dog.

Everyone in Bloomington, Indiana owns a dog.

It’s really odd.  And maybe it’s just my neighborhood.  No, actually, my neighborhood is much further off average than the rest of the city, I’m sure.  Because in my neighborhood, everyone owns two dogs.  And not two Yorkies.  Not two poodles.  But two big ass dogs.  What is an ass dog?  It’s whatever is still barking every night at 3am.

Miraculously, even though everyone owns two dogs, there is no dog shit to be found.  Anywhere.  On the street.  In the bike lanes.  On the park sidewalk.  At first, I thought this was because Bloomington is extremely environmentally-conscious.  But then I realized it’s just because nobody’s dogs poop in Bloomington.  Instead of pooping, they bark all night.  And form secret underground societies whose primary goal is to keep streetlights out of Bloomington, Ind.

Another fun fact about my neighborhood is that nobody actually has a job.  How do I know this?  Because whenever I leave for class – be that 8am, 11pm, 3pm or 6pm, everyone is always out walking their two dogs.  Sometimes they’re also jogging.  Sometimes they’re going with the trifecta – dog, jog, baby stroller.  But one thing they’re for sure not doing is working.  It doesn’t matter if they’re young or old.  They’re always outside not working.  Ever.  Unless you consider playing tennis to be working.  In fact, the only evidence of employment in my neighborhood is the daycare across the street.  Because really, it wasn’t enough for the dogs to be barking all night.  The toddlers have to be screaming all day to complete the 24-hour cycle of noise pollution.

Also, everyone rides a bicycle.  I’m not sure why, though.  As I’ve proven time and time again, my car trumps your bicycle every time.  Conveniently, my neighborhood has a nice, reed-lined ditch in the middle of two one-way streets where I can hide any and all evidence of this experiment.

 

tolerance.

Like pterodactyls, I do not know how to draw crabs.  Again, vital curriculum that is completely lacking from our socialist education system.  I blame Obama.

The moral of this story, though, is that you can’t read any of the speech bubbles coming from the fish, seahorses and reef.  Whereas I can.  Because I created it.  I just chose to take a really crappy picture of it so you wouldn’t know.

Okay, fine, I give in.  From left to right:

Fish 1: Fag.
Fish 2 (to Fish 1): Homophobe!
Seahorse (to Fish 2): Gay fish lover!
Minnow (to Seahorse): Close-minded seahorse!
Reef (to Minnow): Queer minnow!
Rock (to Reef): Ignorant coral!

So basically this is like the aquatic Crash, but with a few notable differences.  For one, there is no fingerbanging.  Secondly, there are no Mexicans or Asians or crazy black people or pompous crackers.  There is only an emo octopus and a gay crab.  Odd that our emoctopus friend is somehow smoking a cigarette underwater.  No doubt a subconscious reference to one of my favorite films of all time (except Bill Murray didn’t quite pull it off.)

Oh, and yes, I still want emo hair.  Please don’t tell anyone.

dinosaurs.

Been a while, I suppose.  But like Abraham Lincoln said: you musn’t rush a good doodle.  Or a bad one.  Or any of the ones in the basement of bad that belong to my assortment of notebooks.

This probably would have been more amusing if I knew how to draw a pterodactyl.  I’ve learned several things in my 16 years of formal education.  How to draw pterodactyls, unfortunately, was not one of them.

(No, they had to teach me about derivatives!  Like I’ll ever need to retain that chunk of knowledge!  Oh, help me sir, my car broke down just outside Stabbington City!  You fix the fuel pump, I’ll fend off the converging army of denim-clad serial rapists with my knowledge of derivatives!)

You know what’s kind of cool about dinosaurs, though, is that they didn’t have to take no guff from no one!  Like, if someone told them that the previous sentence was grammatically incorrect, they would just stomp that know-it-all’s colon until it exploded partially-digested Blackjack Taco.  The only natural predator that dinosaurs seemed to have, besides each other, was the asteroid.  And to be fair, there are very few things in the natural world that stand strong through the nuclear winter following a ten-ton atomic blast.

Al Davis is one of them.

down.

It’s probably going to sound like I’m making this up.  But I’m not.

(Then again, if I made this up, I would probably be more gonzo than the counter-reality of actually experiencing this crap.  Even if in dreams.)

I had a nightmare a few nights ago about dogs and balloons.

Specifically, dogs being tethered to balloons and sent skyward.  Some guy in some suburban neighborhood was rounding up dogs and tying them to balloons and sending dozens, hundreds of them into the clouds.  Hell, people were giving their dogs to him.  There were cars, vans, trucks lined up down his street for miles, bumper-to-bumper toward the horizon.  Handing over their dogs to be sent up to heaven.  All dogs go.

It seems like a funny visual in retrospect, but the feeling of doom was so damn palpable in the dream.  What goes up after all.  I knew all these dogs were being sent up only to have that balloon pop and send them plummeting back to earth.  I could hear them barking and yelping.  The images, they were so vivid.  Tremendous.  Literary to the point of poetic prose on the pupils.  But the sensation behind this ludicrous act, it was horrible.  Just a wretched feeling, watching these dogs be sent up just to come back down to their death.

I don’t understand the symbolism, if there was any.

At one point, my old dog Junior fell from the sky.  My family put Junior down last summer.  He was 12 years old and suffering from canine Alzheimer’s.  I didn’t know dogs could get it until he did.  Still remember the day we put him down.  August 6, the day my childhood was euthanized.

But for some reason, as he fell, a hawk swooped in and scooped him up.  And I happened to be in the backseat of my first car for whatever reason (not getting laid in that clunker, assuredly), and the hawk deposited him through the open window.

So here’s the creepy part, for me.  And maybe that I haven’t found any of the preceding to be “the creepy part” is indicative of how uncontrollably FUBAR this whole dream was.

He was exactly like he was before he got sick.  I mean, he looked the same.  Same gray, wispy hair.  Same Butterball body.  Same slicked-back ears, same eyes searching darkness for the unseen.  I held him and my lap and petted him, and I remembered what it was like to pet my dog.  Wow, that seems like a euphemism.

So while it was a nightmare, and the idea of these dogs all going ker-splat on the ground was dreadful, I woke up reaching for an invisible dog curled up against my ankle.  It was stunning, it really was, how realistic it was.  Like nothing was exaggerated whatsoever, and for whatever reason, I chose to recall a moment with my childhood dog, and I could remember exactly what he looked and felt like.

Just amazed me, the power of a dream to emulate the already realized past.