Pestered

I am still wet even though the sand and sun are very warm.  My mind is foggy and swirling and I can’t remember how and when I was washed up here on the Tahitian beach.  My eyes sting from the salt and I have difficulty focusing on the form leaning over me.  I feel powerless but I am not frightened.  There is something about this place that exudes peace and an inner calm.  I can feel hair gently brushing my throat as the human shape slides closer.

I feel like I am being touched but I can’t tell for sure, as my senses have been combined into a warm bubbling feeling.  I hear a voice, sweet and melodic, of a young woman, in a foreign tongue.  Then there is a second, equally as pleasant.  A little giggling follows with the feeling of warmth and proximity.

Riiiiiiiiiing! What?  All I see now is a blurred image of my family room with the muted plasma screen on the wall.  I close my eyes again fast.  Let’s get back to Tahiti now, go, go, go!  I begin to melt and fade again.  Riiiiiiiiiiing!

I grab my cup of Macchiato and stagger around the coffee table towards the phone on the counter.  The dog is looking at my cup with enthusiastic interest.  I take a swallow but the cup is almost empty and the liquid is cold.   “Spkitchhello,” I say into the phone as I spit a hair off my tongue.  The dog has whipping cream on her nose.

“How are you today sir?” chirps the handset.

“Fine,” I blurt as I stare into my cup.

“I’m calling from the NB Bank of Canada, Canada’s premier banking institution with a very special, time-limited, offer on our new Emperio card which usually has an annual fee of $59.00, but today for just a limited time …”

“There are dog hairs in bottom of my cup mixed in with the cream and caramel…”

“That’s just for you, just for today, if you sign up you will have an annual fee of only $19.99…”

“Can you get rabies from dog hair?”

“But that’s not all …”

“You mean like what, hepatitis, dysentery…?”

“…you get 10,000 bonus air miles and free car rental insurance all over North America…”

“You woke me from Tahiti just for this?”

“No sir, not Tahiti, just North America, all over North America where cars are rented.”

“Do you want to buy my dog?”

“No sir we don’t offer credit to dogs.”

“What planet are you from … Saturn?”

“Yes sir, Saturns, Toyotas, and all brands of vehicles that are rented …”

I calmly place the phone down.  I do not hang up, I just place it down but the non-stop chatter continues.

I sign onto the computer in the next room to find out how to make a Lebanese letter bomb and look up the address of the NB Bank.  My e-mail screen pops up and the only unopened message is about ‘Guaranteed penis enlargement for only $19.99’.  I reply, using my ex wife’s e-mail address, and ask whether they have an ‘extended warranty’, pun intended.  I can still hear the phone chatter in the other room.  It’s really annoying me now so I go back and pick up the phone.  “Alright”, I say, “this does sound like a good deal.” and I give the woman the address to mail the card to.  It’s not my address – it’s the bank’s address that I got off the internet.  She’s made her sale but she keeps talking.  This time I hang up. 

The dog is clearly experiencing the effects of caffeine.  She’s still running circles around the couch on the living room.  Her back legs slide out from under her at each turn but her front paws keep pumping and pumping.  Traction finally gives way and she spins out of control bashing into a large vase and leaving a forensically identifiable nose print in the middle of the TV screen.

During the next week, I pay special attention to all the spam, telemarketing calls, junk mail, flyers and other invasive forms of crap I receive.  The numbers are staggering.  There are calls telling me I’ve won hockey tickets and all I have to do to received them is to attend an ‘information session’ on some new time shares that have been built in some hot, war-torn country.  The girl on the line is particularly pushy and obnoxious so ask her to tell me what she’s wearing, in my most seductive voice.  She hangs up and I tally that one as a success.  I received a renewal notice from Reader’s Digest even though I stopped my subscription six years ago.  I received a promotional bottle of mouthwash that bears a small certificate stating that it was not tested on animals – I am extremely relieved that no baboons were forced to gargle.  During the course of the week, I get calls asking if I want to sell my house, buy a house, have my house cleaned, have my lawn aerated and have lint vacuumed out of my navel.  On Wednesday, I receive thirty–two page flyer from the city explaining the proper way to recycle paper. I receive a second copy on Thursday.

