Monthly Archives: April 2014

A Way Out

When my wife and I moved into our new apartment, we thought we hit the jackpot. It was almost too good to be true, and I know how cliché that sounds, like it’s the intro to every single creepy story you’ve ever read. “There’s only one catch,” I can just see the real estate agent selling that murder house to the unsuspecting newlyweds on every bad horror movie ever written. But there wasn’t any sort of warning when the broker showed us around.

It was exactly what we were looking for. It was more. It was a two-bedroom, two-story apartment, beyond what we had imagined was affordable for our price-range. The only sort of weird thing was that, for whatever reason, the building’s only access to the basement was through a door in the back corner of our living room.

And that does sound weird, right? But, and maybe this was us just really wanting this to work out, it didn’t look that weird, not really. It was just a regular door, a little old, it was locked and it remained locked, we didn’t even have a key. The landlord assured us that, other than the utility guy coming by to check the building’s gas and electric meter once every month or so, there wasn’t really any reason that anybody would have to go down there.

It took us a while to finally settle in, with the both of us working full time, the boxes from moving day just had a way of blending into the background of our daily lives. But after a couple of months we were mostly unpacked, and that’s when I started feeling it, a little uncomfortable having that door there all the time.

I blamed most of it on my overactive imagination. When I was a little kid, I was always scared to go down to the basement by myself. I’d think about old episodes of Are You Afraid of the Dark or scary stories told by classmates at school, and I’d freak myself out. Shadows would morph into monsters and footsteps from upstairs would turn into the muffled sounds of dead spirits. I knew it was all in my head, but the fear, that palpable panic, I’d run upstairs positive that something was chasing me up, reaching out to pull me back down into the darkness.

But I grew up eventually. Every once in a while I’d read something online, an especially creepy story, or I’d see that rare horror movie that kept me up for a few nights afterwards. But I was an adult, I’d grown up. All of those feelings, that mounting sense of dread, I could dismiss it when I really needed to. If I had to go to the basement, maybe I’d have like a sense memory of what it felt like to be terrified of nothing, but that’s all it was, nothing more than residual emotion.

In the weeks after we had unpacked, we started to get more comfortable in our new place. When I came home after work, it would feel less and less each day like I was walking into a stranger’s house and a little more like home.

Except for that door to the basement. At first I tried to will myself to ignore it. I’d tell myself, just wait it out, sure, it’s a little spooky, the idea of a blocked off passageway to a hidden downstairs, but I just had to learn to not pay attention. We set up the TV on the opposite side of the room, so as not to be forced to stare directly at it while we sat on the couch.

Only that seemed to enhance that sense of unease. It was like running up from the basement as a child, that tingling sensation on the back of my neck, like now when I tried to veg out on the couch at night, I’d feel the door, the back right side of my head would have this almost physical awareness of my location, my proximity to the door. There’d be the occasional shuffling sound, almost imperceptible. Which, yes, I was getting a little spooked, but this is the city, it’s a loud place. You hear noises everywhere. It could have been mice, or rats, something legitimately scary.

But it was getting to me, more and more, so I flipped the layout around so the couch now faced the door. And it was better, kind of. I still felt uncomfortable, but not as much, now that I could direct most of my attention toward the TV, pretend like whatever it was I was feeling was a result of whichever show or movie I happened to be watching.

The whole door stood out of place in the otherwise neatly kept living room. While the building itself was old, you could tell that the owner must have renovated this apartment sometime within the last ten years. But that door, it must have been from like way before. Years of paint jobs had accumulated on the top layer, giving it that kind of over-smoothed, rounded look. And the molding around the frame was a little more warped than the rest of the room’s woodwork.

A couple of times late at night I thought I caught something out of the corner of my eye. There was a gap underneath, maybe an inch and a half from the ground to the bottom of the door, and I’m telling you, a few times I’d be watching TV with most of the lights out, late at night, and I could see the reflection of the screen onto the tile flooring, illuminating just maybe half an inch underneath. That’s what I’m talking about, it was like I kind of saw just a tiny movement breaking that glow from underneath.

