Captain The Jake Addendum:

I've gotten several comments and a couple of emails encouraging me to take Jake to the vet, and I just want to make sure everyone knows I'm totally taking the situation seriously; just because I'm sort of making light of it here doesn't mean I'm not 1000% on board with a vet visit because I absolutely am. I love Jake's vet- plus his office is literally across the street from my house. I'm not exaggerating, if I walk to the edge of my front yard I can wave to that guy. I'm not going to right now because he's pretty busy and he gets tired of me doing that, but I could.

Jake, however, haaaaaaaaates the vet. He had a traumatic experience there once as a puppy and now his chart is marked AGGRESSIVE and he has to be forcibly muzzled. I give him little doggie Xanax beforehand but it doesn't help very much. His eyes still swell up and he shakes for hours afterward. It's rough.

So while all advice is very welcome and encouraged (keep it coming!) my thinking in waiting goes something like, hey, let's try the simplest solutions first, and if in a couple of weeks there's no improvement, then we'll take him to the doctor. This is not completely unlike the time I had what felt like a flaming hot lava fireball perched inside my ribcage, but instead of pancreatitis or a peptic ulcer or an actual volcano, it turned out I just needed to stop eating full-fat Greek yogurt by the five-pound vat.

Randy and I want to keep The Captain healthy and happy as long as we can because we honestly don't know what we'd do without him. Randy talks about having him stuffed when he's gone, but I think that's too creepy. I personally think we should have him animatronically controlled like that gorilla from Showbiz Pizza; we'll put him in the corner of the family room and he can fake play the Rock-afire keyboard a la Fatz Geronimo. I think it's what he'd want.

EDIT: Not more than five minutes after I hit "publish" on this, I read a follow-up comment from Kate on the last post about her sweet Aussie's diagnosis with bone cancer. Jake now has a vet appointment on Tuesday. I'm gonna ask if they have any brochures on posthumous animatronic control while I'm there. You know. For levity.

I still don't have the heart to tell Jake he's not an actual Captain.

Captain The Jake has been hobbling around on a stiff wing for a few weeks now. He's getting older, after all, and god knows he's not getting any thinner. About a month ago I started adding liquid glucosamine to his food, and this week I started giving him 300mg of liver-flavored aspirin a day, too.

It seems to come and go, though, and it doesn't seem to be causing him any discomfort, so for now Randy and I have opted for a "discuss it constantly" approach. We both made the rookie mistake of reading The Art of Racing in the Rain, so when I say we discuss it constantly, I mean we discuss it constantly with the dog. If you haven't had the pleasure of open-mouth sobbing all over this tome of enlightenment, I heartily recommend it- particularly if you already have a pet you consider half-human and you're looking to upgrade his status to Sicilian prince.

Both of us finished it and, once our corneal blood vessels had reconstricted, we sat down and had an hour-long heart-to-heart conversation with The Jake. I spent a lot of time awkwardly explaining "sarcasm" and how "fat-ass panda cow" is really sort of a compliment; Randy mumbled a promise to never splash him from the bathtub again and negotiated a slight increase in rotisserie chicken skin rations.

So yeah. That's where we are. Each of us interrogating the dog while trying to outdo one another in the comfort department. Randy keeps thinking of things Jake might like to sleep on, so now our bedroom floor is like a hopscotch myriad of random soft shit. It looks like a four-year-old child lives in there with a drunk caretaker.

I continue asking Jake if his leg hurts, reminding him that he can't stand the vet so maybe he should stop being a big faker. Sometimes I get a little passive-aggressive and mention that SOMEone's leg might not be all fucked up if SOMEone hadn't flown out of a four-story window like a blind squirrel tripping balls. But then Jake gives me a lick on the knee and strolls outside- sometimes with a tiny limp, sometimes not- and he lowers himself with a grunt into a puddle of sun on the patio. And I watch him. And he watches me. And he's thinking, "Yeah, she's not wrong about that window shit, that did not help."

That seemed to snap him out of it.

Randy crawled home early from work today; the crumpled note he handed over from his accountant instructed me to please excuse the bloody sweat and the tears of spinal fluid, that's to be expected, just keep him hydrated and away from anything sharp, high, or loaded.

I did the most logical thing I could think of- I carried my comatose husband out to the car and I drove him to IKEA.

