My Stupid Dog

So I have a doberman, and for the sake of anonymity (because a dog really needs that), we'll call her Ceiling Fan. Ceiling Fan, to put it gently, is a hopeless idiot. I've never met an animal so reminiscent of Simple Dog from Hyperbole and a Half in all of my life, with the unfortunate exception being that Ceiling Fan is much bigger and much more capable of destruction. She once got so frightened by the appearance of a water sprinkler that she ripped the entire thing out of the ground and tried to bite the water that sprayed out of it.

This is like her Vietnam.

Story time. On a rainy day a few years ago, I was getting a ride home from school with one of my friends. As I exited my friend's minivan, I noticed an odd little lady in a yellow rain slicker, standing in the middle of the street outside my house and staring into the sky, her face pelted by rain and her whole body completely rigid. I was slightly unnerved, as the whole scene was a bit reminiscent of the scene in It where the little boy gets his arm ripped off by the sewer-dwelling demon clown (what an incomprehensible book/incomprehensibly awesome movie).

I decided to ignore her, and was about to open my front door when I heard her yell.

"Hey! Do you live there?"

I paused for a moment, my hand hanging in the air, and slowly turned towards her, hoping she was addressing someone else. Alas, she was facing my way, and after ensuring no one else was in my immediate vicinity, I steeled myself for the inevitable social interaction.

"Well hey there, little guy! Don't you wanna balloon?"

"Nope."

"Um. Yeah?"

She got a bit giddy at this and started hopping in place. "Oh! Do you happen to own a doberman?"

Oh God damnit, I thought. "Yeah, why?"

"Because I saw her running away and I chased her into this bush!" The accomplishment and pride in her voice was palpable as she excitedly began gesturing to a massive bush in the front yard across the street. I told her to wait a moment, at which point I entered my house and verified that Ceiling Fan was, in fact, gone. The only living thing in the house was my fat basset hound, who seemed completely oblivious to Ceiling Fan's absence, and whose defining physical trait is that she always smells exactly like Fritos. 

After grabbing a jacket and leash and bidding my other dog farewell, I rejoined Slicker Lady in the street, where she had gone from standing in the street to plowing her way through my neighbor's massive bush (hahaha. Oh man, that sounds nasty). I watched her thrash around for a bit, whereupon she informed me that my dog was not, in fact, in the bush.

It was at that point that I got a call from my mom. I asked Slicker Lady to give me a moment to answer my phone. She seemed a bit helpless, as without her bush thrashing, there really wasn't much she could do, so she reverted to her natural sky-staring state. I awkwardly looked at her for a bit, then turned my attention to my phone. "Hello?"

"Hey, is Ceiling Fan missing?"

"What the hell? How do you know?"

"Because I just got a call from a woman who says that Ceiling Fan is sitting in the backseat of her car."

"...What?"

"Look, I need to get back to work, I'll give the woman your number and you can talk to her. Let me know if you get our dog back."

"Um..well, alright, I'll -"

Click.

"- try. Ok then."

"I love you mom!"

"Nope."

While waiting for Ceiling Fan's unfortunate new supervisor to call, I engaged in a bit of strained small talk with Slicker Lady, where I learned that she really was quite an unfortunate creature. Our dialogue was mercifully cut short by my phone's ringing. I looked at her and said "Hey, thanks for letting me know that my dog ran away, but I think I can get it from here."

"...Oh."

Slicker Lady wheeled around and, without saying a word, bolted to what I'm assuming was her house further down the road. After taking a second to process her abrupt exit, I answered my phone. "Hello?"

"Hey, is this your dog sitting in my backseat?"

"I'm assuming, yeah."

"I'm at the elementary school down the street. I was picking up my daughter from school, and as soon as I opened the door for her your dog came sprinting out of nowhere and just leaped into my car."

"...Huh."

Dibs.

About ten minutes later, I had walked to the nearby school and managed to find the woman's car. Ceiling Fan was staring at me from the rear window, furiously wagging her tail and just happy as shit that she had finally done something to make me proud. I thanked the woman and apologized profusely for Ceiling Fan's behavior, which the woman surprisingly found really endearing. Ceiling Fan was mushing her face into the window and covering the whole thing in slobber. "She seems really excited to see you," she said. "I'll open the door."

"No, best let me do that."

I immediately braced myself, spreading my feet and holding her leash at the ready, dreading the result of opening this woman's car door. Confused, she asked me "Why are you doing that?"

"You'll see."

I pulled the door handle, slowly, carefully, my ears straining and waiting for the worst. 

Click. 

The moment the car door latch released, Ceiling Fan tackled it from the inside, flinging the door open and nearly decapitating the woman's poor little daughter. Absolutely mindless with joy, Ceiling Fan torpedoed into my crotch, giving me a warm greeting and doing her best to communicate to me her latest adventure. 