And each time that I thought I saw it, it happened so quickly that I didn’t even have a chance to really confirm if it had actually happened, or if it was just my mind playing tricks. You know, like sometimes you think you see something out of the corner of your eye, but it’s nothing? That’s what this was like, I’d be staring at the TV, I’d never get a chance to look at it directly, but that flicker, it gave this illusion, like something moving on the other side, something pressed right up against that door.

My wife is easily spooked, and so I didn’t want to say anything to her, not directly, she’d start to panic, I’d have to start accompanying her downstairs every time she needed anything from the ground floor. But she started spending less and less time in the living room. Eventually we set up a smaller TV upstairs, and we wound up kind of just hanging out almost exclusively in the second bedroom. It was this unspoken thing between the two of us, almost like we were afraid to verbalize exactly what it was we might be thinking.

Because what if I told her, hey, honey, I’m getting really creeped out about that basement door? I can’t explain exactly what’s making me feel uneasy, and I don’t have anything to back up my unexplainable but growing sense of dread. What if she said, “Me too?” Would that have made it real? It’s like, I can think about my own crazy thoughts and fears, but to hear them validated like that? No, I wouldn’t want to ever go downstairs again. And what were we supposed to do, break our lease? Find another apartment?

I had this dream one night. I was downstairs watching TV, and the door to the basement was open. There was a man sitting on the stairway, and even though I was conscious of the fact that this was totally out of the ordinary, I still just kind of sat there, hoping that if I could pretend to ignore what was happening, then it wouldn’t be real, that maybe he’d wouldn’t interact with me either, maybe he’d go away.

But he turned his head toward me. I couldn’t make out what he looked like, because he was just sitting there on that first step, obscured by darkness. “Come here,” he said, “I can show you a way out.” And despite the fact that everything in my head told me to get the hell out of there, in my dream my body just kind of calmly stood up and starting walking toward the door, like I didn’t have any control, like I was getting sucked in.

That’s when I woke up, it was the middle of the night and I had a lot of trouble even just laying there trying to go back to sleep. I kind of just waited out the rest of the night under my covers, pulling them really tight, all the way up to my head. I forced my eyes shut, absolutely terrified that if I looked up I’d see something in the room with us, like I’d open my eyes and there’d be a face staring at me from only inches away.

I was getting lost in my imagination, and when the sun finally rose, I took a shower, I packed my stuff up for the day and I bolted out of the front door without so much even looking back toward the living room. “Did you sleep well last night?” my wife asked me on the phone sometime during that day, and I lied, I told her that everything was fine. “Did you?” I asked her back, and she was kind of just like, “Yeah. Me too. Fine.” And I couldn’t tell if she really was fine, or she was afraid, like I was afraid, like maybe she needed me not to be afraid, because I kind of felt like I needed her not to be afraid. It was getting too much, I was starting to feel a little boxed in.

When I got back home, there were footprints coming from the basement door, white, dusty footprints, like from work boots maybe. I froze where I stood and called up the super. “Hey man, did the utility guy come today to check the meter?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “The utility company’s got its own schedule, and their own key to the building, so it should be like I said, like every month or so.”

“But you weren’t around today? Like you didn’t see if they went down to the basement?”

“Look man, I just don’t know OK, I’m sorry, is everything OK with the place?”

“It’s just some footprints, must have been from the basement.”

“Yeah man, that could be it, I’m sure it was the utility guy.”

After I hung up, it took me a couple of minutes to muster up the will or the energy or courage or whatever to move from where I stood. I walked to the basement door, I put my hand on the knob, and I turned. It wasn’t locked. I kept my hand there for a minute, like would I pull the door open? Part of me felt drawn to, but I was frozen, I didn’t want to see what anything looked like, I didn’t want to give my mind anything real to build any more dreams or illusions around, OK, I didn’t want this basement to be any more of a reality than it already was.

