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Archives from 2002-2006

Well! Things are certainly quite … *flaps hands helplessly* right now, aren’t they? It makes me long for the good old days, like a month ago, when it really seemed like things weren’t suuuuuuper great newswise, but ha ha ha WE HAD NO IDEA.

It’s not a great time for avoiding anxiety, that’s for sure, although the kind of anxiety I’m personally experiencing — generally useless, slowly increasing, and rooted in a whole hell of a lot of uncertainty — keeps getting superseded by the dreamlike feeling that we’re all living out a disaster movie. Hopefully one with a really boring un-Hollywood ending where things just kind of go back to normal except with more office work being done remotely because businesses finally figure out that forcing people to commute to cube farms for 8 hours a day is expensive and dumb.

If a week ago it seemed like panic was a very silly option for the truly paranoid, today it seems like panic is pulled up outside in an idling car. Just gonna hang out here for whenever you’re ready, panic says, swilling comfortably from a Big Gulp.

ANYWAY. In other news, there is no other news because this is officially all anyone is thinking about or talking about. Except my kids, that is, because they remain blissfully mostly entirely oblivious and unconcerned about everything except the cancellation of March Madness.

How are you holding up, friends?

There are many indignities to aging but I’m glad I’m not yet suffering with the malady Dog has acquired in her middle years: the Poop Blot. I’m not sure when I first noticed the Blot but it happens when she sits in a certain position and scratches herself, her foot doing that Thumper thing on the floor and her butthole, presumably, resting comfortably directly on the carpet while getting its surface pounded into the fibers. Then she gets up to wander off and lo! A brownish blot remains.

I did take her to the vet to get the situation checked out because I am not a monster whose actions are limited to poking fun of the afflicted on the Internet (to be clear, I am absolutely that monster, but I contain multitudes) and they ruled out an assortment of potential butt-leaking diseases while mentioning that sometimes, dogs of a certain, ah, girth, are occasionally known to experience poop blots because of — and I can’t remember the exact scientific name here, but it was something like Lardassius Canis Lupus, also known as Fatty Fatty Boomba-Labby.

It’s true that Dog has taken on a shape that Riley describes as “like … if a Tootsie Roll was also a dog?” thanks in no small part to her annual gorging on fallen apples in the backyard plus her overall food drive which once prompted a dog-boarding employee to say she was the most food-oriented Lab he’d ever seen, which is impressive because most Labs will eat anything and everything including socks and LEGOs and crayons (check check and orange-flecked CHECK) but even among her garbage-disposal kind she is something of an outlier in that she acts as though she has been starving for literal years and routinely eats her own fresh lawn deposits.

We don’t give her scraps because 1) it makes the already-annoying begging even worse and 2) while I admittedly follow more than one chonky-animal Instagram account and am constantly shoving my phone in peoples’ faces to show them yet another overweight raccoon haw haw HAAAAAAW lookit that fat trash panda I don’t actually want to contribute to my pet’s health woes, but between scavenging fallen kid-crumbs and tucking into both her and the cats’ doots on the reg she seems to be snacking quite frequently and although the latter habit is fairly disgusting I can’t really fault her, these are trying times we’re all living in, I myself prefer a fistful or five of Triscuits when it comes to distracting myself from the hellscape of current events but perhaps in her limited way she is not only self-medicating but saving the planet while doing so. Dog is upcycling.

Anyway, while the poop-eating is unfortunate, it can at least be mostly ignored (until she comes inside and immediately wants to lick your face, that is) but the Poop Blot is a near-daily occurrence that has me constantly stalking around with the Folex and scanning the carpet Terminator-style until I locate yet another sphincter-shaped stain and honestly, this why I am both plastered to ongoing coronavirus news with grim fascination, partially convinced we’re all about to live out The Stand, and largely unconcerned about germs in general because that would require a standard of feces-bacteria-free living that is at least several cleanliness levels above the one this beloved and repulsive Tootsie roll has brought to my existence.

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