TXTNLY

I love my dog. He’s almost 14 years old. He’s was born in Charlottesville, while I’ve only been here about six years. He’s also a total jerk. He does things like beg to go outside at 3AM, then run to the top of the hill, turn around to look at me and bark his face off. He knows I won’t run up the hill after him, so he just bounces around going apeshit, and wakes up the neighbors. Really, he’s great.

I’ve always chalked his aloofness up to being too intelligent to put up with my bullshit, and basically figuring out that I’m going to feed him and give him fresh water no matter what he does. Of course, he knows that when he’s going nuts barking in the middle of the night, I’ll always cave and bribe him with food. You see, food is his only true weakness. When he sees people food, he enters the zone. In the zone, nothing takes his attention away from the food.

So, a few friends (and their dogs) were over, eating pizza and watching TV. Begging space was tight, but all dogs were in attendance. Nothing was really out of the norm until a friend remarked:

“Your dog is on fire.”

A quick glance to the fireplace confirmed this. My dog was so in the zone that he didn’t realize he had backed his tail right into the fire. I pulled him out of the way, and surprisingly his thick coat hadn’t burnt all the way down. He was a little spooked, but hardly enough to break his attention away from his food objective. While a pretty impressive test of dog durability, it was a pretty horrible way to keep company around. The place stunk like burnt dog and the party promptly ended.

So,… sometimes I think maybe my dog isn’t so smart after all. He’s cute, but he might be real, real dumb. A few minutes after the fire incident, he went and laid down in front of the fireplace again. I have my doubts that he walked away from this experience with a single lesson learned.

Damn it, Kodiak.