I called the super back up.

“You know what? I don’t think it’s going to work out. OK, it’s not enough privacy, not with people having access to our place, I think we have to figure something out.”

“That’s going to be tough,” he told me, “If you want a way out, it’s going to cost you.”

My wife must have felt similarly uncomfortable, because she didn’t tell me I was crazy when I told her I wanted to leave. We agreed to the terms right away, the first and last month’s rent, plus the security deposit, gone. She went with my line, that she didn’t like it that other people had access, but I could tell there was something else.

And now that we’re in a new place, it’s like I still can’t shake the feeling, that mounting sense of doom. Like when I try to sleep at night, I can still sense it, something hovering just right there, like all I have to do is open my eyes. Every noise I hear is something coming to pull me down. And I can’t shake it, right, I’m not getting over it, I don’t think my wife’s herself lately either.

And when I dream, I’m still right there in that living room, or I’m even right here in this bed, and there’s that open door right to my side, a little closer each time. I want to turn away, I want to do something, anything, but that guy is calling to me, “Come here,” always hidden in the shadows, and I’m not sleeping at all really anymore, I just feel like I’m losing it, like I don’t know how I’m supposed to deal with any of this, it’s like I’m totally unraveling here.

My letter of resignation

Dear Bill Simmons:

Over the past thirteen weeks, I’ve written to you right here on my blog every Friday. Like Reed Richards desperately waving the Ultimate Nullifier in the face of Galactus in an effort to save the planet Earth, I had hoped that by repeating your name and my stated goal over and over again, this lowly Internet gnat might somehow grab the attention of the sports and pop culture Devourer of Worlds.

That’s supposed to be you, the Devourer of Worlds. It’s a Galactus reference, a classic Fantastic Four storyline from the sixties. Did you ever read comics? Just do yourself a favor and don’t watch that movie, The Rise of the Silver Surfer, because I don’t want you to get any weird ideas of what does and doesn’t work when telling a Fantastic Four story.

I’m getting off track. Bill, consider this my letter of resignation. Obviously, I had hoped to be handing you this letter, in person, some thirty years in the future. In my dreams, you’d have hired me two months ago, and it would have been the start of my illustrious career at Grantland. My rise to stardom was supposed to be so rapid that, after a short while, it would have felt like there wasn’t enough room on the web site for the both of us.

So you’d tell me to go on sabbatical for a while, not having the decency to terminate my contract and let me write elsewhere, but totally unwilling to publish any of my work. So I’d start coming up with all of these pseudonyms, submitting killer material behind your back, right to your own web site. Pretty soon you’d have a whole new team of writers, all of them me, but of course you’d be completely unaware.

And then one day we’d all go on strike. You’d reach out to all of the writers you’d have alienated in your naïve Grantland rebuild, but you know how it goes, hurt feelings, bruised egos. Nobody’s going to give you the time of day. So you’ll have to engage your striking writers, meet their one demand: bring back Rob.

You’d relent, the web site would thrive again, and after a few awkward months of us butting heads, unable to see eye to eye, arguing about even the most trivial of office nonsense, (like, for example, you’d insist on a robust dark coffee in the break room, where I’d keep making a case for a subtler, blonde roast,) we’d eventually get past our differences in an effort to make Grantland thrive.

It would be a golden age of writing about wrestling and action movies and sports, year after year of record high page views and increased advertising revenue. We’d both be rich beyond our wildest dreams. But unfortunately, all good things have to end. You’re quite a bit older than me, and so eventually you’ll be thinking about retiring, while I’ll still be in the prime of my career.

“Rob,” you’ll ask me as you start picking out a senior’s village to move to somewhere in Florida, “I want you take full control of the web site. You’ve done a great job, and hiring you turned out to be the best decision I’ve made. I’ve watched you grow as a writer, as a business man, and I’m proud to call you a partner and a friend.”

