Dog

Dog

Quentin Smeltzer, SmeltzerNation, 7/3/10

Psychologists say you can tell a lot about a person’s character by the way they interact with their dog.  I hate my dog.  She poops and pees all over the place.  She steals our food and destroys our property.  It’s like living with an angry crack addict. 

And I’m confused, because, didn’t we build houses in the first place to keep the animals out?  But now the animal is in the house and the house looks like… well, it looks like a bunch of animals live here.   

Our dog is half Maltese and half Shih Tzu.  My wife calls her a Malshi but I like to refer to her as a Shit-tease. 

For some unknown reason the dog loves carpet.  If it needs to pee or poop, if it needs to destroy a new pair of Birkenstocks, if it needs to chew an entire roll of toilet paper into confetti, it takes care of this business in the carpeted hallway that leads to the master bedroom.  Hardwood floors won’t do for this kind of savagery.  The dog favors plush. 

A great dilemma we face is whether to feed the dog from the table or not.  If we don’t, she whines and jumps up and down on her hind legs and—my personal favorite—she snorts like a whale.  If we do, she takes whatever we give her straight to the carpeted hallway to covet her prize in private.  Once it is gone she comes back for more, repeating her outlandish performance until we give in or not. 

Lately we have given her bones from barbecued ribs and steak.   The result is a hallway strewn with the chewed, cleaned bones of the dead.  The hallway looks like the bone yard from a Stephen King novel.  While our dog may be as cute as the bunny in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, her lair is no less terrifying. 

My wife senses the tension and feels bad about the situation.  She wants me to love the dog and, in an effort to improve relations, she has told me, “But the dog loves you.”

Love?  Really?  Honestly, I don’t think the dog knows me that well.   

Mind you, this is the best dog we have ever had.  The previous dog ate half of the insulation around the sliding door to the rear deck and once tried to escape the house by tunneling through the drywall.  When we put the previous dog on a run outside, he would pull against the rope and bark for forty seven hours without pause, if we left him there that long, digging a half moon trench in the lawn demarcating the limits of his tether.  We never left him there for more than an hour or two.  Still, our lawn showed the semi-circular scars for years afterward. 

We gave that dog to friends who renamed him and loved him and proclaimed him to be the best dog ever—totally without fault or issue.  Talk about things that make you go hmm…

But I am sure they are right.  I am sure our dogs’ behaviors have been nothing more than our own neuroses and family tensions, our own narcissism reflected back upon us with claws and teeth. 

So, in closing, let me give the dog this much: If I was in trouble, if I was trapped in the mountains, say, and we were starving, or maybe a bookcase fell on me, and I was helpless, and I turned to the dog and I said, “Go on girl!  Go get help!  Go on girl!”  Well, I know what the dog would do. 

The dog would eat my face. 

Dinnerware

Dinnerware

Quentin Smeltzer, SmeltzerNation, 7/1/10

The key to staying married for a long period of time is to constantly readjust your expectations.  My wife, for example, has adjusted hers to zero.  This is not to say that she is not still frequently disappointed; it is only to suggest that she is moving her sights in the right direction.

Money is a frequent area of tension in many marriages, particularly the ones where there is no money.  My wife recently bought an entirely new set of dinnerware: plates, bowls, cups; the works.  When asked why she would buy all new plates, bowls and cups when we have plates, bowls and cups, and we currently plan to work into our eighties to keep our home, she was ready with a cogent answer. 

It turns out, she learned recently, that older dinnerware can lose its protective seal.  If your white dinner plates begin to show signs of graying, this is a tell-tale sign that the protective enamel is wearing thin.  It wasn’t clear to either of us what might be in a plate that we would need to be protected from, but whatever it is, she was sure it was getting out. 

And how did she learn about this eminent health hazard requiring a substantial purchase and the tossing away of all of our dinnerware?  From QVC; the very same QVC program selling the plates.  Talk about coincidence!

So now our simple, white plates are in the garbage, replaced with a set sporting a pattern I like to call, “drunken gypsies on holiday.”  Oh, they are festive.  And made in China, where they never take chances adding harsh chemicals or dangerous toxins to their products. 

