I Do Little
I'm not going to lie to you people, I'm good at a lot of things. I'm a multi-talented motherfucker, no mistake. I read fast, I can write, I play the guitar, I'm a competition-level speed-eater, I can draw, color inside the lines, sing, line-dance, skip, yodel, arrange flowers, deadly with a ninja throwing star from thirty paces, macramé and jazz flute.

OK, no jazz flute, but I did see it in a movie once. Usually that's all it takes for me to become near-expert level at something. One viewing of Tom Hanks and Robert Loggia in Big and I could play the piano... with my feet. Not one of those big-ass electric ones either, I mean a REAL piano. With my feet. Shoes on.

But, you're now thinking, how are Pops' detective skills?

Well, I've seen a lot of TV police, so I bet I'm pretty good. Better than that fat ugly dude with the horrendous beard on that CSI I reckon. Let's check:

I opened the my garage door today to find a dog sniffing around the tree in my yard. Never seen it before. The dog has a collar on with a valid tag. A county-issued number, no other ID. The dog is exceedingly thin, moves with a pronounced limp, easily frightened.

My wife and I take the dog into our yard, figuring it is lost. We call the animal control people, but it's Sunday and our case is non-emergent, so we agree to keep it overnight. We try to feed the dog our dog's own hard dog food, but it refuses. We try some soft bread, which the dog can eat a little bit, but mostly drops.

My diagnosis: the way this dog moves, with almost no use of its back legs, it can't have run away in that condition. It must have gotten loose somehow and then been injured, probably clipped by a car. Judging from its scrawny, dog-anorexic appearance, it's clearly been lost for a long time, wandering the streets of the greater Riverside area, ignored by the heartless bastards on my street and in my community who needed only the courage and kindness (as I possess both in abundance) to check for a tag.

The inability to eat says this dog has gone a long time without proper medical care or a proper meal. It obviously has some kind of problem with its teeth or mouth that makes eating painful. Can't really say as my Good Samaritan instincts do not extend to sticking my fingers into strange dogs' mouths.

So, being the good people we are, we promptly leave it here all alone with my mom, who is visiting. If you choose now to say something about leaving my mother home alone while she is visiting, I invite you now to do so.

When we return, the dog is gone. Retrieved by its owner. Here's the real story. Compare it to my constructed, deduced version and be dazzled:

The dog lives about four doors down from me. It wandered out. It was all limpy and didn't eat hard food because it is SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD. The end.

Had the owner not heard the dog distinctively death-rattle wheeze-barking in my backyard, it would have been whisked into the loving arms of County Animal Control and almost certain death Monday morning.

OK, so now that's two things I can't do well. Dectectoring is one. The other is finish a blogpost in a non-awkward way. I just... I can never really figure out what the... um... yeah.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 9.4



Pops
- posted by Pops @ 9:44 PM