Who pays for all this stuff?  Clearly this is a rhetorical question, but since they’re paying it means that there are people out there that are actually so easily influenced by marketing that they can be convinced to spend their money or alter their life styles with only a little coaxing.  I really have difficulty with impulsive people. Religions are founded in faith, history and culture which have evolved for thousands of years.  How someone could possibly convert to a different religion based on a knock on the door and a hard sell sales pitch boggles the mind.  When I am faced with this scenario, I pull a rubber glove over the top of my head and answer the door naked.  I am going to state the obvious here, but if you choose this strategy, you must be absolutely certain that you know who is standing on the other side of the door.  I have a scheduled court appearance next week that will further examine this point.

The door bell rings but I decide not to bother with the rubber glove thing.  I open the door and am handed a free newspaper, that I don’t want, by a kid wearing a Nike hat, an Adidas shirt and Bum sweatpants. He is gone before I can hand it back to him.  There is a crash from the kitchen so I dart up the stairs two steps at a time.  The dog, who has now become a caffeine addict, has knocked over my cup and is slurping up what coffee was left.  As I approach her, a Starbuck’s coupon book drops out of the paper and I lunge for that instead.  She beats me to it and takes off back into the living room repeating a similar scene from before.  There is a lot of running, loss of traction and spinning out.  This time there is a forensically identifiable nose-print and blood stain on the TV but unfortunately their both mine.

Safety First

It was a bit of a grey, drizzly day as I carefully carried my Macchiato to the shop.  Playing with machines that made screeching noises and reduced wood to dust always uplifted my spirits.  I moved over to the drill press and fiddled with the chuck key to change bits.  I was working on a teak jewelry box that I had picked up at a garage sale.  As I reached across for a 3/8 th’s twist bit, the edge of my cuff caught my beloved Macchiato and spun it off the bench into a double bounce on the floor.  Macchiato literally means stained in Italian.  The floor, the side of my bench and my fourteen-year-old jeans were now macchiati.  I uttered the requisite profanities and moved on.  Clean-up could be deferred to later.  This was, after all, a workshop.

As I hit the start button, a quick flash of a faint memory materialized in my head.  Safety!   I had promised that I would be responsible in my playing with tools so I clicked off the machine and looked for my new safety glasses.  I made sure to step in the Macchiato as I went to grab them off the rack across the room.  They were securely contained in an inner package of clear tamper proof plastic, the same material that is used in the re-entry shield of the space shuttle.   The outside packaging was of light cardboard and bore two paragraphs of safety instructions:  blah, blah, blah … put on head over eyes … blah, blah, blah … if taken internally do NOT induce vomiting … and in French:  le blah, le blah, le blah …  I collected all the tools I would need to open the package.  There were five:  Staple remover, disposable knife, dry wall knife, wood chisel and acetylene torch  (just in case).

I got through the cardboard ok but hit a wall when I got to the space-age plastic.  The first attempt snapped the blade off the disposable knife and I pitched it into the waste bin.  Well not quite.  It hit the side of the waste bin then landed in the Macchiato in one of the creamier blobs next to my foot.   I almost gave up with the chisel as well until I realized the torch was out of fuel.  I took out a hammer to tap the chisel through the plastic.  It wasn’t cutting but it was cracking a little so I felt encouraged. One final, more assertive smack and I was through, except that a tiny piece of the polyethylteflohydro-C3PO plastic flew into my left eye. 

I made my way through the last recognizable blob of cream on the floor to the small washroom across the room.   I looked in the mirror but couldn’t see anything.  My eye was starting to water quite severely and I was beginning to get a little agitated.   I grabbed my eyelid and tried to pull it over the bottom of my eye to try to dislodge the offending material.  All that came out were a few eyelashes and a lot of tears.  My eye was starting to get very red.  I tried again, but only got more eyelashes and more tears.  I needed to go the hospital to get the thing flushed.

Driving with one hand holding a tissue over one eye probably wasn’t the best idea I had ever had, especially when it came to changing gears, but it was the best I could come up with since I was in a hurry to get back to playing in my shop.  All was progressing relatively smoothly – I had only swerved onto the shoulder twice – until I rounded a corner where the traffic morphed into a low moving blob.  Construction.  There was a sea of pink cones surrounding a backhoe operator that was wiping mustard stains from his hot dog off one of the hydraulic levers in his rig.  Six other city employees, wearing hard hats, were supervising this operation. A seventh was ‘directing’ traffic.  From what I could tell, safety was very important to him as well. 

