Dawg Days

If someone asked me whether or not I was a "dog person" I would have to say I'm not. The same way I'm not a "baby person" or "strange toothbrush" person: if it's not mine, I'd rather not have anything to do with it.

But not being a dog person doesn't mean I hate dogs, it means I'm only comfortable around my own. I've only had one dog in my lifetime and my family recently lost him. He'll be greatly missed. He'll also stand as the proof that I don't love all dogs, but that I've loved at least one.

This blog was originally written on September 13, 2006.

No picture sums up Bear better than this; Excitable. Affable. None-too-bright.

I was licked awake today.

No, I know what you're thinking and it wasn't that, okay? It wasn't as awesome as you're imagining it to be. It wasn't a beautiful woman and she did she feel compelled to galvanize me awake with her tongue.

That would be sweet, I agree, but that's not what happened because the licky woman does not exist.

Nope. Instead, my Old English sheepdog Bear, awakened me. I'm not sure how he even got in my room, as I keep my door shut. Why do I keep my door shut? Mostly so Bear won't get in and lick me awake each morning.
Nevertheless, there I was, one eye open, drenched in drool and looking into a pair of brown eyes that, in all honesty, look exactly like my own.

Bear isn't much for words, so once I was awake and staring at him, that's really all there was to his plan.
He's a creature of action, not thought.

If you stare at Bear long enough, you start thinking there's a small man in a fluffy dog suit in there that someone must have paid to pee outside and raid our fridge late at night while the rest of my family sleeps. His eyes are humanoid. I've never seen a dog with human eyes. The eyes of other dogs always seem a little bit darker, a little bit more vacant, but Bear has convinced me that a midget* is in my house, walking around pretending to be a dog.

* Or is the term dwarf? Elf? Little dog-suit man? Honestly I don't know the politically correct term for someone who poses as the family pooch.

Anyway, Bear got bored with the staring contest (I totally won!) and decided that more licking was in order. I hadn't really noticed up until this point, but his breath smelled like a pit of dead rattlesnakes, which translated into my face smelling like a pit of dead rattlesnakes.

I couldn't imagine why he would shower me in goopy sheepdog spit. Sheepdogs aren't Beagles or Chihuahuas with little tongues that are more cute than effective. Sheepdogs have paint rollers.

"That's it," I thought. "He's going outside."

It was raining outside, my hopes were dashed. Bear, or the small actor playing the role of the family dog (whom I have privately named Giuseppe), doesn't go outside in the rain. I can't force him, I can't trick him, and I can't bait him with treats. My dog is like a rich blonde girl from Beverly Hills afraid to catch the case of the frizzy hairs. The weird thing is, it's been raining here for four straight days and I'm not sure he's gone to the bathroom once in that time. I don't know about you, but I can't wrestle a 90-pound dog outside and make him pee. Bear's big; big enough that he might make a good swing-dance partner if he ever decided to stand on his hind legs. And anyway, would you want to wrestle with any creature that can go four days without urinating?

I love my dog. Love him. If I were Ashlee Simpson I would L-O, L-O, L-O, L-O-V-E** my dog, but his bathroom habits are a problem. There is no happy ending here. Not only will he feign to grace the outdoors with his presence on a rainy day, but when I walk him, he saves his pee. Do other dogs save their pee? Is this normal? Do humans save their pee? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I've been peeing wrong all my life. What if Giuseppe was taught correctly how to pee and he's trying to show me the correct manner in which to pee without using his words?

** This reference was funnier 30 months ago, I swear.

What happens is that Bear and I go walking and he feels the need to inspect each tree for no less than 60 seconds. He's not a very intelligent dog and so maybe he's hoping for a Leprechaun to peak out from the base of the trunk or maybe he thinks that's where babies come from. I really don't know. I can't get into the rattletrap that is surely Bear's brain.

All I know is that we live in a suburban town called Oak Park, a town whose namesake is quite literal and apt. Oak Park is littered with both oak trees and parks. And when you take a dog for a walk during which he sniffs every single oak in every single park, it translates into a Goddamn long walk around the block.

Meanwhile, he's saving his piss. Why… I don't get it. Why won't he just unload on the first tree? Instead, Bear squirts an eyedropper full of pee on each tree as if he's cultivating the soil in preparation for a delicate orchid to spring up.

Can you imagine if we did this?

Fix a cup of coffee. Squirt a little pee.
Read the funny papers. Squirt a little pee.
Put on shoes. Squirt a little pee.
Slip on a pair of pants. Squirt a little pee...

…Why someone would put their shoes on before their pants is beyond me, but so is peeing in three dozen shifts.

