Walkin’ the Dog, Walkin’ the Dog

Did you know that, over at the Lewis Black fan site, you can submit your own rants? It’s true, it’s true, and if your rant’s good enough, Black himself will read it for an audience in his own, inimitable style.

I decided to try my hand at it in a rant about the anxiety-ridden ordeal that is walking my dog. I don’t know if Black will ever read it, let alone perform it, so I figured, what the hell; I’ll post it here.

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Dear Lewis,

I hate walking my dog. I do it everyday, and everyday I ask myself, “Why the fuck do I keep subjecting myself to this shit?”

Of course, I know why I subject myself to it: the little fucker’s a butterball. My fiancee has overfed him to the point that he looks like a burrito perched on sticks. One night he was sleeping under an old, stretched-out blanket my fiancee had crocheted, and he looked like one of those netted roasts you find at the supermarket.

So he needs the exercise, and, well, let’s face it, so do I. I recently turned forty, and the godly metabolism that kept me rail-thin from my teens to my thirties finally gave out like an old air conditioner. I’ve also spent a lot of 2020 drinking more than I usually do, but I doubt you need me to go into the whys about that. So I’ve developed a gut that I’m rather ashamed of, and I figure any activity is good activity, so out with the damn dog I go.

Some people say that they find walking their dogs pleasant and relaxing. They say it helps clear their heads. Not me. Not in the fucking slightest. There’s a lot of shit you have to put up with when you’re walking your dog.

First is the little bastard himself. He’s always fucking stopping. He stops so much that  you can hardly say I’m walking him. Sometimes he stops to investigate a square inch of grass that’s apparently so alluring that I have to drag him away from it. Seriously, he’ll dig in and resist me, leaving little nail scratches on the sidewalk. I’m amazed that his claws haven’t been filed down to flat little nubs. Eventually he’ll give up and get back on the trail, but only so he can continue his pissing schedule. Jesus Christ, how can one fat little dog have so much piss in him? Every five steps he’s lifting his leg and letting loose, whether there’s an object there or not. When I do that, people tell me I need a prescription.

Now, I’m so anxious around people that I won’t use a public bathroom unless I’m alone in it, but this damn dog LOVES a fucking audience. He always waits to shit until someone’s near enough to get a good look. All I can do is stand there like a moron, sheepishly grinning at passersby, while my idiot dog defiles someone’s lawn. Then I have the lovely pleasure of picking up after him. Honestly, it’s not the smell or the appearance of dog shit that makes this experience so unpleasant, it’s really the warmth. When my fingers close around that little lump of former Purina, I get a real sense of the temperature of my dog’s lower intestine. You might say it makes me feel closer to him, like I know the little guy inside and out, but don’t, because it’s a shitty joke.

Meanwhile, people are walking by and looking at the whole thing. Now, even when the dog’s not shitting, these people piss me off. They’re always going in the opposite direction from me, so when I first spot them, I get to enjoy a long period of dread, worrying about how I should address them, or if I should address them at all. What do I say? Should I say hello, or give a silent acknowledgment? Should I nod, or should I just smile politely? Will they even see my smile through this god-damned mask I’m wearing? What if they want to pet the damn dog, and I have to yank him away before he snaps their fucking fingers off?

Usually they just give my dog a compliment. I hate when people compliment my dog, because my dog can’t understand English, and he comes off as rude when he doesn’t fucking respond. So I have to answer on his behalf, and I never know what to say. They give me things like, “Oh, isn’t he cute,” and the only polite response I can ever come up with is, “Gee, thanks,” and I feel like a fucking dumbass. I have nothing to do with the way my dog looks; why am I taking fucking credit for it?

Still, as nerve-wracking as all that can be, the worst and most baffling thing about walking my dog are the intersections. God, I fucking hate intersections, but not because there’s a lot of traffic in my neighborhood. If there was, I actually wouldn’t hate them so much, if at all. No, the real reason I hate them is that at least once a day, invariably, when I approach an intersection with my dog, a single car will pull up and stop at the same fucking time.