He wore a hard hat, of course, presumably in case any space debris were to fall on his head.  It was covered in large X’s of reflective tape for maximum visibility.  He had on safety glasses, a heavy duty jacket, a reflective safety west, leather gloves, cargo pants with built in shin pads.  Every item was of a distinctly unique, very bright color.  He had on an ergonomic back support presumably so he would not be injured by the weight of his utility belt, which consisted of a flashlight, air horn, flares, radio and a water bottle.  I couldn’t really tell but I’m sure the guy must have been wearing a condom as well.  All he was missing was a parachute.  I was quite surprised by that.  The significant problem here, however was the manner in which he was holding his sign, which was neither clearly STOP or SLOW, but moving back and forth giving some in-between message.  Traffic had accordingly stopped and slowed and slowed and stopped and stopped.  If he were working in the US he would have needed a bullet-proof vest as part of his construction site fashion statement.

I pull into the hospital parking lot and park in the furthermost spot from the pay station.  I walk to the pay station.  I walk back to my car to see what stall I am in.  I walk back to the pay station to record my stall number.  I walk back to my car get change for the machine.  I am breathing hard now and my eye is really starting to hurt.  I finally make it into the building.  There is a large room full of very unhappy people.  Some are bleeding, some are moaning and others are parting with other unwanted fluids.  I’m not sure whether I am in an emergency ward or in a casting studio for a Quentin Tarantino film.  I move to the font desk and am asked what the nature of my ailment is.  I am holding tissue paper over my eye.  I now think I am in an emergency ward.  I tell her I have hurt my eye.  She asks me which one.  I now breathe a sigh of relief because now I know I’m in an emergency ward.  She hands me a form full of medical questions to answer. I move to a seat and try to remember if I’ve ever miscarried or contracted any hematode borne diseases in any African country.

As I sit and rummage through my pocket for a pen, I hear the sound of someone very sick.  It begins as a moan, then escalates to a wet gagged cough that culminates into a full, Olympic-sized upchuck.  I turn and see that the man is about ten meters behind me in the corner.  The smell of bile and partially digested food hits me about two seconds later.  In a purely Newtonian moment, created by a simple calculation, I determine that the velocity of the smell of vomit is 5 meters per second.  I’m sure no one has ever discovered that before.  Once I’m out of here I need to call David Suzuki!

My phone rings.  It’s not David Suzuki.  The room becomes suddenly quiet and all the eyes from the entire cast of ‘Planet Terror’ are staring at me.  The delightful woman at the triage counter clears her throat and points to the “no cell phones” sign on the wall with all eyes shift to her. 

“I’m at the hospital,” I say into the mic.

“What?” she shrieks, for all to here, because I have, inadvertently,  hit the speakerphone option on my cell.

All eyes are on me now, even the guy with the very empty stomach.  He was lying on his back before but now he’s propped himself up to see what was going on.

“I hurt my eye opening the packaging of the safety goggles.”

A man with his hand stuck in a jar of pickled eggs is laughing at me.

My number comes up and I am ushered into the ‘Eye Room’.  A very affable young doctor comes in and places my head in a device that was likely designed in a dungeon in medieval France during the times of Sade.  My head is very immobilized.  The MD shines a little light into the correct eye without asking me which one is hurt.  I am impressed.  He gives it a cursory examination and tells me that there is a little piece of plastic embedded in my sclera.  He squirts in a very drops of anesthetic then comes at me with a scalpel blade.  “Don’t’ blink,” he says.  That would have been like putting a live earthworm in my mouth and saying, “Don’t spit!”.   My eye is blinking faster that it’s ever blinked.  I am creating a draft in the room. 

More anesthetic follows in an attempt to abate my blinking instinct.  It works but now my nose is numb and I’m starting to drool.  The doctor gets closer.  In fact he is very, very close peering into my eye and poking with a sharp thing.  I can see blackheads on his nose and smell his breath.  I don’t think I have ever been this close to another adult male in my entire life.  I try to pull away but can’t as my mouth gets drier and my testicles begin to ascend into my abdomen.

“All done,” he says.  Balls drop down to normal position.

