So My Dog is a Cat Murderer
By Alexis-Jolly
Lauren and I have lived in our apartment for over a year now, and it’s been amazing. We cook delicious dinners almost nightly, watched the entire British 7 Up documentary series, wake up early to do yoga… in short, we’re living the Stuff White People Like dream. And I’m happy to say Sophie’s sociopathic behavior has returned to a tolerable level of mostly-harmless insanity. I’ll share some highlights of the past twelve months below, in convenient bullet point form.
- On a recent hike, Sophie scurried up, then leapt off of, a twelve-foot boulder, plunging face-first into the dirt, leaving an indentation in the ground. She then bounced back up and sprinted seven obsessive-compulsive circles before squatting to pee on a fallen tree and returning to our hike in progress.
- Sophie routinely growled at and tried to attack our neighbor’s old dog as he was in his final months among the living. This ended when he did, in fact, die.
- On another hike, she bit the head off a snake. Which, after a cat, is n.b.d.
- Her anal glands get backed up, then need to be “expressed” by the vet every couple months. Sophie lets us know it’s time by scooting her anus along the floor—a move I’ve named, in honor of The King of Pop, “the forward moonwalk.”
- Sophie recently did the forward moonwalk on Lauren’s bed pillow.
- As we crossed paths along Wilshire, Sophie managed to get a blind woman’s seeing eye dog so riled up that I had to point the woman back in the correct direction (i.e. not directly into an oncoming bus).
Literary convention requires me to transition now to the Marley & Me ending, where I realize just how endearing Sophie’s craziness has grown. Ideally, she’d contract some rare form of cancer or get mowed over by an Escalade while chasing after her favorite toy and we’d have a nice, weepy ending.
The reality is a bit more prosaic than that. As far as I can tell, she’s going to live forever. And the truth is that having your dog drag particles of fecal matter where you and your partner lay your faces at night is never going to get endearing. That said, among all the insanity, there enough things about Sophie which I very much enjoy that I tolerate her crap. And I do mean that literally.
These include:
- How when you put a blanket over her head, she calms down and eventually falls asleep. Like a parrot, or a simple child.
- How pathetically miserable she is during baths.
- How, when we’re about to go for a walk, she gets so happy she’ll spring from the ground with all four feet up in the air, over and over again until we’re out the door.
- How she gleefully eats bugs out of the air.
- How much she loves freshly grated parmesan cheese.
- How she’s got a ridiculous underbite.
- How, when Lauren and I watch tv, Sophie plops herself between us with a sigh, like she’ll reluctantly agree to be normal, just for a little bit.
So while Sophie & Me won’t be coming to a theater near you any time soon, the fact of the matter is I love Sophie—at least as much as any man can love a creature that would eat him if he were made of parmesan cheese. Scroll through my phone and you’ll find it filled with photos of the beast. And, at any given moment, if I’m not writing or scrolling through photos of people I don’t know on Facebook, I’m probably chasing Sophie around our one-bedroom apartment, stomping on the hardwood floors, knocking paintings from the walls, and annoying the hell out of our neighbors.
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And I think that love I have for her is important, for a couple reasons. One has to do with the fact that I can identify with Sophie’s weirdness, her occasional inability to connect with other dogs, even her cold-blooded murder (in my case, involving a bb gun when I was twelve, a rabbit, and a one-in-a-million shot that ended, once again, in pre-adolescent tears). So in a bizarro way, I think being able to love Sophie has a lot to do with my being able to love…
Rabbit… porn? No, myself! That’s it! Being able to love Sophie is like being able to love my own weird self!
And the other, less child-of-the-80’s, part of it is that, if I can love Sophie despite her many, many, many flaws, it’s probably good practice for being able to do so when it comes time to bring an actual human life into this world. A human that will, at times, disappoint, disgust, surprise, horrify, shock, humiliate, surprise, enamor, entertain, and, every once in a while, bring pride, contentment, and a tremendous amount of joy to Lauren and me. That, more than ability to tolerate an onslaught of feces and bile, is probably what matters most.
So I guess the take-away from this little self-help session is, when Lauren and I do someday have a baby: stay far, far away.