Let me repeat that: a single car — that is, with no cars before it, and no cars after it — will pull up and stop at the same time that I approach an intersection. If I had arrived at the intersection a minute earlier, or a minute later, this wouldn’t happen, but it DOES. What’s more, since the state of California apparently deemed turn signals optional at some point, I have no way of knowing what these fuckwads are going to DO. So, I’m standing there with my dog, wondering whether this fucking driver is going straight, or will turn in front of me. Again, the anxious questions run rampant. Should I assert myself and go forward, or is this guy a fucking nut-bag who will gladly run me over? Should I play it safe and let HIM go ahead, or is he one of those overly careful douche-nozzles who likes to feel good about himself by letting everyone else go first? When that turns out to be the case, the two of us end up staring at each other like a couple of dimwits with no plans on a Friday night.

“So, uh, what do you wanna do tonight?”
“I dunno, whadda YOU wanna do?”

This happens everyday, Lewis, and everyday it’s a different car, at a different intersection, at a different time. It happens so often that I have to wonder that it happens at all. I mean, think of all the variables involved in this sort of occurrence.

The time that I leave the house. My energy level, which determines my walking speed that morning. The number of times my dog stops to sniff shit, and the amount of time he takes sniffing all that shit. The number of times he stops to MAKE shit, and the amount of time he takes making that shit. The number of times he stops to piss, and the amount of time he takes doing all that pissing. The number of people I have to slow down and talk to, and how lengthy each of those social interactions becomes.

Those are just a few of the factors on MY end. The fucker driving adds even greater dimension to the equation. What time the asshole left the house. Whether his car started properly. The numbers of stop signs and stoplights he encountered. The amount of time he spent in the drive-thru at Starbucks because those fucking baristas always take FOR-GOD-DAMN-EVER. The number of homeless people he fucking ran over on the way — you get the idea. With so many factors to be aligned, you’d think the odds of a single car arriving at the same fucking intersection as I do each day would be astronomical. Yet, without fail, the mathematics always add up to: GOD-FUCKING-DAMN IT, HERE’S ANOTHER ASSHOLE I HAVE TO DEAL WITH!

After hours of pondering this strange choreography of the universe, I believe I have determined the way that I am going to die.

You see, ten-thousand years ago, the inhabitants of the planet Zebulon discovered how to harness geothermal energy, and use it to power their cities. Since the Zebulonites hired Chespeake Energy to do the work, however, they dug too deep into the Great Magoovian Fault. This caused a massive explosion at Zebulon’s core, and split the damn thing in half like a jawbreaker. The planet’s two hemispheres went sailing across the galaxy as though hurled by heavenly hands. One of the halves came into the path of an Abraxian battlecruiser on deployment, which blasted it out of its way with a photon torpedo. This sent chunks of debris in all directions, and one such chunk was sent on a trajectory that, in time, will bring it into contact with a small blue planet called Earth.

As of now, the chunk is still many millions of miles away, but soon it will enter Earth’s atmosphere, where it will come ablaze and crumble, until it’s about the size of a .32 caliber bullet. Then, it will fall seven miles out of the sky, and right onto my god-damned head.

They’ll find me splayed on the corner of Third and Atchison, where I was waiting at a crosswalk for a car to pass by, still clutching my dog’s leash. The coroner will say something like, “Poor bastard; he never knew what hit him.” But I DID, Lewis. I DID.

Now, I know that this isn’t really how things work. I’m not so egocentric that I really believe that the universe has it out for me, like some cosmic version of The Fucking Truman Show…

…but it sure FEELS that way sometimes.

Your fan,

Daniel

Ceaselessly Into the Past

The use of firearms requires training, and not just in how to most efficiently bring death upon your target, but in knowing when doing so is actually necessary.

Self-control. Putting the situation before oneself. Recognizing the terrific and irreversible consequences of the trigger pull. These are the behaviors of the fit owner of a firearm. The fit owner is mature, careful, and draws his or her weapon only when death is clearly at hand.

Michael Dunn is not a fit owner of a firearm. I’m not even sure that he’s a fit member of society. Check out the video below to see how his story ended:

Before I get to the point, I want to give credit to Rhonda, Dunn’s fiancee, for her courage in telling the truth. Instead of scurrying and resisting and hiding and lying, she gave the testimony that incriminated her man, even though it clearly broke her heart. That she put justice before herself gives me hope for humankind.

So, what the hell, man? Why did this happen? Many of the comments on the above video say that Dunn is a racist, that he felt an immediate hatred for those boys because they were black. I’m not sure that that’s the chief reason. Prejudice certainly played a part in the motive, but I think what spurred Dunn was something more fundamental than that.

At the introduction to the video, the creator wisely holds on the telling phrase, “I’m the victor, but I’m also the victim,” which reveals, I believe, all we need to know about Dunn to explain this case.

