The younger pup was broadly untrained because you know, they — it was I think the younger dog was a Christmas present for the youngest sibling just before my girlfriend got really sick. So they had these great notions of training this dog and raising it right and then, suddenly it was kind of like “well, now we’re just going to try to entrust you with this puppy,” who again would never stop barking at night, and then would also need to be crated because it was not trained well at that point but hated to be crated. So when I would think about those days — when I would have a lecture I’d needed to get to at college — which sounds so basic — at college. I would need to somehow find a way to collect that small dog and then crate that small dog, which was always a big fiasco.
And I do remember kind of briefly evaluating my life choices on this one particular day when I found myself chasing this dog around the house like you would see Steve Martin do in like a “Cheaper by the Dozen” movie. Like it just seemed — it’s almost like I was chasing the dog so hard that eventually you kind of lost track of whether I was chasing a dog or the dog was chasing me — almost like Scooby-Doo, like suddenly you look and the dog realizes that they’re chasing me and then we look at each other and they’re like, “oh whoops,” and then we go back. And after some time — not going to sit here and tell you I was chasing this dog around the house for literally five minutes straight or anything — but I probably was booking it for solid 30 to 45 seconds to try to capture this dog.
And when I finally got to the pup, picked him up, there’s this moment of triumph like “I’ve got him. Now, let’s get him to the crate.” And the moment I held them up sort of like Simba, looking at him like, ”Finally dude, got you.” He began to pee over me, and so it pretty much symbolized my experience as a whole with that dog. So, I had to go change and that whole thing and I don’t even remember what class I was going to or whether I got there at time — but — or on time, but whatever. I guess it didn’t really matter in the scheme of things. Here I am.