I’m just here for the free dog.

Every kid I knew growing up had a dog, and it was sorta weird if you didn’t. These furry creatures were like weird uncles living in every backyard on the block, sleeping in their shit, shitting where they eat, and constantly yelling at the neighbors. Sometimes they even got a little frisky with the kids, but for the most part they were lovable and harmless.

However, my family did not own a dog. My parents claimed they weren’t “pet people.” But this wasn’t exactly true. What they meant was they weren’t fuzzy mammal people, but they made exceptions for class-B pets all the time. The rules for class-B pets were as follows:

1. It must not exude any type of odors. No body funk or piss perfume
2. Absolutely no noise. Noise is reserved for family feuds, bickering, and the roar of the glowing box
3. Any and all fecal matter must never be seen nor require manual gathering
4. It cannot shed hair, fur, fuzz, skin, or any other outer extremity
5. Must not slobber or create wet situations, and lastly
6. It must follow the Milford School motto, “(pets) are to be neither seen nor heard.”

Now if you can image, this meant things got really wild at our house. We’re talking goldfish, ant farms, and yes, even the occasional pet rock.

The craziest thing that ever happened was when our 42nd goldfish killed himself by jumping out of it’s bowl and into the toaster. Take a moment to think about how bad your aquatic life must be to commit suicide by slowly baking yourself in an open oven. Somewhere in the afterlife there is a small army of goldfish waiting to exact their revenge for my negligence. But for the record, it’s not that I didn’t care about goldfish, it’s just that I didn’t care about goldfish.

The closest I ever came to actually owning a dog was on a foggy Sunday morning while on my paper route. As I was delivering the say-nothing newspaper that was a front for flooding the streets with heaps of Sunday ads I came across a “stray dog.” This dog was well groomed. It had a collar. It had a name (Buzz). And it looked like that expensive purebred St. Bernard from that underrated 1990’s classic Beethoven. It was the best damn looking stray you’d ever seen. So I took Buzz home, slipped him in the backyard and hoped no one would notice.

After casually grabbing a bowl of Lucky Charms and cracking open a copy of the Sunday Ads I began strategizing on how to keep my unauthorized mammal. It then struck me that I should’ve taken the collar off and not a moment later I heard my mother cry, “what is that beast doing in our backyard?!” In my ten year old brain that tragic error cost me my dream dog as my mother read the collar, called the owner, and sent my beautiful captive packing.

Fast forward 20 years.

I have a dog now, his name is Koda. I adopted him off a farm in Guatemala after his bitch mother bore a bastard son that melted my heart when I picked him up for the first time. He was two weeks old, covered in fleas and had yet to eat a real meal. So we bought him for $2.50, cleaned his ass up (literally) and brought him back to America to live a life of luxury.

Now, not having grown up with dogs I never became acquainted with the whole ‘throw the beast in the back yard and acknowledge him twice a year’ type of pet ownership. I’m more of a “helicopter” pet owner/parent. I reward him for doing nothing. He sleeps in my bed when he’s scared. I stroke his ears at a moment’s notice. As we walk through the neighborhood I find myself constantly praising him with, “what a good boy!” and “yes he is, he’s a very good boy!” I make myself sick.

The great thing about smothering my little smoochy-boochy is that unlike those delusional parents of real kids that think their special little prodigy is a goddamn genius, I have zero expectations for my little guy. I never worry if he’ll turn out to be a self-absorbed, unproductive member of society sucking off the tit of the system.

In fact, I encourage it.