Another Adventure in Fine Dining

From the Email files

 

Some like a snake and some like a frog
Some like a ferret or a pot-bellied hog
But the best kind of pet that you can get
Is a good old puking dog.

 

Hey, Maria!

Here's one you'll like. I’ve worked as a janitor in a day care center. I’ve been cleaning up after animals my whole life. I’ve shaken babies over my head and had them erupt into my open mouth. I thought I knew puke. I knew nothing. Now I have experienced the ultimate. God, it was horrible. Our house will never smell the same.

Lemme tell you about it.

I wake up as usual at around three in the morning. There's this weird odor in the house, some sort of boiled-liver/stew thing. It's one of those dank smells that you can only get from bad grease, the kind that grabs your nostril hairs and just hangs on. (Ever notice how there's a special quality to stinks that remind you of food?) As I'm headed out the back door in the dark I step in something warm and soft up to my ankle.

I freeze, turn on the light and look down. There are two piles of vomit that are (and I am not shitting) somewhere between a half-gallon and a gallon total. I make a noise and Karen (who normally wouldn’t be awake) cries out, "There's more in the living room!"

This stuff was incredible. Imagine a mix of one-quarter stew, one-quarter catshit, one-quarter mucus, and one-quarter thick yellow oil. The oil was the single most repulsive substance the world has ever known. It was running in rivulets along the floor, it had a barely-melted clinging consistency, and it smelled like the worst organ meat taste you've ever experienced, a horrible liver/kidney kind of thing only much more powerful and concentrated than mere meat could ever be.

So as I start to clean this up, Amanda (the long-haired Australian shepherd and obvious perpetrator) dashes desperately around me. Her feet hit the main pile, skid neatly sideways (remember the oil?) and she sits her big ol' fuzzy butt dead center into the puke.

You’re an animal person. You can fill in the blanks.

So as we're cleaning up (God but that oil clung to the floors. Even now I can still detect it if I sniff for it...) Karen and I are asking each other what the fuck did Amanda eat? My two theories were that either someone tried to poison her or she had gotten loose and eaten a pot of rotten stew off the back of someone's porch. Neither of those seemed thoroughly convincing.

So while I'm dealing with the piles (now I know how much a dog holds – lots more than you’d expect) Karen is washing Amanda. While Karen is gifted in many ways cleaning things isn't her area of expertise. She thinks you clean something by wiping in its direction – the wash-inspect-rinse-inspect routine just never registered...

As a result that night and the next day we kept getting whiffs of the stench. If you bent down and sniffed at Amanda's head or back you didn't smell anything aside from her powerful odor of dog. Because the stink was on her butt. (You know that could be a song.) Finally I talked/bullied Karen into taking Amanda to the pet food store to get a bath. (Between the dog, the tub, and my back washing her at home was not gonna happen.) Once we got her in the car, we were all, "Yep, uh-huh. She’s stinky." We wound up rolling down all the windows and sticking our heads into the breeze in order to avoid, well. Contributing to the problem.

We get her washed for the first time in years. You know what disturbs me about that kind of cleaning? Amanda was lighter when we were done. She probably lost a couple of pounds of filth.

So we take her home and set about our usual habits, me pottering around on the computer and Karen pottering around in the garden. That was when Karen found out what Amanda had eaten.

Now I knew that Amanda was possessed of what are referred to clinically as ‘depraved appetites.’ She will eat anything. We don’t have to resort to tricks when she needs pills – she just eats them. She runs off every chance she gets because she views the world as a smorgasbord and she wants all the garbage and cat food she can eat. If Karen uses fish-based fertilizer as a garnish that dog will eat dirt.

Karen has been composting forever but between the dogs and the neighborhood rats she gave up on a compost heap a long time ago. Now she uses this plastic doohickey, a sort of barrel on legs made up of stacked plastic trays held together with bungie cords. It’s not so much a compost heap as a worm farm.

That’s what Amanda had eaten. She’d knocked the thing over and for the first time in her life she had all the organic matter she could eat. Sure, it was compost but it was made up of stuff that was sort of like food at one point in time.  I was baffled for a few seconds after Karen told me what had happened -- "There's nothing but vegetable scraps in there! Where did all that grisly oil come from?" And then it hit me.

It was from the worms. Amanda had rendered the worms in her belly and then greased the floor with worm oil.

Boy, if I’d known that I would have saved some. In this life there are times when you need a potent stink. (Remind me to tell you about the jug of stink some time – it turns out that you can dissolve gym socks in cologne and the result has practical applications if you’re a rotten person with no heart or conscience.) But for crying out loud, who decides to eat worm-riddled compost? There’s something wrong with that brute.

Yours,

Sean

 

I'm animal person. So this next bit of information is solid.
Dogs are retarded children.

MK Chavez