And that’s when I’d hand you my resignation letter. It would be uncharacteristically bitter, full of hatred and laced with old resentments. It’ll turn out that I never forgave you for trying to push me to the sidelines back you first hired me. This whole time, I’ve been building up the web site all while cooking the books behind your back, rotting the business from the foundation up. And now I want out, leaving you as an old man to try to clean up the festering mess of a once-great media empire.

Of course you won’t have the energy to do it, so you’ll file for bankruptcy, and you’ll have to hire a whole team of lawyers and accountants. Say goodbye to that retirement in Florida, Bill.

Anyway, that’s how I’d always imagined this going down. But you’re not even giving me the chance. It’s like that What If? comic, the one where Ben Grimm winds up chickening out of the space flight that turns Reed Richard and his friends into the Fantastic Four. I think they let Dr. Doom pilot the rocket instead. Of course this winds up destabilizing the timeline, Doom betrays everyone else, and Ben’s not the Thing, so there’s really nothing that he can do about it except for to sit there in misery, thinking about how things could have been different, if only he hadn’t left his friends behind.

OK, that one was kind of a stretch, but I’ve always had a fantasy where I got to write a resignation letter that both began and finished with relevant Fantastic Four analogies. Or metaphors. I can never remember which one is which, a metaphor or an analogy. Whatever.

It would have been an honor to work with you,

Rob G.

I almost met David Wright

I went to the diner last weekend and right as I was sat, I saw this guy that I went to high school with sitting a few booths down. The last thing I wanted to do was get into a fake “Hey, how’s it going, so good to see you, how’s life,” type of conversation, but I didn’t want to be a dick either, and so I avoided eye contact, hoping that he didn’t see me sort of staring at him initially as my brain tried to figure out how I knew this guy.

But was he looking my way? I couldn’t remember for sure, and as I was about halfway done with my burger, and I know this sounds totally crazy, I started to get a little upset. I mean, if I saw him, he probably saw me, and why wouldn’t he want to come over and say hi? Right, like I just said, I didn’t want to say hi to him either, and so, whatever, I tried to let it go, hoping that he wasn’t just as surprisingly annoyed as I currently was about having been stiffed out of one of those awkward, “What are you up to these days,” back-and-forths.

I made up my mind to force the situation, I’d get up and be like, “Is that you?” although, just as I went about to actually put my plan into action, I realized I couldn’t even remember this guy’s name. Sophomore year, we definitely sat across from each other in at least three classes, but I don’t know why, I was drawing a blank. Was it Tom? Pete? It was something like that, Billy maybe?”

“Mike!” I heard another voice say coming at me. Only, it wasn’t coming at me. It was coming at Mike, his name was Mike, I can’t believe I couldn’t think of it. Here was another guy I went to high school with, I’m pretty sure his name was Brian, he must have been meeting Mike for lunch. And as Brian passed by my booth, we definitely made eye contact, it was only for like two seconds, but a solid two seconds, like two beats of definite eye contact. I went to make a subtle kind of head nod, like a, “What’s up,” but I think it might have been too subtle, because he just ignored me, and I tried to play it off like I had an itch on my nose or something.

“Charlie!” Mike said. So this guy’s name was Charlie, not Brian, and then they started talking, but the diner was busy, and even though I tried to hear if one of them said something like, “Did you see that guy a few booths down? Was that Rob?” there was no way I was able to make anything out. I did glance that way occasionally, but I didn’t want to come off as too creepy, and so, whatever, I just wanted to finish up and leave.