"FRIEND!!!"

After a brief wrestling match on the sidewalk, I successfully restrained my dog and attached the leash to her collar. I hurriedly said goodbye to the woman and proceeded to walk my dog home, hoping that my dog's impromptu attempted murder of her daughter hadn't left too much bad will. When I got home, I took Ceiling Fan's leash off and took a seat on my staircase. She sat down in front of me, her chest heaving with her excited breathing, gazing at me expectantly and waiting for me to commend her on her latest display of idiocy.

I tried headbutting your testicles into paste because I love you.

She's a nice dog.

Tales Of Younger Me Suffering Absurd Amounts Of Pain - A Miniseries: Part 4

Age: Third grade.

The injury: a thorough embitchening at the hands of a grass field.

The story: For most elementary schoolers, Field Day is great. It's such an objectively awesome concept that nobody, myself included, can really find any fault with it. Rather than struggling to shove some learning into the sugar-addled minds of small children, teachers can just take them outside, make them play some games and maybe check up on them every now and then to ensure they're not killing one another. I myself was never talented enough to win any of the events that I partook in, but I sure had a lot of fun losing.

"Mommy look! I lost again!" 

"We're all losers, honey."

So we were doing Field Day at my school, and my particular group of kids was at the 3-legged race station. The teacher there was pairing us up with our race partners, and much to my dismay, I was partnered with a kid that we'll refer to as Johnny Psychopath. To this day, Johnny Psychopath remains one of the most aggressively pissed off third graders I've ever met, and having him strapped to my leg for a competitive event was nothing short of terrifying.

After unwillingly having my leg attached to that bull of a child, we all lined up at the start line. While the teacher rattled off the rules of the game, Johnny Psychopath looked me dead in the eye and said "If we lose, I'm going to kill you." 

Now, I shouldn't have to explain this, but a 3-legged race is kind of a group effort. One can't exactly expect to win without the help of the person attached to their leg, and it wouldn't do one any good to, say, punch their partner in the side of the head as soon as the race starts. Hopefully you understand that, my dear reader, because Johnny Psychopath sure as shit didn't. The instant the teacher said "Go," Johnny Psychopath decided that an excellent way to achieve victory would be to punch me in the side of the head and drag my ass across the field like a person tied to the back of a rampaging elephant. Surprisingly, his tactic worked, if only because everyone was so dumb-struck by the indecipherable workings of his mind that they couldn't help but stand there and wonder. 

Man, do I love me some Spongebob. 

After a moment or two of dead silence, punctured only by my panicked screams for help, the teacher grabbed Johnny Psychopath by the ear, and she beckoned to a nearby adult to take off our leg strap while the other kids commenced with the race. I laid there on the ground like an upturned turtle, covered in grass stains and unable to right myself, stuck on my shell while my exposed belly acted as a beacon for any hungry predator that might have passed my way. While they feasted on my turtle-y insides, I would crane my head and gaze at the sky one last time, cursing the cruel, unloving god that would let such a terrible fate befall as beautiful and majestic a creature as a turtle. 

I never was very good at similes. 

Tales Of Younger Me Suffering Absurd Amounts Of Pain - A Miniseries: Part 3

Age: Fifth grade-ish.

The injury: A stationary truck had its way with me.

The story: As I've mentioned before, my dad looks a lot like this.

And, as I'm so annoyingly fond of pointing out, I used to look something like this. 

The thing is, man-gorillas like my father get a little confused when handling small children, so when it came time to teach me how to ride my bike, my failure was such that my dad rage-quit on the whole endeavor and drowned out his disappointment with TV. This suited me fine, as riding a bike was far too physical an activity for my pudgy frame, and we both reached an unspoken agreement to never speak of it again. This happy ignorance lasted until my family got sick of hearing gunshots every day, and decided to pack up and move from our home in the city of Aurora, Colorado to the nifty little suburb of Centennial. Not only did I have to deal with a substantial amount of culture shock (where were all the kids trying to make me cry?), but it was also my first time living in a suburban environment - a place where virtually every kid rides their bike and you're absolutely hopeless if you can't keep your balance on one. In an effort to adjust to my new home, I took it upon myself to teach myself how to ride a bike.

Suffice it to say, this story wouldn't end up in my childhood pain miniseries if it had gone without some colossal screw up on my part. The short version is that I got the everloving shit beat out of me by a parked truck.

There's a stone-cold killer behind those goofy Pixar eyes. 