So it's raining today and I know Bear hasn't any interest in staying outside, but I'm planning on being home most of the day and I can't have him play the Hooch to my Turner all day long. I'm going to need a respite and I took one of those respites soon after waking up covered in goo.After standing at the back door with the damn thing opened letting all the cool autumn air in, Bear finally realized I had stronger will than he did and he loped outside. I'm not sure, but I swore I heard some sort of Italian mutterings coming from the dog.Not 10 seconds after closing the door behind the dog, the front doorbell rang.

There are two things Bear loves in this world: the first is running into the kitchen with his head pointed downward seeking out some sort of lunch fixin' that I dropped unknowingly on the floor. Imagine the feeling you get walking down a city street and finding a $20 bill just lying there. That's what a stray Dorito is to my dog.

The second thing Bear loves in this world is a stranger, especially a stranger at the front door who enjoys ringing the doorbell. If Giuseppe hears the doorbell, he lifts off the ground like Scrappy-Doo and races at mach-7 toward the front of the house, first looking out the window and then awaiting the arrival of his master at the door to open it. Bear is not at all violent. He's never bitten anything; I'm not even sure how he eats his food because he won't bite it. I accidentally stepped on his chest once and he didn't even move, he just looked at me like, "Dude, I couldn't breathe just then. Be gentle, I'm a Goddamn dog, okay?" And then he went back to napping.

I stepped on a dog's chest and lungs and ribcage and he barely noticed.

What I am attempting to illustrate is that despite his outward appearance of being a man-eating crazed beast looking for crotches to bite in half, Bear doesn't have any design on hurting anyone. Really, he just wants to lick you. So the doorbell rings and Bear is stuck outside and all he could think to do was bark.And his bark is not the grizzly roar you would expect from a dog of his size. If you're expecting something substantial to come out of his mouth, you'd be wrong sucka. Bear's barking is like a cement truck with a tricycle horn installed into it. It's just lame and pitiful and frankly I blame myself. He was trained to be calm and chill and allow his owners to step on his chest without much commotion afterward. So now we're stuck with the sounds of a soprano coming out of a baritone body.

The mailman was dropping off a package. I signed for it and closed the door. Deciding that Bear had had enough outside, I let him back in. He didn't even look at me when I opened the door, he sprinted past me and down the hallway into the living room to see if he could catch the visitor at the door. No such luck. Bear was wet and the doorbell-ringer had vanished.

Normally, dogs don't carry the capacity to shoot their owners a dirty look, but remember, Bear has human eyes. I swear to you, Bear came loping back into the room I was in, paused in front of me, looked up and gave me a glare that said, "you're fucking dead to me, Adam. Do you understand?" He then went into the bathroom to lie down.

Watching Bear go from a standing position to a lying position is both tragic and hilarious because he's so lazy. Either lazy or Giuseppe is a very old dwarf with bad knee joints. Have you ever seen an elderly man sit on a park bench that he suspects might have been painted recently? That's how Bear sits. He bends his legs, then pauses and waits to see if something is going to happen, then he bends his legs a little bit more, maybe looks around for a moment and then mercifully slumps to the ground. Bear ain't that old, but he's heavy.

So he's in the bathroom, which I haven't got a problem with until I have to use the bathroom. First, he lies near the central air vent to insure that his fur sucks up the maximum amount of heat or cool, but also the air vent is behind the door. I'm never sure whether or not he's there until I accidentally whack him in the face with it. And much like the chest stomp, Bear never makes a sound.

There's a disagreement among my family on the proper etiquette from this point on. My sister and my mother just let him lie there while they do their bathroom business. But I see this a horrific interaction between man and beast. I love the dog. I love the dog so much that besides chest stepping and fair working conditions for midgets wearing dog-suits, I treat him as any other member of the family that scours the floor for lunch and pees in shifts. And because I treat him this way and because I can't imagine peeing while my sister takes a nap on the floor, I insist that he leave the bathroom.

He stands up just as quickly as he lies down.

I just can't imagine sitting there on the toilet looking Giuseppe in the eye; wondering what he's thinking in that little Italian mind of his. Wondering if he never pees when it's raining outside because he sneaks his dog suit off and pees in the toilet when no one is watching.

The way I see it, either this mopey dog is a true member of the family that should afford us some privacy when appropriate to do so, or he's just the family mutt whom I may be free to strap a saddle on and ride up and down the street for my own personal entertainment.

That door doesn't swing both ways, so we better pick one.

The remainder of the day was spent mostly just laying on the bathroom tile with my dog. Which is really how you know you're good friends with someone. There we were, just two dudes lying on the bathroom floor and not feeling hassled by one another, not worrying about making idle chitchat, not bothering to fill the void of silence with b.s. We were just a dude and a dog (or a dude and a Lilliputian) hanging out waiting for something to happen.

Letting life unfurl as it may.
Letting the rain drip.
Letting the day pass.
Letting the urine build up for days and days.
Letting the sleep sweep us back into dreaming of ladies golf.

Bear's my dog, but more than my dog, he's my dawg.
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