In fact, it is astonishing how many products QVC has taught my wife that we must have.  There was that set of “Wonder Hangers” that allowed us to save closet space by hanging six coats in the space that used to occupy one.  That the exponential increase in weight ripped a few closet rods from their moorings was an inconvenient side effect, and a clear sign of inadequate home maintenance on my part. 

Then there was the Stainless Steel Professional Pineapple Slicer, which really does an admirable job of slicing an entire pineapple.  What a family of three is supposed to do with an entire, sliced pineapple we have yet to figure out.

Someone recently said of my book, Self Help, Your Complete Book of Bad Advice for Every Situation in Life, “You realize, don’t you, that your book is written entirely from the perspective of a man?”

I replied, “I certainly hope so.”

It is from this perspective that I have come to realize that, if you are the man in the relationship, you are not the point.  You are lucky if you are an afterthought.  At least this is true if you are doing it right. 

Let’s face it: a house that tiptoes around Daddy is an abusive tyranny.  A house that tiptoes around Mommy is a warm and nurturing environment.  This is because Mommies and Daddies want different things.  Very different things.  Daddies want sports cars and beer and reckless women--in our dreams.  Mommies want new dinnerware. 

What to do about BP

What to do about BP?

Quentin Smeltzer, SmeltzerNation, 6/29/2010

BP presents a quandary. On the one hand we want to see their leaders frog-marched off to Joliet. On the other hand we need the oil and jobs their reckless behavior produces. In fact, you can argue, BP never produced half so many jobs with working wells as they have with the Deep Water Horizon disaster. It is vaguely reminiscent of the old joke Woody Allen tells in the movie, “Annie Hall.” His family includes an uncle who thinks he is a chicken, but no one will tell him because… wait for it… they need the eggs.

Why can’t people just use less oil, I frequently ask myself as I strafe the Connecticut hills near my home on my motorcycle?

I was on a business trip recently and the car rental agent asked if I would mind an SUV. It was late and I was tired and I would have gone to the hotel by nitro, top-fuel, funny car or rickshaw, if they could only get me to a shower and set of clean sheets. So I said, sure, expecting a Kia Sedona or a Chevy Bankruptus.

Once I got to the parking lot, instead I found a mountain of sheet metal waiting for me: a cream and burgundy colored Ford Expedition. It took few tries to throw my bags up through the open window in back, and I was breathing heavily by the time I completed the final ascent to the driver’s seat. But like all good climbs this one, too, rewarded me with a magnificent view.

Far below were the drivers of other, quote-unquote trucks, and even further below them dwelled the puny race of cars, scuttling about like the insects they so clearly are. Few things in life are as exhilarating as gazing down upon the roof of the Jeep Cherokee next to you. The sense of power you experience, knowing you could punt him into the guardrail with the slightest flick of your luxurious, leather-wrapped, control-encrusted steering wheel, is intoxicating.

Let’s face it: big SUVs rock!

So, as in all things, I have the answer. A special prison should be built for oil company executives, from which they can run their evil enterprises. Deciding who should go to such a prison need not be difficult. Just round up any oil exec making more than one million dollars a year, and whisk them off to the new pen. Anyone making less than that clearly has no pull whatsoever.

But what about incentive? The Chinese have been running prison labor camps for decades and what has it gotten them? Okay, they are the world’s fastest growing, and soon-to-be largest, economy but let’s not get lost in the weeds, here…

These are Amerikans we're talking about here, with a “k!” We need incentive; we need freedom; we need Gulfstreams and hookers if we are possibly to do our best! Think the Brits are any different? Evidently, they are not.

So this new oil executive prison will need a few perks. First, we can build a large control room with many high tech screens, managed by engineers in white lab coats, to make the executives feel important and in charge. Water in the cafeteria will have to be replaced by bourbon on the rocks. And conjugal visits by “entertainment specialists” will be the norm. Finally, helicopters manned by AK-47-toting Blackwater guards should be available to whisk the executives out to the oil platforms to survey their masterwork. Only, the guards will be there to secure the executives, not to protect them.

Following this simple, new program will give us all what we want: we can lock the bastards up and continue to enjoy the fruits of their labor, as we wait—any day now—for energy independence.