On the drive to the hospital I made a mental not to come take the route with the construction site.  That note got lost somewhere between the speed of smell and the non-blinking challenge.  Back at the traffic snarl, the mustard mishap has been fixed because the backhoe operator is sitting on the front arm of his rig having a smoke.  He only needs five supervisors for this.  The sixth is making scraping noised with a shovel.  Mr. STOP/SLOW has been replaced by a young female with slightly less safety equipment but much better color co-ordination. 

I’m back in the shop and I’ve only lost two hours.  I must get back to my project but first a quick trip to the loo.  I come out and go back in with the safety goggles.  Safety first.

Penguins and Polar Bears

In the Vancouver area, as I suppose, in a number of other areas where cold and colder water are a natural part of winter, a New Year’s tradition has emerged that baffles even the most liberal logician.  It’s called the Polar Bear swim.  Swim is actually a misnomer, because no one is actually in the water long enough to swim, however people do don bathing attire and occasionally more bizarre costumes, and plunge into English Bay for a few microseconds.  They then return to dry land and, traditionally, down a quick shot of the hair of the dog last seen the night before to celebrate their survival.

Initial suppositions regarding the impetus behind this strange tradition center on the excessive use of alcohol the night before which, we can agree, is an even better established tradition.  Over the years a number of theories have been suggested to explain the aquatic tradition (we all fully understand the alcoholic one). The first simply postulates that those who participate are still in advanced states of inebriation and therefore do not have any clue as to what they are doing.  They just attach themselves to some screaming herd of equally inebriated persons and en masse head in a random direction, which ends up at the low tide mark of the local beach. The evidence does not support this supposition, however, for if it were true, we would expect to see other random herds of drunken people doing equally stupid things like cramming into busses naked or riding the baggage carousels at the airport.  We don’t see those a lot so clearly the New Year’s dip is not a random drunken event, especially since we see it repeated reliably each and every year.

Cold water as a counter-irritant therapy to severe hangover has also been put forward as a possible explanation.   I liken this to sitting on a soldering iron to distract the pain from a toothache. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.  In the most severe cases of post partying pain, suicide by drowning might seem plausible but if one’s mood were that low, one wouldn’t likely wear a spandex Grinch costume to their demise.

To consider s more spiritual explanation, New Year’s symbolizes a new beginning, re-birth, starting over etc. This could provide a plausible explanation with English Bay being the metaphoric baptismal font.   The fact that twelve emergency vehicles, with resuscitation equipment, are present might cloud that theory, in that they portend the possibility of sudden death from hypothermic shock rather than rebirth.  However, it might also be supported by they the fact that most men’s personal private things have already begun to shrink down toward neonatal proportions just by thinking of the cold water ahead.

All of this questioning and considering has now led me here.  I have become obsesses with trying to understand this seasonal phenomenon.  This year I am participating in the local festivities at a smaller clone of the English Bay Polar Bay Swim.  The event in my neighborhood of Port Moody is called the Penguin Plunge.

Upon my arrival, one thing was very clear.  The ratio of observers to participants hovers around 60,000 to one, indicating once again, that jumping into freezing water is a questionable pastime enjoyed by only a special few and that voyeuristic sadism is a very popular form of entertainment.  I also note that the plungers are relegated to a roped off area of the boat launch while the observers are stationed high above, overlooking the boat launch from a high and sturdy pier.  They look down upon the plungers from a vantage point much like the boxes of royalty in opera houses of old, or like the Emperor’s box high above the gladiators on the floor of the ancient forum.  All around me warm breath fogs the air and people stomp their feet and shiver from the cold.

There are only two emergency vehicles here.  This disturbs me.  I think that there should be more.  Perhaps there should be one or two per participant, depending on their carrying capacity. I am deeply concerned, not so much that someone should expire, but rather that if they do, they may feel the eternal humiliation of meeting St. Peter while half naked, wearing felt reindeer antlers and a Little Mermaid life ring.  Life should be preserved to ensure death with dignity some time in the future.

The countdown takes place.  The herd roars and plunges into the water.  They turn around and roar again, in a much higher pitch and storm out much faster.

During the chaos, I am actually splashed by a few drops of the freezing water.  Others around me, all of us standing above the plungers atop the pier, step quickly back to avoid the splashes as well.  One errant drop hits me on the jaw and drips down my neck.  I shiver.  I am forced to remove my fur-lined leather glove, thus exposing delicate flesh to the frigid air to wipe it away.  The horror…!

