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Dods and I were having breakfast in Mul’s Diner last week when I suddenly blurted out, “I think I’d like to get a puppy.”
“Yeah,” Dods said thoughtfully. “That’d be cool.”
“But without the responsibility.”
“Right.”
I think I’ve been thinking about puppies because I bought my mom Marley & Me for Mother’s Day. It’s a book about a young married couple that adopts a yellow lab puppy, mostly because they think it will be good practice for one day having a child. The dog turns out to be a monster that likes to eat, among other things, home pregnancy test results, and I’ve only read the first fifty or so pages, but now I’ve got puppies running around in my mind.
When I think about puppies, I think about traipsing around the Common with a mid-size athletic-looking male canine. I wouldn’t buy a female dog. I also wouldn’t buy a small dog because when I see a small dog, I assume that it’s either female or gay. But that doesn’t make any sense because my leg has been humped on many occasions by big, gay (or at least bi) dogs. Actually, on most of those occasions, it was my dad’s golden doodle Cosmo.
Marley, the couple’s dog, is evidence that there are a lot of good reasons to buy a puppy, but there are also a lot of reasons NOT to buy a puppy. So I made a list of pros and cons. Here they are:
PRO: Puppies are cute.
CON: Puppies don’t stay puppies forever. They eventually turn into dogs. And also, even when they’re in their cute puppy stage – that’s when they’re most likely to pee and poop on a carpet, or eat your wallet (which has happened to me).
PRO: Dogs are supposedly man’s best friends.
CON: If my best friend is a hairy dude who can’t speak, relies on Alpo and flip-flops for sustenance, and poops outdoors, what does that say about me?
PRO: Dogs are babe magnets.
CON: Some babes are allergic to dogs.
PRO: A dog is always there for you when you get home, wagging its tail, jumping up and down, and accidentally punching you in the balls.
CON: I live in a city, and I would feel bad about leaving my dog inside all day long. Sure – I could leave him in our big back yard, but I would either have to tie him to his doghouse or run the risk of a drunken homeless man stealing him and trying to ride him up the street because he thinks the dog is a unicorn.
PRO: Dogs eat food off the floor, which keeps your floor clean.
CON: If you don’t drop enough food on the floor, you have to buy dog food. Dog food is expensive. I don’t have any money. So I would have to feed him human food like Cup Noodles and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which would probably make him sick.
PRO: If you have too much toilet water in your toilet bowl, a dog will drink the excess water.
CON: There are no cons when a dog is drinking toilet water. You win and he wins. Because now you don’t have too much water in your toilet and he’s not thirsty anymore.
PRO: If you have a girl in your apartment, and you fart, you can blame the dog.
CON: If you’re all alone in the apartment, and you fart, it’s pointless to blame the dog. Plus, if he blames you, it will turn into a case of he said/the dog said, and you’ll look crazy because you’re alone in an apartment having an argument with an animal, which is something that only a cat person would do.
PRO: Dogs are good practice for owning something even more high-maintenance, like a child. (It should be noted, however, that adopting a cat is not good preparation for parenthood. It’s good preparation for lifelong loneliness, online book clubs, and an apartment that smells like urine.)
CON: I don’t want to practice owning a child. I’m not ready to be a parent. Besides, I didn’t like my last “pretend parenthood” exercise, which was in seventh grade. All the seventh graders were paired off in male/female couples and given sacks of flour. The flour would serve as a metaphor for a baby. We were supposed to bring our sacks of flour home, change our flour’s diapers, and generally behave as if we were its parents. I found this creepy for several reasons:
1. Even when you dress a sack of flour up in baby pajamas, it’s not a baby.
2. We were not living with our partners, so our “family,” was more of a broken home with joint custody. Plus we fought a lot. While this aspect of the project may have been realistic, it was also depressing and somewhat fatalistic.
3. This project encouraged several students to try to get pregnant immediately (one succeeded).
4. Our sack of flour broke, which according to our teacher, meant our baby was dead.
Ultimately this is why I won’t be buying a puppy anytime soon (and also because I don’t have any money). I’m just not responsible enough to have a living dependent. And I still have friends who would want to fill its water dish with beer. And on some nights, I would think this was a good idea.
Some day, in like forty years, when I’m thinking about having children, I’ll get a dog and we’ll play baseball together on the Common. The dog, I’m sure, will be my best friend. But only if he can hit a curveball.
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adam@theadamwhite.com |
