9/16
i'm thankful that yesterday evening after dinner i was outside with miso and after trying to get her to go to the bathroom in the back yard without success, i did have a small victory, in that sometimes she will get so anxious or stubborn or both that she will just stand in place and you will have to pick her up to get her to move because you can not wait her out, believe me i have tried,
but i found that if i plucked one of the hundreds of thousands of pieces of grass in our yard out of the ground and teased it into her mouth, she would play a tiny and gentle game of tug of war with it with me, and then i tickled her face and ears with it, and it was the first time that i saw her seem to be happy and active outside the way she can be inside with us, which seemed like a victory,
but life can not be only play and she had to go to the bathroom, she had not been in a while and had already had an accident in the house earlier in the day and so we went to the front yard, where i quickly found myself squatting in the grass trying to convince her to move from her immovable point at the end of the leash, where she was straining to get at some kind of nut/seed that falls from the tree in our front yard,
a fact (that there were nuts/seeds that fell from the tree in our front yard) that i was not aware of until we got her and i started spending large periods of my life standing at various positions in our yard, not able to really look at my phone (because i need to know if she goes to the bathroom or not and need to keep her from eating things like poop and trash and the nuts/seeds that fall from the tree in the front yard), as i normally do when i am forced to stand in place for more than 10 seconds,
and then one of the boys in the house next door bounced a basketball in his driveway, which suddenly shifted her attention and the leash slackened as she came back close to me and turned to face the boy, immediately rooted in her new position, and i knew then that she was not going to go to the bathroom and so my getting sweaty and receiving more mosquito bites was going to have no real tangible result, but such is life, i have learned to in a larger and more general sense accept that this is what it is now,
but even with that general sense, there are moments in which hope is possible, so then i had the thought that maybe i can try the grass thing again and that will work and we can try again, i work in technical support where we are obsessed with reproduction, in the sense of if a customer experiences a behavior in our app, the most important thing we can do is be able to reproduce that behavior, since without being able to do that reliably, it's so much harder to be able to figure out what the underlying problem is and fix it,
so i picked up a piece of grass and tried to get her to be interested in it, which at first she almost seemed to be a little, her mouth opened and accepted the tip of it, and i thought, oh, yes, if we can make this happen twice, it could be a new solution, in the same way that earlier in the day when we were playing fetch, i was counting the number of times she would fetch a small stuffed ball and bring it back to me, which was at least 10 then, which was the most she had done before, because i think i feel some sort of security in those numbers,
but then the boy bounced the ball in the other driveway and she turned back to him, her body a straight line, and closed her mouth, the rumble of a bark building up in her throat, and i knew that there was not going to be another chance this time, and i might as well pick her up and bring her inside, there was no point in subjecting myself to this any longer,
but as i was sitting there coming to terms with this specific instance of futility, i looked at her butthole, as i often do during these periods because i am always trying to predict whether there is a chance she might somehow take a shit sometime soon, and in doing so i have learned a lot about her butthole, such as that when she barks, her butthole will flare out in a similar way (but not the same way) as when she is about to take a shit,
and when i looked at her butthole, i saw that a mosquito or some other small flying insect (i don't know how to tell the difference, in the same way that i don't know what the fuck kind of tree is in the front yard of the house we have lived in for over a year) had landed on it, and i did not know what to do,
because d and i both have more mosquito (and other ambiguous bug) bites than we have had in years from taking the dog out for two weeks and we hate it so much, at night we sit side by side on the couch passing back and forth a tea tree oil roller stick that we pointlessly roll over the bites, and having had so many bites on my feet and ankles that it feels like i am wearing socks of mosquito bites, i thought about having a mosquito bite on my own butthole and about how unpleasant that would be,
and i had the piece of grass in my hand still, so i had the thought that maybe i could use the grass to get the mosquito off of her butthole, so i poked at the mosquito on her butthole with the grass, but the grass had very little rigidity, it wasn't a twig, and the mosquito held on, and i realized that if i wanted to make the mosquito go away, i could definitely do that by getting rid of the grass and using my thumb or index finger to poke at it, but that doing that would require me to touch her butthole,
which is a thing i really did not want to do, not that i have any particular squickiness about buttholes specifically, which is a fact that i think might be clear given the number of times i have said the word butthole in this note, but my feeling in that moment was that i have already suffered all of these various indignities related to owning a dog, my life is not the way it was just a little while ago in some ways that are nice but in a lot of ways that fucking suck, and in that moment having to touch her butthole to make the mosquito go away seemed like a bridge too far, i just could not accept it, and it's one of those moments where i felt really sure i don't want to be an actual parent,
but even though i didn't want to touch her butthole, it also felt wrong to just do nothing, so instead, i squatted there in the heat and soldiered on with the grass, in effect tickling her butthole until she finally reacted and sat down, hopefully squashing the mosquito before it fully bit her but honestly i have no idea, but at that point i gave myself permission to pick her up and bring her inside and go on about our day.
i'm thankful that today after i mowed the yard, i climbed into our shower and we gave her her first bath. i'm thankful that her fur turned darker in the warm water of the shower head and that though she clearly was not enthused about the experience, she also didn't violently try to escape, which is what the dogs i had when i was growing up would do, she just rooted in place and let us wash her. i'm thankful she is clean now, at least for a little while.
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