Nest year I will continue my observations and try to find an answer to my question, “why?” And a new one – is there any significance to the fact that Polar Bears and Penguins reside at the opposite ends of the globe?  Until next year, you must excuse me – I must turn my attention to matters at hand.  I almost slopped my hot caramel macchiato in the jostle of the crowd, hurrying back to the sanctuary of our cars and their heaters.

Choices

When you live in a privileged culture such as ours, where purchasing power generally exceeds that which is required to sustain life, people tend to buy things, which may not be absolutely necessary.   I had a neighbor once that owned an electric melon baller, my former father in law owned a magnetic petoncle (French bocce ball) retriever and have a little machine that shaves knots off sweaters.  Again, affluence breeds bad judgement when it comes to purchasing.    For those that decide that they don’t really require the obscure, then the wide range of choices available, for just about everything can appease the ravages of consumer lust.

There is an ice cream place in town that has over one hundred flavors.  The perceived prowess from the perspective of the consumer lies in potential ability to purchase absolutely any of these to satisfy any possible whim.  I can have whatever I want!  The obvious downside, however, is that they can’t all be winners. If you happen to go there, don’t try the Calamari Peach or the Banana Anchovy.   Likewise if you go to Safeway to get a little cream cheese to go with your lox you’ll probably be overwhelmed at some of the bizarre combinations of flavors that have been engineered.  The same is true for potato chips, which have about the same profit margin as street drugs.  One potato can yield about fifty, twenty-eight gram bags.  Again the flavor range is quite broad.   Salad dressings are the same, more flavors than you can shake a carrot stick at.   What I wonder about is given some of the absurd concoctions that are actually marketed, what are some of the ones that didn’t quite make the cut in the food testing lab.  Cramy Cucumber is in, sorry Lumpy Leek didn’t make it.  The mind boggles.

If you go and buy a pacemaker, you have a choice of two.  They both work very well.  Their designs have been extensively examined and their performance has been exhaustively tested. You pick the best one of the two for you, and that’s all you need. They send measured doses of electricity to your heart to contract your ventricles so that your blood circulates.  If the pacemaker fails, you end up in an urn.  Urns come in thousands of shapes and colors.  Pacemakers have a limited product line because they are not visible.  If they were, they would come in thousands of shapes and colors as well.  If they did, some would not be as good as others so there would be a lot more urns around too.  So what’s with all that then?   Adultery!

Yes, we are unable to have long-term monogamous relationships with fashion and color.  We’ll have a new fling with a silk tie in this fall’s new colors but by May we’re surfing the net for new shapes and colors in the Boboli catalogue hoping not to be caught by any of the other members of the household.  But men are not as bad as women.  Makita power tools only come in one color.  Do we really need 16,000 shades of lipstick?  Is it necessary to have an analytical chemist train for eight years so that he can go to work for Revlon and discover a new shade of Pastel Plum Pink?   So the advice to be given to men who stray from monogamous relationships, and are caught, is to be aware of women’s nefarious, adulterous attitudes towards color.  Ask them, “So how many shades of nail polish have YOU used in the last year.” and you will be exonerated - or maybe she will end up shopping for an urn for you in this year’s color.

Cell phones also come in a variety of styles and colors.  Mine actually comes with covers in three different colors.  I hadn’t realized this before so I switched to the blue one hoping that it would improve reception in the non-upstairs-bathroom areas of my home.  It didn’t, but it tied in nicely with the color of the trim around the kitchen.

Toilets and toilet seats also come in a wide range of colors.   That is to be expected, but what really surprises me is that they are all the same size.  The last time I checked, which is quite seldom, except perhaps in the summer months at certain resorts, the human backside comes in quite a range of sizes.  Apparently it’s more important to have a lid that matches your curtains that a seat that fits your keister.  Personally, I find it more important to have a toilet seat that will support your weight when you’re climbing up onto the tank to talk on your cell phone.

There are similar size range problems for chairs, theatre seats, and airline seats.  One size fits all!  Not bloody likely. In the US they have come to realize that, even though all the airline seats are the same, the airlines have made seat belt extenders available to those passengers with ample adipose endowments.  That still doesn’t solve the problem of the seat itself.  I suppose their thinking is that one should be purchasing as many seats as required depending on butt size, which would be limited to three on most aircraft.  That’s nothing to laugh at.  A larger person could ride in comfort and be entitled to three 14 gram packets of pretzels for dinner.

