week, a sign appeared on the stall — single stall; small company — in the mens’ room. The sign read:
THE DOOR HINGE IS BROKEN! MAINTENANCE WILL FIX SOON
Or words to that effect. I have to admit I didn’t look especially closely; I do my very best not to require the services of an enclosed bathroom stall at the office, so I noted that the door was amiss and went on about my business.
(My number one business. Because if I were doing other sorts of “business”, then… oh, you’ve got it? Super. Moving on.)
The sign stayed up all week, until this morning. As I took a pre-lunch constitutional down by the boys’ room urinal works, I noticed that the sign was no more.
“What’s the washroom chain of command here, and who notifies us grunts when the latrine is AWOL or not?”
That’s when the gears started whirring.
I realized that I didn’t know exactly when the sign came down. It could have been last night, or earlier this morning. Either way, we’ve got some people working long and strange hours some days. It might have been nice for someone to have sent out a notice — some kind of “stall’s well!” email, perhaps.
That train of thought just drove me further down the rabbit commode. What would the distribution list be for such an email? Only the guys care about what’s going on with the mens’ room stall, presumably. Do we have an email list of just the men in the company? Should we? Is that sexist somehow?
What if the email went out to everyone, including the women? Would they really want to read about every miniscule repair and update and paper roll restocking that goes on in our rest room? Would that be sexist? More so, or less?
Then I considered who’d be sending such an email. Most of our staff who would coordinate with maintenance are female. And most of the maintenance staff I’ve seen in the building are male. Would the person doing the work declare it done? Or would one of our administrators have to go in to sign off on it? Who does the final testing? What if it was a clog, or a wonky flusher handle? What’s the washroom chain of command here, and who notifies us grunts when the latrine is AWOL or not?
These questions raced through my head — spinning, like water down a bowl. Soon enough, it had my stomach keeping time with the churn. Finally — despite my strict personal policy — I could hold out no more, and I sat down in the recently de-signed stall. For business.
(Oh yeah. You know the kind I mean.)
I’d just dropped trousers and settled into the job when the mens’ room door opened and a couple of the execs came in, chatting. I heard them head to the sink — washing up for lunch, perhaps.
That’s when the stall door, hinge thoroughly busted, eased a corner from the frame and swung wide open outward, possibly hitting one of my uberbosses in the back.
They turned. I sat. I waved. They gaped. I asked for, “Little help, please?”
Which they gave, to very little avail. It just swung right back at them again. By the time their hands were clean, I was slumped half in the floor, trying simultaneously to keep the door hooked with my foot and not fall headfirst backwards into a bowl of my own “overthinking”.
I managed only one of the two. But I did keep my hair clean. I think I made the right choice.
And I vowed to try — oh man, will I try — not to overthink things in future. Some curtains are simply never meant to be peeked behind.
In other words, sometimes a bare bathroom stall door is an enigma, leading to all sorts of ‘whys’ and ‘what shoulds’ and ‘how’s the best way to bes’.
Other times? The sign that’s not there isn’t there any more because SOME HORSEHUMPING JACKASS STOLE THE DAMNED SIGN!
And that’s all I have to think about that.
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