Growing up, there were always dogs in the house. I liked the dogs, thought they were cool, but despite all those years of tug-of-war and couch cuddles, I can’t say I grew up to be much of a dog person. I just find them a bit high maintenance (and a little too up in my business) for my liking. And after 40 years, I can firmly say I prefer cats.

That being said, I do have a dog, one that came as part of a package deal with my now live-in-girlfriend (don’t even get me started on the baby). She’s a 10 lb. miniature Poodle-Shih Tzu mix named Pippa who’s ugly as sin (through no fault of her own, she comes from a long line on inbred critters a Guatemalan aquaintence makes in her living room for fun) and brings undisputable joy to my children and partner. But despite her merits---and she has a few---Pippa and I have still had our issues.

For one thing, I find her addiction to playing fetch triggering. While a dog that enjoys playing fetch may seem like a positive, in her case, it’s pathological. If anything in her immediate vicinity is round or stick-shaped, she can not resist but pick it up, carry it over, and drop it at your feet. On hikes, this looks like the dog trotting underfoot with an oversized stick in her mouth that inevitably ends up between your ankles, breaking in half as it trips you into a freezing river, and at home, it’s the relentless requests to play, which, if ignored, result in obnoxious fits of barking.

As you can imagine, a self-proclaimed “cat person” might find this sort of behavior challenging. So much so, in fact, that it may come to represent their own special circle of hell when spiraling out of control into imaginings of a hellacious future. Like, the cat person’s partner has left them for someone who isn’t losing their hair and has a perfect dick that they use to fuck them just right. The cat person has also lost their job and’s broke and living in some sad bachelor pad their children are too embarrased to visit on account of the urine smell. Actually, no, scratch that. The kids are dead, so the cat person sits alone on a cold park bench, head in their hands, feeling small and inferior, hungover and crying about betraying themselves for having broken their sobriety. And as the tears well up, through the rushing of blood in their ears, they hear it: the soft “thud” of a rubber tennis ball being dropped at their feet.

The cat person looks down and sees the snaggle-toothed jaw, the persistent bug eyes looking up in high expectation, and in that moment, they understand. This is their sisyphian punishment, their damnation for being such a cremudgin, for living a life of fear, for pushing away the people that love them so they wouldn’t get hurt: no matter how far they throw the ball, no matter over what bridge or into what crevasse, the dog will find her way back and wait… and wait… and wait… then start barking.

Alright, alright, truth-be-told, I do find the dog a little annoying at times, but I also want her to be happy. Which is why our family heads over to the dog park now and again where she can have her pick of stray tennis balls. She brings one over and I whip it a few feet off the astroturf toward the back fence. She fires off like a rocket, slides along the turf and somehow gets her tiny mouth agrip to the pale green fuzz in a frenzied blur. She runs back and releases the ball a few feet away, rolls toward me. I stop it under my boot, pick it up, throw it hard, and she’s off again.

She really has an extraordinary talent for fetching, and people usually comment on it. But sometimes, if the ball doesn’t go where she’s expecting, she can get a little lost. When that happens, she falls into an instinctual search pattern resembling an expanding figure eight---incidentally, man’s symbolic representation of infinity. Which is exactly how long I’ll be throwing this ball. And while I might not fancy myself a “dog person,” I will say this.

There are worse ways to spend eternity than with a dog that just wants to play with you all goddamn day.

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