A Free Dog Story, and Why It's All Angie's Fault

2:30 am, Monday morning, December 5, 2017

I abruptly awoke from a peaceful sleep to an immediate keen awareness of my surroundings with the distinctive sound of a dog wretching.  I was lying on my side on the port side of the bed facing outboard.  The source of the alarm was somewhere between 3-1/4” and 3-3/8” in front of my forehead.

“What the hell was that?!” Angie hollered.  Evidently her fight or flight mechanism had been triggered too.

“I DON’T KNOW JUST TURN ON THE LIGHT TURN ON THE LIGHT TURN ON THE (EXPLETIVE) LIGHT!!!!”

And there staring before me on my pillow, so close that I could stick out my tongue and lick it, was a pure white slimy pile of dog puke.  If you took a serving ladle and glopped out a full scoop of Thanksgiving mashed potatoes, and then added one more full scoop, that would be about the size and shape of the goopy glob that shared my pillow with me when the light was flicked on.

This photo shows the perpetrator of the incident, aka Reese the Dog. Contents of stomach not visible.

We had just washed the sheets that evening, and as my wife will tell you the absolute WORST household chore you can ask me to do is put the fitted sheet on the bed.  No matter which way you start you always put it on 90 degrees off of the correct orientation, and as soon as you’ve fit one corner you can be sure it will come flying off towards you when you try to stretch the next corner on.  I absolutely hate it and will throw a temper tantrum every time the task is before me.  So having gone through that nasty awful process I was a little more vested in the state of our freshly cleaned sheets when I saw my painstakingly hard work from a few hours ago threatened by a festering white gelatinous pile of doggie upchuck.

And that’s why my instinct was to immediately plunge my hands into the puke and stop as much of the liquid within from seeping into the pillow case, the precious soft lusciousness of the pillow within, and the sheet and mattress directly below.  I saw it like that scene in Aliens, where they discover that the alien green blood is so acidic it eats through the metal grated floor, down to the next level and through its metal floor, and on and on burning a hole through the building’s never ending layers of structure.  If my hands melted away in fiery acidic doggie stomach contents, damnit, I would save my sheet and pillow case that I fitted all by myself and not without maybe a little complaining.

Bear in mind that one second before this my hands were comfortably shoved under my pillow, resting and dreaming of the amazing work they had recently performed from the arguably impossible task of fitting the sheets, so I think it’s important to describe the sensation from their perspective due to this instinctual yet poorly thought out move that was forced upon them.  Warm.  Extremely warm.  A lot of wet. Certified and definite kind of wet you’d expect from most any orifice of most any animal.  Really really soft but not in a good way like when you touch fleece or a baby’s foot.  Soft, like……….well, like whale blubber if you put it on pulse mode in a blender for about 30 seconds.  And the reason it was so soft, my eyes discovered as they looked upon the dripping horror that I had cupped in my hands, was that most of it was synthetic pillow stuffing.

I think I carried it to the toilet.  I’m not sure because now I was wretching.  I was making those disgusting dry heaving sounds, about to puke myself from the texture and the smell of the contents in my hand.  Apparently this was very amusing to Angie, who by now had yanked off all the sheets and was getting ready to throw them in the washer. (it's amazing how fast we can act in a dangerous situation heightened by the desire to go back to bed)

Now, I didn’t intend for this to really be a story about doggie puke.  I meant it to be a life lesson about the differences between a husband and wife, a man or woman, because I’m not saying this situation was the fault of anyone in particular but now that the event was more or less over it’s typical of me to rewind and analyze the root cause of the situation.  Here’s my logic:

Had there been no pillow to tempt the dog to partake in joyously ripping it to shreds and enjoying its succulent fluffy innards to begin with, this incident would surely have been avoided.  Upon further investigation of the scene of the crime, it was noted that the pillowy victim was found in the spare bedroom.  In particular, the type of victim is very interesting.  It was not a nice big feather filled pillow designed with a clear purpose of supporting a human head during its slumber, but was actually the kind of pillow that serves no purpose whatsoever other than decoration (if that’s a purpose). 

Now, the standard length of a king size bed is 80”, and depending on how much you fluff it, a standard head-supporting functional pillow measured longitudinally or parallel and in-line with the human body is about 16”.  If you use two pillows, one sort of nested over the other, that would probably take about an additional 10”, so that adds up to 26” and should leave 54” of bed exposed when it is properly assembled prior to getting in it.  This is what a man pictures when he thinks of a bed that is made.  Notice there is no decorative pillow stuffed with synthetic fluff, aka a large doggie treat, in this assembly.

Typical cross section of a “made” bed using “The Logic Technique.”

But this is not the configuration we have in our spare bedroom, because as the man of the house the layout of the bed is not my jurisdiction nor do I have any authority over the bed arrangement or any of its assembly components. This assembly by tradition must fall solely on the hands of the woman of the house.  So, without the helpful guiding hand of logic, it seems the new $150 comforter on the bed must be vigorously and entirely covered with $750 worth of pillows so as to conceal its pattern and decorations, however worthless they apparently are as they must concede to the amazing floral pattern and unmatchable joyous art of the multitude of pillows above.  Going back to the longitudinal dimension of the previously described inferior yet logical arrangement (which you’ll recall left 54” of useable space on the bed) this arrangement allows for a mere 8” of exposed, useable space on the bed.  It also requires that you set your alarm clock for one hour prior to your perceived bed time to allow sufficient time to clear the bed of decorative pillows and allow oneself ample space to sleep comfortably.  Therefore, it is clear that the root cause of the problem of being awakened by dog barf on my pillow in the middle of the night is in fact the decision to have a surplus of decorative edible fluff-filled pillows, which in turn caused temptation by the dog to disembowel the said decorative pillow, allow the stuffing to fester in its belly until proper digestion of the contents within could be regurgitated in a glorious manner at 2:30 am precisely in the location 3-1/4” to 3-3/8” from the forehead of the man of the house.  In short, it’s all Angie’s fault.

Typical cross section of a “made” bed using the “I Want My Dog to Eat a Decorative Pillow and Puke on My Husband's Head” Method.

Although no paw prints were found to suggest Kona the Dog had any involvement in the incident, it is strongly believed that he played a role as accomplice or perhaps even selected which pillow was to be "hit" and therefore masterminded the whole thing.