The dog
I lived with a landlord for about two years, and I got along well with him. We shared much the same interests, sense of humor, and religious views (i.e. none at all, both being atheist). If I were a homosexual male or a heterosexual female I probably would have dated him. But I wasn't, so we just played computer games and played paintball instead. It was a good time.
However, two years into my residence, he decided to get The Dog, hereafter referred to as Sonofabitch, SOB, Planck, or it. This marked the beginning of the end for me.
There are other posts on this forum that may indicate that I'm not much of an animal person, to put it mildly. I can tolerate things that are quiet, odorless, and easily contained. For this reason, I have been told I would do well with fish and possibly snakes. Cats are just on the periphery of my tolerance, and dogs - regardless of breed, personality, or other specific traits - are well beyond the border into "get that bloody thing away from me" territory. Dogs stink, as evolution intended - after all, they hunt in packs with one group upwind and one downwind to corral their prey. Dogs bark, as their featherbrained social structures encourage, and it doesn't seem to occur to them that humans both a) don't understand WTF they're talking about and b) have developed vocal cords so we can actually do it
properly instead of employing their meaningless patois. Finally, worst of all, dogs get all up in your business. Anything you're doing is something they must investigate, using their apparent three senses of smell, taste, and bite. My landlord eventually bought a bitter spray to spray on his shoes so they'd last more than a week. At one point he put his plate of dinner on the table and came back to find SOB eating it - as a pure reflex action, he sprayed bitter spray onto his food and then realized what he'd done.
SOB started off about the size of a mentally deficient chicken, which was okay because it couldn't lick me anywhere higher than my shins. However, at that size it was a very needy, wheedly, barky, whiny little runtbag, and it had to come along with us wherever we went. Given that my landlord and I both work from home in a basement office filled with sensitive computer electronics, this did not bode well. At first my landlord tried to make a stand for the dog. "I'm not going to arbitrarily limit sections of the house just because you don't like him," he said.
I then reminded him that the dog is not an independent legal actor, and so anything the dog broke, landlord-tenant law would treat just as if my landlord had broken instead. There were a lot of sensitive computer parts in the basement, I pointed out. Computer parts that don't take well to being licked or bitten. Computer parts that would cost a considerable amount of his money to replace in the inevitable event that SOB decided to "investigate" in its own incompetent and scientifically non-rigorous way.
My landlord suddenly changed his mind and locked SOB up in the bathroom instead.
For about three weeks, we then had to endure torturous howls and yelping throughout the entire damn house as SOB bemoaned its fate worse than death - which was to have nobody around to pay attention to it and stroke its wretched hide and tell it that it was a good boy instead of some blathering backward proto-mammalian atavistic life form that had yet to even evolve opposable thumbs. Whenever the landlord was in the house, he would inevitably crack and go up and retrieve SOB, which would then be pathetically grateful and dance around its savior.
Sometimes the landlord brought SOB downstairs, and SOB once tried to jump into my lap. I intercepted it in a fluid arm motion and simultaneously stood up. After its hard-surface encounter with the wall, SOB never tried that again. Other times when I was nose-deep in legal work and the little bastard came over full of yappy mindless exploratory inquisitiveness, I would spin suddenly in my chair and hiss loudly at it, sending it back to its master in a quaking frenzy. Somewhere in the dim recesses of ganglia it called a brain, ancient evolutionary memories were probably surfacing of prehistoric felines that could crush a canine in their jaws. Maybe SOB was puzzling over exactly how these great cats had taken Asian bipedal form.
My landlord had a problem pronouncing the name Planck, as in the physicist Max Planck. He pronounced it Plunk, and to an American's ear, it should be closer to Plonk. Fatally, the landlord decided to call the dog "Max".
Shortly thereafter, my landlord would go to work offsite, and come back home in the evening to find that his dog no longer responded to the name "Max". Instead, the dog had begun to respond to the name "Planck", pronounced "Plonk". The landlord did not take long to figure out how this had come to be. Although he continued to call the dog "Max" in a vain effort to undo my own counterconditioning, for the remainder of my stay, the dog consistently responded to Planck. With the correct German pronunciation, dammit.