I once paid a large sum of money to be somewhere I didn’t want to be with someone I didn’t want to be with.  We’ve all done this.  It’s called wanting to impress, whom I don’t know.   It was a showing of Cabaret with Joel Grey.  Not really my style. I would have been happier at a tractor pull but whatever … When we arrive at our seats we realize that a very large man is sitting next to one of them, again one size does not fit all.  This guy had his own postal code. He was literally overflowing into what would end up being my seat.  I couldn’t ask my date to sit there.  I didn’t like her very much but since the prospect of potential sex was not unpalatable I played the gentleman.

I am a person that generally does not like being touched by others.  There are limited exceptions to this but that depends on what is being touched and who is doing the touching.   I did not want to touch or be touched by this giant man.  I slid into my seat at an angle resting on my left hip with my right butt cheek against the armrest on the right side.  I then arched my spine to the right and tucked my shoulder down and back.  There had been no contact yet but I could feel myself being sucked into his gravitational field.  So far, so good.  I couldn’t breathe, but the show was only two and a half hours long.

After about 45 seconds, chaos theory took over.  My date caressed my little finger with hers just as I was about to shift down and to the right so that I could take my first breath.  The little distraction caused me to quickly look towards her, triggering severe muscle cramps in my shoulder and abdomen.  I uttered an explosive snort as my oxygen deprived lungs drew in the volumes of air they were yearning for.  This conveniently happened during a silent portion of the show so now I had an audience, giving me the opportunity to experience public humiliation along with physical and emotional distress.  The man in front of me was wearing a toupee.  It almost got sucked up my nose.  The spasms in my clenched abdomen and shoulder made me lose complete muscular control and I fell into the fat man.  It wasn’t exactly a fall of catastrophic proportions in physical terms but it felt like I fell from 1000 psychological feet.   I collapsed sideways a few inches and became one with him.   I felt like I had been dropped into a pond of warm pudding.  Everything was quiet and warm.  Everything wobbled a little from the original impact and then came to rest.  I don’t think he notice a thing.  The union with him lasted the entire evening.  Every time he laughed, I jiggled and I eventually developed motion sickness. 

How to purchase a dog

I recently became a dog owner for the fourth time but with this latest acquisition we, myself and my significant other, of the opposite gender, went though a process.  This was in great contrast to my first experience where my father took me to the SPCA, laid down ten bucks and hauled off with an adult male German Shepherd.  His significant other, again of the opposite gender, aka my mom, is surprisingly still with him.  My parents were in Northern Italy during the war and my father was a little miffed at the British after an off-course Wellington dropped a 500 lb bomb down the chimney of his house.  After that, he held the Germans in the highest regard. Since they had built the best V1 rockets and anti-tank weapons during the war, it was logical to assume that they built the best dogs too, so extensive research was not required in selecting a family pet.  He was given the name Rex thinking that the Latin label would somehow soften his teutonic edges.  Rex came home one day after roaming the neighborhood, as was customary for all large carnivorous beasts in those days, and went into a fit of coughing and gagging.  I thought he had a fur ball like many of the cats I had owned but no.  No fur ball.  It was just a cat’s head that was irritating his esophagus.  When that popped out, he was fine and he settled down to lick his privates.  The owner of the cat had found little humor in this, so the next day Rex was returned to the pound.  We were down ten bucks and we were left with four 25 oz. cans of Rover dog food for any possible future pets that might be brought into our household.

The second dog was vastly different from the first, given the difficulties we had had.  Well, not really vastly different.  Again it was German, after all that’s where the best cameras and motorcycles came from, it was large and very strong.  He was a Doberman named Bobo.  I have no idea where the name came from and clearly not a lot of thought had gone into that process.  Bobo didn’t last long either.  He had far too much energy, a huge appetite and a short, inefficient digestive tract.  What went in one end, came out the other in twice the volume.   I must ask a physicist about that.  Clean-up after that dog involved a shovel, a wheelbarrow and an ergonomic back support.

