On Becoming an Adult
03/24/2009, 8:12 am
Filed under:
dogs,
growing up,
money | Tags:
assholes,
doctors,
dogs,
growing up,
money,
newsweek,
puke,
rush limbaughI had a conversation with a co-worker a few weeks ago about childhood. He said that he doesn’t miss being a kid. He doesn’t reminisce about fond memories of a stress-free, simple life.
Me neither. I like being an adult. When you’re a kid, you don’t have any freedom.
Goddammit.
It is so hard to write with them staring at me. Rodney is sitting ten feet from me, staring at me. Rodney is exactly halfway between me and Nick. Nick is also staring at me. Nick is whispering and whistling and laughing. Now he is snorting. Now he is slapping his thighs. Rodney runs to Nick. Rodney jumps down onto his forearms in his trademark pounce stance. He does that, and then he hops up and down 3 times. That’s what Rodney does. Now he barks once and runs to me for cover. He knows that if he barks, Nick will try to slap him. He runs back over to Nick and does it again. He runs to me. Then, he looks at Nick and he pants, his tongue slobbery and wagging. He barks one last shrill, defeated bark and collapses.
Nick yells, “Shit, Rodney!” and brings me my highlighter. It was in Rodney’s bed and it is chewed up. The foam tip is dirty and worn down and it doesn’t mark anymore. It is not out of ink, I can see the ink sloshing around inside. It simply won’t make a mark. I throw it in my office trashcan. My office trashcan is plastic and cylindrical and has a panoramic computer-generated moon-landing scene on it.
Rodney has been sick lately from eating too much random crap.
Does this make me a bad mother?
I think so.
He puked five times yesterday morning while I was asleep. I woke and found caustic piles of puke all over the kitchen. They were like landmines. I used last weeks’ Newsweek, the one with Rush Limbaugh’s fat, sweaty face on the cover, to scoop the chunky piles into a grocery bag. Suddenly, the smell hit me. It hit me so hard it made me puke into my mouth. That was the first time I’ve ever puked from puke.
I took him to the vet on Saturday. There were three other dogs in the waiting room. The dogs were all equally aggressive to each other, which made me feel better. I am not the only person with an asshole dog. When we were finally admitted into the other room, I enjoyed showing off to the fat nurse-guy with earrings that I could easily pick my dog up and put him on the steel examination table. I didn’t need his help.
Rodney put his head on my shoulder and I hugged his body with all my strength to restrain him while he had blood sucked out of his arm and mystery liquids shot into his hip.
He really trusts me.
The doctor gave me some antibiotics and anti-inflammatories and I gave the doctor $217.
It was painful for everyone, I think.
Chicken Bones
I think it always comes to this.
I’m trying to remember.
This time last year I was working a lot so I guess it wasn’t as bad in a way. I had a new job as a hostess in a metal bar. I got paid fifty bucks a night to try to calm down and entertain some of the biggest assholes I’ve ever met. It averaged out to about 9 dollars an hour. I did it because they told me that I would be promoted to a server soon. I was a hostess for about 4 months, from February to May, before I became a server. I was supposed to work on my birthday but I called in sick and ate magic mushrooms and sat in my bathtub instead. Which was better than my previous birthday, because I had to work a 12 hour shift and ended up quitting that job at the end of the night. Among other things, I quit because I couldn’t find the Courvoisier.
But anyway, when I say it always comes to this I mean it gets ridiculous. How is it still snowing? Why did the settlers settle here? What the fuck?
Thanks to the internet I don’t even have to leave my house to spend money. I’ve been buying pants that are big enough to fit over my winter ass. The only way I can afford to do this is from money I still have from the serving job at the metal bar, which I also quit because it made my heart beat too fast.
Maybe I would feel better if I took Rodney for a walk. But to do that I would have to put on long underwear, and to put on the long underwear I would have to stand up, walk away from the space heater, take off my stretched out sweatpants and put them back on again. And I just can’t see myself doing that.
He is looking out the window and whining. He gets my attention and that gets his attention. He is now pawing at my left arm, which makes it difficult to type. Type type type. Delete delete delete. I should start over.
He is laying on the ground at the axis of the two doors. He is guarding me. His right leg is tucked under his body somehow and his left leg is splayed out to the side. His ears twitch. I shift my leg because the space heater is burning me and he looks back over his right shoulder at me. He has a concerned look on his face. I guess it looks concerned to me because it looks like his eyebrows are on the sides of his eyes and his forehead is wrinkled under all that fur. He rolls over onto his right side.
Times like this make me feel like I’m ruining his life. He is stuck in a small apartment. He has eaten all his rawhide toys and I have no new ones for him because it’s been too cold for me to make the trip to Target. I can’t give him any old dog toy because he will just eat it. No tennis balls, no stuffed animals, none of that. He doesn’t play with them, he just eats them.
On Friday he got into a bag full of chicken bones and bacon grease. The fur on his head was matted down with it. I got home from school, found him this way, and started sobbing. He didn’t understand what was wrong. He tried to console me my smearing his greasy head on my face.
Now, he is on the sofa, chewing on a toilet paper roll. This is all he has in the world, toilet paper rolls and empty old water bottles. Aaaaaannndd it’s down the hatch. I don’t know if he metabolizes these things, I just hate to take them away from him because they make him so happy. Oh and look! He has regurgitated it onto my lap. I pick it up, it smells like like a grocery store. A grocery store that has been saturated with saliva.
He has now taken my left arm, and he won’t let me have it back. Typing is very difficult, pecking at the keys while my left arm is being chewed on. Ow. Ow ow. Warm and wet. The roof of his mouth is ridged and spongy. He has big, dull teeth and black lips. He has learned to use his paw like a hand- grabbing mine and pulling it to his mouth. Ow. I can no longer type. He has won.