I mean, this is why people feel self-conscious about going to a restaurant by themselves. Because, what if that guy did say hi? Or what if my nod was slightly more than imperceptible? I’d say hi, these guys would say hi, and, and then what, they’d say, “Great, see ya later?” Would they feel maybe pressured to invite me to join their table? I’d have to say yes, right, I mean that’s polite, so we’d have to grab a waiter or a busboy and they’d have to move everything over. I’d be eating whereas these guys would have just been ordering, and so the timing would be off, there’d be the question of separate checks, or maybe even separate waiters.

I just wanted to leave, seriously, I was in my head now and I wanted out. But just before I had the chance to ask for the bill, guess who walked in? It was David Wright of the New York Mets. I couldn’t believe it, because this was just my regular diner, I mean, I guess celebrities go out for regular food once in a while, but this was just unreal, David Wright, walking right past me.

“There he is!” Mike said to David Wright. Man, he was there to see Mike and Charlie? Now I was kicking myself, because if I hadn’t tried so hard to avoid that bullshit conversation, if I’d only thrown in a, “Man, can you believe how long it’s been since high school,” or a, “How’s your family, everybody doing OK,” I could have been standing there at the table just as David Wright walked in. They’d have had to introduce me, maybe invite me to sit down with them, man, that would have been awesome.

Was it too late? It was probably too late. But I really needed to try. At the very least I could have endured an awkward two seconds or so to grab a selfie with David Wright, after which I’d bow out gracefully, and that would be that. So I walked over and I tried way too hard to play it cool. In my head, I wanted to pull off a natural double take, like it would’ve looked like I wasn’t going out of my way to bump into them, but then I’d be all, “Whoa! Mike? Charlie?”

It came off too forced. Because, and I always forget that when I’m playing out these scenarios in my head, I’m thinking that people are paying attention to me pretending not to pay attention to them, when in reality, nobody’s paying attention to me, not really. So from these guys’ perspectives, it must have just been, them sitting down at the table, and then all of the sudden I’m there, interrupting whatever it was they were doing with me, “Whoa! Mike? Charlie?”

“Yeah?” Mike said.

“It’s me. Rob.” Now all three of them were looking at me, but nobody said anything. “From high school.” I added.

“You’re from Ohio?” Mike said? “You went to Franklin?”

“No, I went to high school here on Long Island. You guys aren’t from Long Island?”

And they just shook their heads back and forth, which would have been fine I guess, an honest mistake. Only, it was definitely a little strange that I had called them out by their names, Mike and Charlie, names that, yeah, I guess I only knew because I overheard them talking to each other when they sat down. So I don’t know if they made that connection or not, but all I could think about was how obvious it was that I’d been spying on them.

“Oh really? That’s crazy. You look just like some of my friends from high school. Sorry for the confusion guys,” I didn’t even bother addressing the fact that I said hi by name, but whatever, I just needed a picture with David Wright, and then I could make my graceful exit.

“Sorry to bother you, but if I could just ask a favor,” and now I turned to David Wright, “Do you think I could get a photo?”

And it was even more awkward than I could have imagined. Everyone kept looking back and forth at each other with confused faces. Finally I just kind of leaned in a little closer, and nobody actively objected, so I of went for it, I took the selfie David Wright and me, said, “Thanks guys!” and then I left.

It was like half an hour later, I was back at my house and I’d already posted the photo to Facebook and Instagram, “Look who I met at the diner today!” was the caption.

One of my friends commented, “Who?” And I just typed back, “Haha.” But then another friend wrote, “Seriously, who is that?”

So I wrote, “David Wright from the Mets.”

And then like ten people shot back, “No, that’s not David Wright.” Some of them even posted pictures of David Wright from the Internet, with comments like, “This is David Wright. Who is that guy?”

And yeah, seeing them side-by-side like that, it definitely wasn’t David Wright. I’m telling you, in person, I don’t know if it was the light, but in the diner the resemblance was uncanny. But now, I mean, they kind of looked alike, like if you told me they were cousins, I’d totally believe you. But whatever, now it all made sense, the confusion, the awkward moment at the diner. I just kept the photo up on my wall, hoping everyone would think it was some sort of an inside joke that they didn’t get, because if I took it down, it would look like I had no idea what I was doing, like I’d have to admit to the Internet that I’d asked a random stranger to join me in a really weird selfie.

