dogs

My dreams are usually not entertaining. They are soul-erasingly dull, in fact, and of late, I always seem to be looking for missing words in the NYTimes Spelling Bee. In my sleep. Which means it’s not much different from being awake.

The other night, though, I had a fairly complicated dream about a scientist who was experimenting with aphrodisiacs in animals. He had a bunch of turtles in a small room and, upon being administered Viagra, the turtles developed unprecedented speed and kept running into the walls and smashing themselves into little sticks. It was horrible. It was an experiment gone terribly wrong.

In the next scene—and scenes they were—the scientist was doing a slow loop in a boat far from shore and hollering on his cell phone that he was sinking and couldn’t swim, and the camera catches his drain-circling progress from above, from where we can see that the front end of his boat is riding low due to his own Viagra-inspired effluent accumulating in the bow. And then—there’s a laugh track.

Yes. I dreamed a comedy. Not a good one.

Naturally, in the morning—the laugh track woke me up—I wondered why in hell I would dream such a thing. And in short order I remembered: it was all Ed’s fault. My friend Ed had recently informed me that you can get Viagra for your dog from Chewy.com. It is not any business of mine, or the State’s, how he came upon such knowledge.

I mean, I guess it could cheer up a morose pet, but not everyone at the dog park is going to see it that way. And it could lead to epidemic levels of abraded Dachshunds.

dogs

It just seems like one indulgence too far. Already dogs are expected to be fed a much finer menu than we are, in spite of the fact that they will happily eat raincoats. They’re eating whole beef, turkey, pork, carrots, green beans, lentils, chickpeas, and fish oil. We’re eating Mac’N’Cheese out of a box.

This is new. Back in the day, dogs, in their natural state, ran free in packs all day long knocking over garbage cans, and worked out the remainder of their diet from whatever Junior was slipping them under the dinner table, rounding it out with cat poop, old vomit, and socks.

Which is why it remains a secret that I keep our robustly healthy old cat Tater on a diet of grocery store kibble. Word gets out about a thing like that, and I can expect to open the front door one day and find Sarah MacLaughlan in the front yard singing a suicide-inducing song in the company of a pack of animal rights activists swaying with candles.

By which I mean, yes, this is a blue state.

Well, it turns out the Viagra for dogs is meant to treat their hypertension. That’s another thing. We were never meant to find out our dogs had high blood pressure. They were just opaque dog-shaped packages that did fine until right toward the end, when they got slow and urpy and then went to live on a farm to play with all the other dogs. Or fetched up on the grill of an Oldsmobile.

After a wonderfully free and possibly shortened life.