Number three was selected by my ex wife and was a total success.  Buddy was a Miniature Schnauzer with a wonderful temperament and warm disposition.  Selection of that breed was as per my ex wife’s Committed Relationships Manual.  She retained custody of it after we split but, if I remember correctly, pets were addressed in Volume 14, Section 12, Chapters 7 to 9.  There were also many other significant references in the volumes on general cleaning, towels, lint brushing, bedroom etiquette and shelf allocation for canned goods.

The spotty level of success with previous dogs led us to believe that we should adopt a more scientific approach to the selection of our next family member.  To begin with, the Canadian Kennel Club recognizes 183 canine breeds organized into seven groups.  If a pure breed was not a requirement, mixed breeds could be examined.  Given the 183 pure breeds there are 16653 theoretically possible combinations of first generation mixed breeds.    Make that 16652.  I don’t think a Great Dane / Chihuahua would work, either way you look at it.  Don’t go for the visual, it’s not pretty.  The first choice, that we made, was that we wanted a puppy and had some expectations as to what the puppy would look like when it reached adulthood.  We didn’t want a cute little fur ball later maturing into a two hundred pound behemoth with no teeth and two tails.  Clearly the way to go was with the pure breeds.  However, at 183 the number of choices was still sizeable, approaching that of feminine hygiene products (dry weave, scented, unscented, mini, maxi, wings, flippers …).   We needed help!  The Net came to the rescue.

The internet has close to four billion websites, unfortunately 3.9 billion are strictly devoted to blow jobs.  Finding a reliable breed selector database is still a bit of a challenge.  We used the one from the American Kennel Club, which is pretty much the same as the Canadian version except that the dogs are a little louder, a little fatter and drool more.  The dogs are selected based on certain criteria such as size, hair length, trainability and intelligence.  You punch in those attributes that you like and it spits out your best match – kind of like computer dating except that you don’t get Christmas cards from transsexuals for the following few years.   Initially I thought that the method would have potential until I saw that intelligence was a criterion.  I see intelligence as the ability to learn, to acquire complex information, to use inductive and deductive logic and to reconcile self awareness.  Dogs can’t do that.  They can sit, they can bark and they can run after anything that moves.  To me these behaviors do not display intelligence at any measurable level.  Sure, some dogs are smarter than others and in general dogs are smarter that slime molds, insects and squirrels but I don’t think that there is any danger that the unifying theory of physics will be elucidated by the canine world leaving us, mere humans, red-faced and thinking, “Why didn’t we think of that?”

So how do you pick a dog?  My plan B was simple:  Pick the one with the biggest, wettest nose.  Type that into your net program and out pops Airedale.  Sold.  An Airedale has a very long snout with a damp nose the size of a hockey puck.  These dogs are like giant bingo dabbers with legs.  Once I saw one, I knew that was what I wanted.

With 183 breeds out there you can’t just roll down to Petcetera and expect to find the dog of your choice.  You have to find a breeder.  I have always found that to be a curious term: ‘Dog Breeder’.  What is it that they do?   Provide soft music, champagne and a video of 101 Dalmatians?  In fact, and this is just an educated guess, I think that the dogs do the breeding themselves.  All the so-called breeders do is provide a venue and wash the sheets afterwards.  If they are called breeders so should hotel managers.  Occupation?  I’m a human breeder at the Westin Bayshore!

It gets even sillier when a breeder is found and later referred to as ‘My breeder’ or ever ‘Our Breeder’.  Someone not familiar with our culture would have difficulty translating this.

So anyway, we found a breeder and called ‘our’ breeder.  They were expecting a litter at the end of the summer and the price would be $1000.00.  Then my phone cut out.  It has call display, text messaging, a calculator, downloadable ring tones, internet access, call logs and an alarm clock.  The problem is, that it doesn’t work in my house.  I can use it to track apogees of communications satellites or monitor solar flares but if I want to talk on it, I have to go into the upstairs bathroom and stand on the toilet tank.  The breeder called back on the land line and we cut a deal.

The puppy arrived in October and we named her Bodica, after Boudica, the flame-haired queen that led the Britons in revolt against the Romans in the first century AD.  We dropped the ‘u’ otherwise the short form would sound like Buddha.  Having a middle aged white guy repeatedly yelling that in park would be unfairly cruel and confusing to the sedate crowd of my Coquitlam neighborhood.   But now I do feel I fit in with the other dog owners of my ‘hood’, standing in the rain with the pedigreed dog, the cold caramel macchiato in one hand and the bag of warm shit in the other!