Gladys

In 2009, my wife and I joined the Peace Corps and were sent to live in a rural town in the subtropics of Ecuador. One aspect of life that stood out as remarkably different was the sheer number of stray dogs roaming the streets.

They were everywhere, packs of dogs, hundreds of them, chasing motorcycles, digging through piles of trash, barking and howling almost constantly. It wasn’t too long before my wife started hinting that she wanted to adopt one of the countless puppies wandering the streets. And even though I protested, I knew that it was going to be difficult standing in opposition to my wife’s demands for a whole two years.

While not a lot of people kept dogs in the house like we do over here, nearly every little kid takes in a puppy now and then. It’s not a permanent relationship. The little fuzzball soon outlives its cuteness and the parents kick the dog to the curb. About a year into our service, the neighbors across the street found themselves in this exact situation.

This little girl came over to our house one day, hysterical, she’s holding this ten-pound mutt, no bigger than football really, it was black with a white belly and two eyebrow-shaped brown spots on her forehead. “Please Joannah,” the little girl sobbed, appealing directly to my wife, a wise decision, because I was already shaking my head no.

“Please, my parents are making me get rid of her. Will you take her? Please?” And my wife got all doe-eyed, she looked at this dog, it had a big read ribbon tied up into a bow where a collar should have been. She looked at me. I looked at the dog. In a moment of weakness, I said yes. Thinking about it now, I still can’t recall exactly what it was that moved me to agree.

I never wanted a dog, not really. We always had a dog in the house when I was growing up, and for whatever reason I never forged much of a connection with any of our pets while I was living at home. But once I said yes, that was it, the deal was done. The little girl smiled, ran out of our house, and this animal that we verbally agreed to adopt immediately took a dump on the floor before getting lost under our couch and gnawing on an electrical chord running across the floor.

Our neighbor called the dog Pelusa, which means “fuzzy” in Spanish. Most people in Ecuador who had dogs gave them similarly literal names. Black dogs were named carbón or sombra, meaning “charcoal” and “shadow” respectively. We weren’t crazy about the name, it was kind of like naming a pet “Spot.” So we changed it to Gladys, which we thought was kind of funny, because it’s a human name, but a really old-fashioned one, something from several generations ago.

Gladys was a handful. She was hyperactive the way all puppies are, but as she grew up, she never lost any of that boundless energy that made her so difficult to control sometimes. If anything, she was getting stronger. One time she escaped the house, jumped over a huge fence, and didn’t come back for a solid two days. When she finally returned, parts of her fur started falling off, which the local vet diagnosed as mange. This meant applying creams and force-feeding pills every day for a couple of weeks. I didn’t even know mange was a thing, but it’s a disgusting skin-eating parasite that, according to the Internet, can be transmitted to humans in rare instances.

Another time, she got loose in a chicken coop and actually got a little bloodthirsty. “I’m really sorry,” I told our uninterested neighbor as we coughed up the money to make up for the birds that Gladys has mutilated. The lady was probably thinking, what did you expect? There’s a reason nobody keeps these things in the house.

It was weird. Gladys was really sweet around us, but she definitely had a feral streak. Nobody else in town liked to walk too close to her, and people looked at us like we were nuts when they found out that we let her sleep inside.

But we had always planned on bringing her back to the States with us, and we figured that getting her fixed was a part of that process. What if she escaped again? What if she was in heat? Wouldn’t that sort of complicate things if she all of the sudden had a litter of her own puppies?

So we brought her to the nearest city and found a vet willing to do the surgery. We dropped her off in the morning, but when we came back to pick her up that afternoon, something clearly wasn’t right. For one thing, she couldn’t move, at all. What kind of stuff did they use to knock her out? “Don’t worry,” the vet assured us, “It’ll wear off … eventually.”

