Our would-be adopter backed out on us, as I feared she would. So I’m putting out the call again: if you’re anywhere near central Arkansas and would like a 4.6 pound bundle of squeaks and chomps who just wants love and supper and to playplayplay, hit me up at middleclasstool at the gmail and we will deliver with bed, food and toys.
Jeff is now Squeaky Pete
Jeff didn’t suit him. So we renamed him.
The vet asked me to thank my wife for grabbing him. He wouldn’t have lasted two days if she hadn’t. He had a massive abscess on his neck from where he was attacked, plus a belly full of hook worms and round worms. So they squoze the abscess (SO MUCH PUS) and sent us home with antibiotics and dewormer.
Two days later, he’s a different dog. Curious and playful, as a puppy should be. Not pitiful and exhausted. You can no longer count his ribs at a distance. He gained a whole pound, which for him is a roughly 25% weight gain in 48 hours. He can eat and drink without getting sick. He doesn’t cry when you move him. And boy does he like to play bite.
Oh, and it’s not done until he’s delivered, but I think he will have a permanent home before the weekend is over. Losing him will be hard, but it will be good practice for letting go. In the meantime, we are determined to enjoy him and spoil him.
Nicknames I have given him in the last 48 hours:
Petey Peters
Peter Barker
SqueePee
Pete “Petey” Peterson
Petey Petey Bite Your Feety
Bitey Herzog
Ah Goddammit He Got Me on the Dick
Jeff, Everyone. Everyone, Jeff.
My wife found Jeff at an apartment building near the University Target in Little Rock. She was, in keeping with her character, helping a homeless couple get moved into an apartment when she spied a tiny little furry baby with no home to protect him from heat or traffic or an oncoming storm, and she thought well, that won’t do. So now Jeff is here with us.
He is skin and bones and covered in sores. He is a baby. He still has puppy breath, my favorite smell on the entire planet. And he is as sweet as he can be.
We are only fostering. Among many other practical considerations, Mugsy is NOT HAPPY. We have talked to a few rescues, and they are all understaffed and overextended. We have stressed that we will care for him and pay for everything, we just need their websites, full stop.
So I’m spreading the word here too. If you are anywhere near central Arkansas and would like a very sweet baby boy with puppy breath who has so much love to give to a cruel and uncaring world, hit me up at the gmail.
Watching the Netflix Dogs show
My friends help me work around my weaknesses
They’re Good Dogs, Crass
I was a teenager when Norm, our younger springer spaniel, attacked my dad. He had undiagnosed rage disorder and bit my dad on the face while they were snuggling in his chair. Dad threw Norm in the back yard and mom took dad to the hospital. I had to stay behind and listen to Norm, now returned to himself and confused about his banishment, cry to be let in.
He hadn't howled like this before. This was a wholly new sound, different from the sounds of pain and stress and alert that normally came out of him. Listening to it was almost unbearable.
I sat in the upstairs hall and wept. Our older springer Malley padded up close, sniffed me twice, and nudged me. I tried to shoo her away. She normally listened to that, but that night she stayed, and she nosed my hands away from my face again and again until I let them fall. She kissed me and she lay down next to me and did not leave my side until dad came home. We put Norm down the next day.
He used to try to talk. If you were sitting in a chair and reading or watching TV, he would come and sit right in front of you, face like a forlorn Stan Laurel, and wait for you to notice him. If you ignored him, he would scoot a half-step back, sit back down, and huff once. If you continued to ignore him, he'd try to talk.
This was not a bark or a whine. He would open his mouth and start modulating his voice in a constant up-and-down rurring sound that approximated the rise and fall and cadence of human speech. I've never heard a dog do that before or since.
That was one of the things I missed most when we put him down. He was one of us. He wanted to be near us, to share body warmth with us, to be comforted and told that he was good, that we saw him there, that we hadn't forgotten our boy. He was also weird as hell, and I identified with that.
The gist of this article is mostly reasonable. Which makes the clickbait nature of its headline and framing even more tiresome in contrast. Even Norm didn't clown that hard to get our attention. He just tried to talk to us.
That clowning drowns out some of the piece's more disturbing points, like that 40% of women dog owners get more emotional support from their dogs than from their husbands. That's a parasitism that's far more worthy of scrutiny than the question of whether my Mugsy understands selflessness and altruism.
Indeed, there's a case to be made that we're all emotional parasites. That we need affirmation, that we need security both physical and emotional, that we need to feel needed and valued. That others are mostly a means to those ends.
The question of whether dogs love us or merely need us only stops with their species if you don't understand the implications of what you're asking. Pointing out that they train us just like we do them opens us up to much broader and more interesting discussions about the nature of our thinking and feeling existence than a lazy and predictable "everything you know is BACKKERDS" hot take, if we’re listening.
It’s a perfect microcosm of everything I’ve come to hate about the internet I used to love. A big opportunity for meaningful discussion torpedoed by the symbiosis of market considerations, short attention spans, and the need for an outrage platform.
Right now the San Diego Union-Tribune is basking in a viral Twitter fight that raised their ad revenue for a minute. Right now Twitter is screaming DOG HATER about an article they didn't read. Both of them sacrificed something to get what they wanted.
The whole thing makes me tired all over. So tonight I will scoop my little bearded boy up in my arms and carry him up to bed (note: that fucker’s spoilt), and I will ponder for the 500th time as we plod past the stained glass window just what all this says about what it is to have feelings.
What Good Boy is This
It me
RIP Woody →
Tom Hardy's dog died, so he dropped a tribute video and an open letter to his good boy. This marks him as a quality human worthy of a dog's care.
Please note that Woody was named after both his penis and his fondness for eating poop.
Every few months, I look at Mugsy and four words leap unbidden into my brain: You can never die.
Who's a boy? Who's a boy? You are. →
Good works are the fruit that bear the indication God has sown the seeds of grace. Do not mistake them for goodness itself, dog. Would a dog who has experienced unconditional election bark at my stairs for no reason for thirty minutes? There was nothing on the stairs. Why, then, did you bark? Were you fulfilling the commandment found in Lamentations 2:19, “Arise, cry out in the night: in the beginning of the watches pour out thine heart like water before the face of the Lord”? Because I do not believe that injunction applies to my stairs.
