previous column next column back to archives
I’m wearing a layer of dog slobber on my skin right now. Am I wearing dog slobber because I think it smells good? No. I am wearing it because I am home in Maine and Maine is where I go to relax, eat home cooking, and get attacked by my parents’ dogs. Two of them are border collies and one of them is a golden doodle but they all possess the ability to kill human beings.
About a year ago my mom decided to get a puppy, a border collie named Lizzie. Then my dad decided to get a puppy, a golden doodle named Cosmo. So my mom added another border collie – Dash is his name. They will probably each keep acquiring dogs in a kind of canine nuclear arms race. But all the dogs are aimed at me. I don’t see why we need to take this any further. The three dogs have already combined to leave me raked with scratches, serrated with bite marks, and reeking of aged dog saliva. They’re cute as hell, but so is Katie Holmes and look what she did to Tom Cruise – he’s legally insane now.
My mom treats her border collies as if they were humans, except the dogs are more intelligent than most of the humans she meets. Yesterday I happened to be within earshot when someone asked my mom which dog was Dash and she told this person that Dash was the emotional one. I would have described Dash as the one with brown on his chest, but whatever.
When I’m away from home I have to ask my mom how the dogs are doing or else she’ll say, “Don’t you want to know how the dogs are doing?” So I ask her before she can ask me. Instead of just telling me whether or not the dogs are getting big, or whether they’ve been barking all day, my mom tells me how the dogs FEEL about getting big or WHY they’ve been barking all day.
My mom recently informed me that a neighbor has been complaining because Dash has been a little loud during afternoons when my mom leaves him alone.
“That’s too bad,” I said.
Then there was a short pause before my mom asked, “Don’t you want to know WHY Dash has been barking?”
Of course I wanted to know. Apparently, Dash is so obsessed with his big sister Lizzie that he can’t deal with life when she’s not in the same room. So when she leaves the room, he says (and my mom actually thinks that he says this to himself), “Oh my God! There’s nobody here to take care of me!” At which point he starts barking. In fact, I’m sure my mom could translate what Dash was saying into English if I asked her to. It would probably be something like, “I FEEL SO ABANDONED! I FEEL SO ABANDONED! I’M A PUPPY WITH FEELINGS! I FEEL SO ABANDONED! I HAVEN’T PEED OR POOPED IN TWO HOURS!”
My mother’s house isn’t the only home in which egregious anthropomorphism is taking place. Cosmo, my dad’s dog, apparently thinks all his thoughts in English, but can only express himself in Dog. He’s half golden retriever, half poodle. For some reason, this breed is called a golden doodle, despite the fact that there’s no reason to change the first letter of poodle. From what I’ve observed, his most common thought is, “I’d like to jump on Adam, claw him in the face, drop my dirty tennis ball on his shoe, and then bite him.” This is either cute or painful, depending on how effectively I block his attacks.
Cosmo and I, with nobody else around the house, have been spending our days together. When we’re in the car, he likes to employ a technique in which he drags his paw across my wrist and makes me almost swerve off the road. This maneuver is apparently Dog for “practical joke.” We also go on runs together. I like to run in a straight line. Cosmo likes to run across my bow, tripping me into a defenseless position so that he can leap up and attack vulnerable regions like my neck. Today I tried to do some stomach crunches and Cosmo helped to add resistance by sitting on my face.
Cosmo also likes to swim. Swimming is fun because his paws make the water splash in the air and then he gets to try to eat the water. Swimming is also fun because it’s a good time to attack Adam with paws that somehow acquire dragon talons under water. Cosmo is the largest reason that I’ve been soliciting advice on my swim technique from anybody who is a better swimmer than I. Since I’m so bad at swimming, I’ve been looking for help from pretty much everybody besides my friend Steve, who should probably invest in a pair of water wings. I watched him almost drown in three foot surf the other day.
Cosmo and I have been spending so much time together that I even tried to get him to help me with this column.
“Cosmo, what should I write about?” I asked.
“Arf, whoof, arf,” he said, which means, How the hell should I know?
“Come on. Give me an idea.”
“Roof, Roof.” (I’m a dog, idiot. I don’t come up with ideas for columns.)
“You’re not very helpful.”
“Whoof.” (Sorry.)
“Stop being sarcastic. Well, maybe I’ll just write about you.”
“Arf, whoof, whoof.” (Fine. I don’t give a rat’s ass. Hey, look behind you!)
And that’s when I turned around and he jumped on me, dropped his tennis ball at my feet, clawed my back, and bit me in the forearm. It was definitely premeditated. These dogs are fricking smart.
previous column next column back to archives
adam@theadamwhite.com |