After hauling her immobile body onto a pickup truck to make the hour-long trip back to our town, Gladys wasn’t acting like herself anymore. She wouldn’t eat or drink, we couldn’t get her to move from this one spot underneath the table. She had to have been in pain, and when we went to take her bandages off to clean the wound, it was obvious that the doctor had messed something up.

The incision wasn’t the tiny inch-long cut I had remember seeing on our family’s dogs back at home. This was like a six-inch gash, and not even a straight one. The area was swollen, and as the night went on, it started to get bigger. By the morning, it looked like it was going to burst. A few hours later, that’s exactly what happened.

The rest of the story is pretty gross. The vet was an hour away, so I had to hold Gladys down while my wife went to look for some local help. She came back with one of our neighbors who had experience performing basic veterinary care to his cows, and so he drugged her up, stuffed everything back inside, and sewed up the wound with really thick cattle stitches.

When it started swelling again, we returned to the vet, who performed yet another surgery. At this point, Gladys had been put through enough torture. When her wound opened up again the day after that, we knew what had to be done. Our cow doctor neighbor gave me an injection he said would do the job, and it did, instantly.

There were so many dogs in our town, and they died all the time. They would get in fights and bleed out, or they’d get run over by a car and bleed out. If the packs got overly populated, neighbors would lay out poisoned food and the streets would be littered with dead dogs for days. Nobody buried animals. I saw it happen a few times where some guy would pick up a carcass with newspapers and throw it in the river.

But I just couldn’t do that to Gladys. I borrowed a shovel and took the body out to the woods and started digging. The whole process was a nightmare, a singular experience so far removed from anything that I’d ever imagined myself doing back at home. On my walk back home, I was caked in dirt and sweat, I passed a group of men who started making fun of me, asking if I was going to wear black for thirty days. The fact that I was now being laughed at, on top of everything that we’d just been through, this was so far outside the realm of what I could process. It felt more like a disjointed dream than actual reality. I couldn’t even get mad. Here I was, this total outsider, spending all of this time, energy, and not to mention money, on a dog. From their perspective, this was actual crazy.

News of our theatrics spread across town instantly, and the very next day, a different neighbor showed up at our house with a new puppy, the one that survived Ecuador, the one that made it back to the States with us. It was like, look, don’t be sad, there are plenty of puppies. Here, have another one.

Everything worked out the way it did, and I love our dog that we have now. Would I have done anything differently? I don’t know. We didn’t know any better. And Gladys had been put through so much pain. Even if she had recovered, she would have probably been emotionally scarred from the whole ordeal. That’s what I tell myself anyway.

But every once in a while, I’ll think of one memory that stands out. It was while we were waiting for her third surgery in that nearby city. We were early, and the vet wasn’t open for another hour or so. Gladys was in bad shape, but my wife got her to calm down somewhat as we hung out outside. I went for a quick walk, to buy a couple of sodas, and as I came back to where they were waiting, Gladys looked up at me from maybe half a block away and started wagging her tail, the way all dogs start wagging their tails when you come home or when they’re happy to see you. It crushed me, her loyalty, that insane indescribable bond that you can develop with an animal. It was like, despite the hell she was going through, she still saw me and thought, OK, here he is, this is totally normal, and everything’s going to be OK.

April Fools Day

Happy April Fools Day everybody. I got up this morning kind of on the later side. But it wasn’t like I woke up and said, “Shit, it’s eleven and I just woke up.” No, this was more of a, “Wow, I can’t believe it’s eight o’clock and I’m already awake,” kind of day, so I celebrated, I rolled over and grabbed my phone and started surfing the Internet. And then the next thing I knew, it was actually eleven. So I don’t really know how I feel about that, like is it better to willfully waste the better part of a morning? Or would I have been more OK had I just naturally overslept?

