On Puking Puppies and Life

Raise a puppy, get a condensed dose of raising a kid. Sometimes puke gets everywhere. Sometimes they make a lot of noise. Sometimes it's like they're deaf. Sometimes, because they're stupid, they eat things that aren't edible. Which brings us back to puke getting everywhere. 

Of course, this is about Jack. 

See, as I said, Jack's sort of stupid, and he ate part of a plastic bottle, and also part of a plastic water bowl. Being that plastic is one of those aforementioned inedible substances, the stuff was leaving his body in its original form in one of two ways. This was made manifest last night around 11. 

Heard him start making weird noises. Went from our bed to his bed and grabbed him and threw him into the bathroom, so at least the puke would get on tile, and thus be easier to clean. 

This happens with my brain just jolted out of the the flying/falling stage of sleep. I may have also had a few beers in my system. And still I realize that it's good to carry the stupid 35-pound dog completely across the room so the dummy can puke on tile instead of carpet. So, yeah, go me. 

Of course, being hopelessly human, I'm also totally freaking out. Oh, God, I'm thinking. Jack's dying. He's puking up plastic. It's probably shredded his insides. I don't know where the emergency vet is and by the time I Googled it and got him there he'd probably be dead and they're probably closed anyway and I'm the worst dog owner in the world because my God my dog is puking up plastic! And screw that trainer, he's a moron.

(Asked a trainer once how to keep Jack from chewing on things he shouldn't chew when we leave him home alone. "Oh, just give him lots of toys," he said. When we left Jack that weekend, we left him with approximatately 128 chewable toys. And he goes after the plastic bottle and the plastic water bowl.)

[ Other than the crate, do you have any tips on how to keep dogs from chewing up stuff they shouldn't when they're home alone? ]

Anyway, so I'm sitting there in my underwear, holding a flashlight in my mouth and cleaning up puke and gagging and trying not to puke myself. And Jack starts chucking again. More plastic. Also some clumps of red string. I give up cleaning up and just sit there with Jack.

I'm stressing out hardcore, and stressing out more over how much I'm stressing out. And then I get worked up thinking about how easily I stress out over nothing, and how stupid I am for it, and I wonder how expensive psychiatrists are and what kind of drugs they could give me. 

Eff, I'm going to stress myself into a heart attack by age 30, I think. Which of course only makes me stress more. (No wonder I'm already going bald, right?) 

But then, sitting there, I started to get over it, all this stress and fretting. I talk about dogs being stupid, but Jack was even less stressed than I was, and he was the one puking. He was just sitting there, waiting for more to come up, like, OK, this is what's got to happen so I can go back to sleep and not have plastic stuck inside me forever.

Even my stupid puking puppy doesn't worry about things he can't control. 

So why do I?

Who's the real dummy?

OK, so Jack's barfing. We'll clean it up. OK, so it's so gross it makes me almost barf, too. This is why they invented soap. OK, so I didn't get any sleep. This is why they invented coffee. And naps. And Red Bull. 

The thing about stress is that it cripples. Paralyzes. For one, it's stupid for me to get crippled over something stupid as stress when I'm sitting here working on a story about a guy who is literally paralyzed. Like I have it so tough.

As a creative type, a writer, a dreamer, the more we stress over the small crap in life—paint, puking dogs, stuff like that—the less energy and focus we can put on the things that really matter. Our work. Our words. Our sentences. 

Jack? Jack's good. He'll be all right. He's a dog. Eating random s--- and then puking it up is what dogs do. It's so common and expected that the Bible even talks about it. All I can do is keep him away from as much random s--- as I can, and keep him from eating the nastiness after he yaks it up. 

So anyway, on the floor in the dark with the dog puke all over the bathroom, Jack goes a few minutes without yakking. I clean up. And I'm feeling good, now that I've all psychoanalyzed myself and had a breakthrough and whatever. 

I lean down and scratch Jack's head. "Feelin' all right now, bud?" 

Little Puke Face licks me in the mouth.