June 21, 2010; Biding Time

Skeeter is just a walking pile of meat covered in exposed nerves, right now. Two things: he is waiting for the iPad Boo gave him for his birthday to arrive but, most stressifying, tomorrow morning he goes to see the plastic surgeon who will decide a good deal of his future. Meanwhile, Boo is absorbing all the tension by trying to disperse it and that is not helping because the way he does this—narrating everything he does ("Oh, look! We haven't prepared the recycling, yet; I think I will do that right now!" "I wonder what I feel like snacking on; I think I'll have peanut butter toast with banana, just like you!")—is tap-tap-tapping on Skeet's exposed nerves. Right now, all Skeet wants to do is turn on the TV and forget about real life; live the lives of the vampires in "True Blood" or those plucky New Orleanians in "Treme." He does not want to hear about recycling or snacks. But the odd thing is, Skeet knows that Boo is just as stressed as he is so there is a kind of crackling, edge-of-your-seat peace in the house.

Of course, I'm doing my bit by being adorable and not peeing on the beds and curling up to one or the other when things get particularly gloomy. (Note to other dogs: depressed humans are like Pillsbury concoctions—warm and crispy on the outside, and pasty and gluey when you burrow in.)

But the other thing is that our lives are a bit like those Shakespearean tragedies, the ones where the king is nuts and everything around the king turns nuts too, even nature. A couple days ago, for instance, thieves stole a truck out of hotel parking and since then there has been a man hunt 'cause in the truck there were two camels and a tiger (named Jonas). Then there is the story of the right-wing nutjob Catholic cardinal, here, who is about to get a promotion into the Vatican even after he said women who've been raped shouldn't have abortions.

Closer to home, I was walking with Skeeter in the alley and we came across two kids, nine or ten, boy and girl, playing and, of course, they both wanted to pet me. Skeet muttered, "Try to be cool, okay!" and I winced and let the clumsy little oafs pet me as only clumsy oafs can: rubbing the fur the wrong way and pinching me and patting my head too hard. "What kind of dog is it, Mister?" said the little boy. Skeet answered. "I love your dog," said the kid and then, "can I come with you and play with him?" "Bye-Bye!" Skeeter almost shouted and, to me: "Let's get the fuck out of her and fast." "You don't have to tell me twice," I said. Kids, as we all know, are all sorts of trouble but this kid was another layer of trouble topped with a creamy swirl of you're-going-to-prison-Homo.

Later, sitting on the balcony, I said, "The world is weird."

"Yes," Skeet said. "The oil slick, Toronto in a state of siege for the G-8, the heat..." His voice petered out.

"And what about those frogs, eh?"

"Don't call them that," Skeeter said. "When I was a kid and whenever we would use that word, my dad would clip us on the head—"

"—yes, well he was a frog, wasn't he?"

"Half-frog...er...half-French Canadian. Anyway, we're not the same here as they are in France, and certainly not the same as a soccer star."

"Still, it is weird that it would get out to all the press that the star said of his boss: 'Go and get ass-fucked, dirty son of a whore.'"

Skeeter laughed for the first time in days and said, "Doesn't have the same poetry as it does in French." Then he went on, "Do you think it will all turn out normal? That the oil well will stop gushing, and the kids in the alley will act normal, and the World Cup will be a big happy party like it's been every other time?"

I snerfed a bit and then said, slowly, "I think, after you see the surgeon and know what the future holds, everything will assume it's place again. Weird things will just be funny weird things and the news will just be the news and all of this won't be happening to you and Boo and me."

He sighed deeply and said, "I hope so."

I sighed as well but didn't say, "I hope so too."