And when I finally got out of bed, I was at once crushed with all of the little things I’d have to do in order to kick my day up to the next level. I’d have to drink coffee, eat breakfast, take my dog out, put on a pair of pants, brush my teeth … and not even in that order, it was like, OK, I know all of this stuff shouldn’t take me too long, but all of these competing commands from my brain to me, I can’t untangle them all, why can’t they just present themselves to me in a linear fashion? “OK Rob, first, put on pants. Great job! Now, brush your teeth …”

I didn’t untangle the order of operations flawlessly, but I did manage to get pants on and go downstairs. That was something. I wasn’t in my bed anymore, I wasn’t still wearing pajamas. My instincts next led me to the kitchen. My normal routine involves me getting the coffee ready, pressing the “brew” button, and then taking my dog for a walk while the hot water drips into the pot. If I time everything just perfectly, and this doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, it’s like I know that my day is totally set up for success. If the walk is just right, I’ll come back inside the house after letting my dog take care of his business, and the “beep, beep, beep,” of the Mr. Coffee machine will signify to me that, it was perfect timing, that I’m exactly in the right spot to enjoy the freshest cup of coffee.

Only, and this is another kind of kink in my programming here, but sometime around two weeks ago, my coffee machine stopped working. It was kind of acting up a few months ago, like the machine would clearly be on, and you could hear it really trying to suck up water to then pump down over the grinds, but it wasn’t happening. There must have been some sort of hole somewhere in the little tube that sucks up all the water.

So I did what I always do when my appliances start to malfunction: I opened it up and started poking at things aggressively, flicking this part, jabbing that spot with a knife. It worked. My coffee machine was better than ever. Until two weeks ago, that is. It was the same problem as before, only this time, when I gave that tube over there a yank, it snapped out, that little piece of broken plastic almost looked like a face, like it was smiling at me.

Whatever, it was a stupid coffee machine anyway, only like thirty bucks at Costco. I’ll just get a new one. Eventually. I keep forgetting to do it. Every day I wake up and my muscle memory leads me to the now lifeless piece of machinery still sitting on the counter, maybe I’ll even fill up the pot before I remember, oh wait, I need a new coffee machine, I’ll go today. Or tomorrow.

Luckily, my mom gave me this French press for Christmas. I busted it out after my machine broke, and it works. I have to like boil water though, and then wait for it to steep, and then I have to press this handle down, and then I have to clean it out afterward. So it’s a lot of steps involved, and I hate to think that my body might be adapting, like sometimes I go downstairs in the morning and my hands start to automatically get everything ready for this ten-step manual coffee making process. I get scared, because once I get too comfortable, all chances of me buying a new Mr. Coffee maker are out the window, because I’m a creature of comfort, of routine. Once I’m set in my ways, it takes an outside act to make me adjust accordingly.

The worst part is, this French press only makes two cups. And it’s such a long process, that I’m not going through it twice in one day. No way. So my caffeine levels for the past couple of weeks have been at an all time low. I’m getting less done. I feel less energized. I’m going to sleep earlier, which you might think would be a good thing, but once I fall asleep, I’m in there, it’s a deep sleep, I’ll sleep all the way until eleven. Or even like today, I got up early, probably because I was so under-caffeinated, and I couldn’t muster the energy to get out of bed.

Anyway, that’s where I’m at right now. It’s a little past lunch time, but I just ate three English muffins, so I’ll probably be OK until three, when I’ll get really hungry, and I’ll debate, should I eat something now? Or wait until dinner. I’ll decide to wait it out. Maybe I’ll go to the store and buy groceries, plan on making a big meal. But then like an hour before dinnertime I’ll cave, I’ll eat a whole bag of pretzels and half a block of cheese. And then I won’t really be super hungry for dinner, but I’ll eat it anyway, and I’ll just feel really, really full.

Happy April Fools Day.