The slightly elongated version is this: on the day that I decided to learn how to ride a bike, I took my long-forgotten bicycle out of its dusty corner in the garage and wheeled it to a nearby cemetery, where I spent most of the day losing my balance, eating shit and presumably being laughed at by all the dead people. However, my perseverance began to pay off, and after several hours I had succeeded in keeping myself balanced long enough to be considered adequate at bike riding. Reveling in my victory, I got a bit cocky and decided that the only way to cement my status as a cool kid was to ride my bike all the way to my house.

Here's the thing: I live on a bit of a hill, and as successful as I had been at riding, I hadn't actually bothered to try my hand at braking. So when I got on my street and rapidly started gaining speed, I panicked. Rather than applying the hand brake, I started crying and screaming, my vision quickly blurring as my velocity approached terminal levels. I helplessly zoomed right past my house and continued down the hill, where, to my horror, my path intersected with a rusted out heap of a truck that was parked on the side of the road.

Pic unrelated.

Oh, I tried. I flailed like an idiot, doing everything in my limited power to prevent the inevitable collision. But like most things in this world, I was doomed to failure. 

My face and the side of the truck rushed to meet each other like two long-lost lovers. Unfortunately for me, those lovers were engaged in a highly abusive relationship, so when my face met the truck it raised its proverbial hand and bitch slapped me to the curb with all the force of a fat kid crashing his bike into a truck. My poor bike, ill-prepared for the collision as it was, crumpled into a confused mess of pedals and whatever else a bike is made out of. My only saving grace was that I was wearing a helmet, a positive which was somewhat refuted by the fact that my helmet had left a massive dent in the driver-side door and knocked the rear view mirror off of the vehicle and into the street, where it lay shattered and useless (much like my pride).

After disentangling myself from the misshapen remains of my bike, I assessed the damage that I had done to the truck, whereupon I looked pretty much exactly like this.

Being the responsible young child that I was, I gathered the various pieces of my bike and ran away as fast as I possibly could, leaving the unfortunate truck owner to contend with the consequences of my own incompetence.

I am a burden to society.

Making Fun Of Handicapped People (Is Still A Really Bad Idea)

Despite the impression that you, my highly valued reader, may have of me from this purple little blog of mine, I am no superhuman. To the disappointment of all involved parties, I am not a towering monolith of everything that humanity could be if it simply fulfilled its potential for greatness. In fact, as difficult as it may be for you to swallow, I am only human, and just as fallible and stupid as the rest of my ilk. Yet, even for a species as destructive and short-sighted as mine, one would have to be exceptionally lacking in areas both intellectual and moral to do something that could be considered a sequel to something like this.

Alas, that person is me. I'm so sorry for all of this. 

Take this bottle of shampoo as a gift to show you how remorseful I am.

So I'm white. I happen to live in an area where just about everyone else is white too. Virtually every friend that I have is perfectly acceptable WASP material. Because of this homogeneous atmosphere, my friends and I have all picked up a bad habit of using terrible words to describe unfortunate things. We feel pretty secure using these terrible words, because none of us really know anyone who's retarded or gay or any of our other horrible adjectives; consequently, we don't know anyone who has a real basis for being offended. 

This is my friend, Bucket Of Dicks. He gets really offended when we call something a bucket of dicks.

So the other day, I was hanging out with a friend of mine at school. Neither of us had class for a while, so my friend suggested going across the street and getting some food. I was happy as a clam at the prospect of perpetuating my fat existence, so we went on our merry way. All was well until we got near the crosswalk. 

I have a special reservoir of hate in my heart, reserved specifically for people who incessantly mash on crosswalk buttons. It's more than just a pet peeve; every time I see a person press a crosswalk button more than once, I want to slap them across the face and explain why I believe every major tragedy in the last millennium has been directly caused by them. I firmly believe that rapists, racists, murderers and crosswalk-button-smashers are all going to the same part of Hell. I hate crosswalk buttons because they serve no purpose and the ones in my area make a God-awful clangy metal noise that can be heard from space. 

Hate Puppy knows how I feel about this. 

So we came within view of the crosswalk, and I immediately felt my soul turn cold and black, because some girl was beating on the button like a particularly bad case of domestic abuse. As we approached, the girl pulled out her cell phone and started perusing through it, pushing that Goddamn button all the while. At some point, the little white crosswalk guy came on, and every single person crossed the street except her, because she was still checking her phone and pressing that awful button. 

This blatant stupidity stoked the proverbial fires of my unreasonable hatred into a blazing inferno. Turning to my friend, I vehemently whispered to her. "Is this girl retarded or something? Why is she still pressing that button?"

My friend was horrified and urgently whispered "Johann, that girl is retarded!"

"....what."

I usually turn to the internet to express my feelings. I'd like to think it does a pretty good job.

When we got to the crosswalk, I timidly looked at my former hate-target, and sure enough, the girl was actually retarded. 

This post doesn't get a satisfying ending, as I feel the urge to repent. Goodbye.