Asshole Daschund

I hate to say it, but I may have to kill Sunny’s dog.

Let me be absolutely clear on this. Sunny’s dog, Barney, is a grade-A, dyed in the wool asshole.

First of all, we’ve had him for four or five months now, and he still isn’t house trained. It isn’t down to a ‘training error’ either. In my lifetime I’ve owned five dogs. All have been house trained. Buddy went from no training whatsoever to fully house trained in less than a month.

Let’s just say I got so desperate, I even started taking hints from those awful dog-training reality shows. (That’s how bad things are, I actually sa through a couple episodes of ‘It’s Me or the Dog’).

Despite all this, Barney will ask to be let out, so I’ll put him outside, leave him there for half an hour…and then he’ll come back inside and shit in the kitchen. Did I also mention that despite the fact we only feed him one small bowl of food per day, he shits in the kitchen at least 6 times per day.

Not only that…he snores. I mean real snoring. He alternates between sounding like a rusty chainsaw and grumbling like an old man who’s lost his teeth. He’s also totally disobedient, he does what he likes when he likes…no matter what I do. Crate training, positive and negative reinforcement, nothing works.

I used to believe the maxim that there are no bad dogs, only bad owners. Barney has single-handedly changed my mind. Like I said, I’ve owned five dogs, all have at the very least learned to sit, stay, keep off the furniture, not mooch food…and above all, learned to shit outside.

Well, last night was almost the last straw.

I was bored to tears, there was nothing on TV, so I sat down at my drawing desk and started sketching.

For some reason, I decided to draw Spider-Man swinging through New York…and let me tell you that Spiderman is just about the hardest comic book character in the world to draw. The guy has zero body fat, ultra-defined muscles and, while swinging, ends up in almost anatomically impossible positions while keeping an overall feeling of total fluidity and grace.

Let’s just say that it’s one thing to draw the arm muscles…it’s another to draw those arm muscles twisted into a very awkward position with some extreme foreshortening. The other thing is capturing that fluidity. Get it right and it looks awesome…get it even slightly wrong and instead of looking like an other-worldly astoundingly graceful acrobat, he looks like a dude having a seizure in his pajamas.

The thing is, what started out as a five minute sketch (that I knew I’d get wrong) actually turned into an awesome drawing. The talent monkey was definitely with me…and as I’ve said before, at this stage, my drawings coming out well or not is about 40% skill, 60% luck…and lady luck didn’t just smile, she smiled, winked and gave me her phone number.

About two and a half hours later, I had the best drawing I’ve ever done in my life. I literally could do no wrong. Even pencil shading, something I normally never do and therefore suck at, worked perfectly.

Now, my regular readers know I never usually toot my own horn. I’m my own biggest critic…but in front of me I had a drawing of Spidey, swinging towards the camera, hand flung out in the characteristic ‘THWIP!’ position. Every muscle was rendered perfectly (even those very tricky rib mucles that usually make the characters I draw look starved instead powerful)... it was awesome.

It looked fluid, it looked graceful, it looked dramatic. It was only drawing I’ve ever done that I could take to a comic convention, show to a professional and know they’d be impressed. It looked professional, something that wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of an Amazing Spider-Man comic…and I did this with zero reference. It was totally original, not someone else’s drawing that I’d copied.

At risk of laboring the point even more, normally when I finish a drawing I like, I put it in a folder with my other drawings and don’t think about it any more. With this one, the first thing I thought was that I wanted to go to the local art supply store, get some fixative so it wouldn’t smudge and get the stuff I’d need to matte and frame it.

That’s right. I’m the guy who usually shows his work to someone and says “Yeah, I know this looks wrong and that looks odd, and I really need to work on this…”

This was a drawing I wanted to frame, hang up in my hallway so people could look at it and say “Hey, where’d you buy that drawing of Spidey?”…and I could say “I drew it.”

Anyway, back to that stupid, stupid dog.

So I finished the drawing. Usually I walk away from a drawing for a while, and spot a ton of mistakes when I get back. I’d walked away twice and the only thing I thought when I came back was “Wow, I can’t believe I drew that!”

I left the drawing on the desk, went into the kitchen and made some coffee. I hadn’t eaten, so while I was out there I decided to cook a couple pieces of chicken.

About half an hour later I walk back into the living room…and I spot these little white flecks on the carpet in the middle of the floor. “What the hell?” I thought.

Now, when I draw, if something just isn’t working, I just crumple the paper into a ball and drop it next to the desk until I’m done. In the past, Barney has gotten hold of one of these paper balls and played with it. Something I’ve punished him for. I figure that’s what happened this time.

So I start picking up the paper, when I notice something on one of the larger pieces that I recognize.

My…fucking…Spider-Man…drawing.

Not willing to accept the evidence my own eyes are showing me, I look over at my desk. The drawing’s not there…but the air conditioner is right next to the desk and it’s running.

I instantly pictured the scene. The AC blows the drawing off the table. Barney sees it land. Buddy eyes it and remembers just how much trouble he got into when he chewed up that ten dollar bill when he was a puppy. Barney eyes it and remembers how much trouble he got into when he chewed up one of my job application forms.

Buddy relaxes and goes back to watching Stargate on TV (One of his favorite shows…seriously). Barney remembers that he’s a gold-plated asshole and tears the whole thing up into as smaller pieces as possible. Making sure to literally chew sections and use his tongue to really make the graphite run and smudge together…making sure that I couldn’t even scan the torn pieces and try to restore them with photoshop.

You know what I did?

I didn’t say a word. I turned out the lights and went to bed.

Why?

Because I knew I couldn’t punish Barney without totally losing it and actually killing him. I know it would start with the usual light shake by the scruff of his neck, telling him no and giving him a couple slaps on the backside…but it would have ended with my fingers around the little bastards throat while I choked the life out of him.

Then…just to add insult to injury, before I go to bed I go to make sure the front door is locked…and the little bastard had shit in the hallway…less than twenty minutes after coming back in.

So…anyone want an asshole Daschund?