Dunn was a successful man, and I’ve found that success often breeds paranoia. Once you have things, you start to worry about losing those things. Opportunists have reaped fortunes in money and power by exploiting real threats to successful people, and much more by selling perceived ones.

To an old, successful person, nothing is more threatening than the lands beyond the walls, where the indigent and misguided await to take over the world. With their stupid clothes and their fidget spinners and their weird, weird music, these creatures exist only to tear down all that the oldsters hold dear. Of course, this is exactly what every generation does, but let’s not think about that.

The disgust and distrust that every generation has for the next always amuses me. I’m guilty of it too; I hate the culture that teens have constructed, with their bronies, selfies, foodies, besties, and normies, but I try to remember that I was once no different from them. What must my parents have thought of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or the surfer-dude lingo we once found so bodacious, or the anti-adult rhetoric of most Nickelodeon programming? It’s a cycle, and every generation insists that the next one is the worst one yet.

Even so, they feel a need to perpetuate it, and then they congratulate themselves for it. New parents say, “I just want my child to have a better life than I had.” Old parents say, “Kids today have it too damn easy.” I’m tough, they’re weak, but I loved them enough to make them weak. A classic ego stroke that works from both directions.

And the reason they stroke themselves is that the truth is hitting them hard. The system never gave them the rewards they were promised for their years of back-breaking work, and now has turned its greedy eye to the kids, to the young, to the liberal, to the ones who are relevant now. All the advertising is aimed at them. All the music is aimed at them. All the great shows aren’t on TV anymore; they’re on these new-fangled streaming services. And these kids, suddenly they’re interested in politics, talking about gun control and pollution and housing costs, and showing their anger that their parents didn’t do anything to ensure a better future for them. What a bunch of bratty little ingrates! While the old and middle-aged rock in their recliners, wondering why retirement isn’t making them happy, these kids are all over television, acting like thugs, rioting about issues they don’t have any right to be involved in, and spouting “OK Boomer” to their elders. It’s like they think they can do whatever they want! It’s all scary and foreign and impossible to understand. Of course, a lot of the examples I’m giving here occurred after Dunn’s crimes, but the sentiments are evergreen.

So I think that the sight of those annoying, selfish punks, blaring their wicked music in a public place, struck a nerve with Dunn. In those kids, Dunn saw all the threats in the world, everything that made him feel small and sad and marginalized as a middle-aged man in a secluded suburb, and he decided he’d had enough. In shooting at those boys, he would strike a blow against this sick, dangerous world that just didn’t make sense to him anymore.

It’s all pretty grim, but that doesn’t mean I feel sorry for Dunn. His victimhood was entirely fabricated. The world was never out to get him. Certainly, none of the kids in the car he shot up were. He thought it was, though, and he had a need to fight back, even if he didn’t know exactly what he was fighting against. This need to be the “victor” was born of an ego made fragile by perceived powerlessness. Here he stood, the last sensible man facing the representatives of the future, a throng of smartass kids and encroaching thugs, all giving the finger to authority with their militant hip hop music, and no one standing up to do anything about it. Until now…and look where it got him.

I think the lesson to learn from this tragedy is pretty clear, but if it isn’t, I’ll spell it out for you: NO ONE IS OUT TO GET YOU, OKAY? THE GHOULS ARE NOT SCALING THE WALLS TO STEAL YOUR TREASURES. YES, KIDS ARE LOUD AND ANNOYING AND DISRESPECTFUL, BUT YOU WERE THE SAME WAY. IF YOU REALLY THINK KIDS ARE THE PROBLEM, THEN MAYBE YOU SHOULD ENCOURAGE PEOPLE TO STOP HAVING KIDS.

Having shown no remorse for Jordan Davis’s death, Dunn may never really understand why he was convicted, and why should he? Believing oneself to be a martyr provides the greatest sense of moral superiority, and there’s no more comfortable place than the couch of complete delusion. This is why I find the hateful noise in our culture so unsettling; there are people who really believe that the world outside their doors is full of monsters to be slain. Or, if they don’t think it is already, then it will be after the inauguration. They’re prepping for doomsday when the doom is all in their heads, and they’ll fire the first shot if they have to just to make sure it happens.

Is this how you want to live? Bitter, enraged, convinced that your cherished property is under attack from all sides? Seriously? You think on that a little, then get back to me.