After about a month, SOB was the size of a travel suitcase (although it no longer fit inside of one... or so I would imagine) and it could lick faces, although it was just dimly smart enough not to try this with me. SOB's increasing size also meant that heat diffusion was a problem, because the genetically inferior evolutionary adaptations of the canine family meant that they didn't have sweat glands on the majority of their skin.
At about this time, Planck outgrew the cretinous need for constant companionship and attention, and became quite content to lie in its cage all day. This is one canine evolutionary trait of which I approve - at a certain age, they have a denning instinct, which means they willingly go into a cage where they can then be locked so they cannot perpetrate further idiocies upon cohabiting humans.
This meant that SOB would lie in its cage all day, generally quietly, but with scant opportunity to cool down. Its cage was in the top level of the house, in the landlord's bedroom, and on hot summer days it could reach 100°F. For a human like me conditioned to fear British cold weather, this was a heavenly temperature. For a dog, it was potentially lethal. I watched patiently as a disinterested observer to see how long it would take my landlord to realize that his dog was incrementally roasting to death each day he was gone at work.
On the third day, my landlord called me from work and asked me to move the dog to the air conditioned TV room. I agreed to do this in exchange for dinner, and we sealed the deal. I went upstairs and looked at the dog, which looked back at me with slow-headed expectation as it panted away stupidly in the heat, indolent in its own cloying reek and stench of canine vapidity.
"Let's go then," I said, and let the dog out. I carried its cage down to the air-conditioned TV room, and the dog meekly followed. I opened the cage and the dog slipped in and curled up more or less happily.
I looked at it and realized that I had just performed an unconditional favor for the dog.
Frankly, this was unacceptable.
It is an axiom of human existence that the Universe grants us nothing without taking its pound of flesh in return. For now, Planck had food, shelter, and companionship from a human master - but at what cost? Someday Planck might realize that even this apparent show of compassion and sacrifice came only with its own ironcast terms. Planck would never run free in the dappled sunlight of its ancestors' woods. It would never have the chance to hunt its own food - being eternally child-dependent on a human to scoop dehydrated protein granules into a dogbowl every morning. Moreover, even its kindly human master acknowledged in some faint way that this life was an evolutionary dead-end: one day soon, Planck would be bundled into a surgical facility where humans would pet it, and stroke it, and say comforting things to it, and then with precise strokes of their advanced tool-using digits, cut off its testicles and cauterize the roots shut.
The sooner Planck learned this lesson, the better for all of us.
I fished around the room and found the TV remote, turned on the TV, and set the channel to something that I would have found intolerable. Something that would have formed Cruel and Unusual Punishment under the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Something that Planck would have to watch for the six hours until his master came home.
* ~ * ~ *
"Hey, Bing," my landlord said. "Why is Planck sitting in front of the TV and why is he watching the Evangelical Church's Hour of Power channel?"
I did not look up from my work. "No idea," I said. "Maybe your dog is a closet fundamentalist. You should get that checked."
"Okay," my landlord said, and went back upstairs.
* ~ * ~ *
After two months of living with SOB, I moved out to a new location. I still meet with the old landlord from time to time, and we're still good friends. But the one time I met Planck - now the size of a wolf - it remembered who I was and wisely kept its distance. Maybe it knew that those funny bipedal mammals may not run very fast, or bite very hard... but they do have two limbs that they do not need to use for walking, and with those two limbs they can fashion all manner of ways of putting you bang in trouble.
Either that, or Planck knows better than to hang around an atheist, as it might hurt his chances of joining the heavenly choir.
This makes me sad. Nothing against the new girl in the office, her presence will simply add a different dimension to the company, I just don't know if is one I'm going to like. Don't know if it qualifies as a fear/horror/madness check, but will post it anyway. Its disappointing when things you like have to change in one sense, in another sense, I know my friend is simply thrilled at this development and I wouldn't want to damper his enthusiasm with my grumpy attitude.
How many hours a day were you playing?