He likes the vignettes. Something about 542 square feet of living space really seems to calm him down; he may storm in all red-faced and puffy but he always leaves with a triumphant fistful of tiny pencils and a solid plan to move into an upcycled storage container.

We had just finished pretending we lived in a 253ft studio apartment in Helsingborg when we noticed one of the neighboring displays was off limits and cordoned off with caution tape.

I nudged Randy. "IKEA murder," I whispered.

No response. I couldn't tell if he was tax-relapsing or if he'd convinced himself he was actually studying tiny architecture at Linkoping University.

Either way, this was necessarily the next step:

Crimp those edges, baby. Oooh, yeah, you know I like my top lattice weaved.

Holy shit, it's been another month. Oh, hey, to the day, look at that. Let's pretend like I planned it that way. (EDIT: Not to the day. Threes look like eights, I guess, time to see my eyecare professional.)

I'm still driving back and forth to Tucson every day. Likewise, I still have eight-plus hours of A Dance with Dragons to listen to, but I guess I reached my fantasy recitation threshold or something because I can't bring myself to turn that shit on in the car. I just can't do it. It's almost like a hundred and forty-two hours was enough or something, weird, right? So I'll either have to make time to read it myself with my own eyeballs and one monotonous mental voice or else I'll just read how it ends on wikipedia. Fin.

Since I was here last, I started and ended an unfortunate adventure in audiobooks: I downloaded like seven Stuart Woods novels for absolutely no logical reason. I've never read Stuart Woods and never had any real inclination to read Stuart Woods, and since I've made this particular mistake before, you can probably go ahead and guess how it ends. CLUE: Wonderfully.

Nope. So I start listening to these books and the narrator is reading the protagonist, Stone Barrington, as a 1940s "film noir" detective. Which gets tiresome. These books are set in a relatively modern-day environment, but every time I hear this guy's voice I picture some dude standing in a dark rain wearing a trenchcoat and talking around a cigar. Not to knock the narrator's talent, since he's obviously a multi-faceted voice actor; In the event that another male character finds himself in a dialogue with Stone, that guy is always Russian. And god forbid there are three guys in a scene because Guy Number Three is then necessarily forced to be a Transylvanian vampire. So you might be involved in a scene where a lawyer is having a conversation with a New York cab driver and a cop, but what you're hearing is Sam Spade talking to Yakov Smirnoff with occasional interjections from Count Dracula.

I don't even want to get into how the female characters are voiced OR written because it's just too fucking horrible for words. All of the female characters are narcissistic sex fiends who force the protagonist into bed (or car or bathroom stall or large armoire) literally ten minutes after the initial handshake. And the (many) sex scenes read like they were written by a thirteen-year-old boy, you know? Like, he uses the word "penis" a lot. "Testicles" make a regular appearance. And judging by the context, you're not left with any kind of confident impression that Woods has ever actually HAD sex before. At least half of all sex scenes start with Stone dreaming he's having sex, only it turns out it's not a dream. And I'm not talking "passed out with a head injury" asleep, I mean "dozed off with last month's Esquire in a chaise lounge" asleep.

First of all, how fucking asleep do you have to BE? I've never actually woken up from a leisurely afternoon nap in the sun to discover that oh! wait! That wasn't a dream, there's actually A DUDE INSIDE OF ME RIGHT NOW. I was just resting my eyes for a second and now I'm naked and in Stage Five of a sexual encounter. AGAIN.

Likewise, at least half of said sex scenes end with a sex-starved female begging for a fifth go-round while Stone shuts her down. The female is typically "kneading his penis" as this conversation takes place. She has also been known to "stretch" it. I don't personally have a penis, but I've been around the block a few times and I'm pretty sure penises aren't made out of pie crust dough. For what it's worth, Woods goes out of his way to avoid dealing with the female genitalia at all. When he absolutely can't get around it, you can almost picture him covering his mouth and whispering, "down there," while furtively pointing.

When the women aren't stretching, kneading, or begging, they're busy making horrible decisions for Stone to clean up. Insurance fraud. Murder. Lying about paternity. Gold digging. It's one hundred and ten percent infuriating. And yeah, I listened to like six of these idiot books and I have absolutely no defense. I finally shut the door when two competing female characters were attempting to wheedle a reluctant Stone into a threesome.

Oh, and here's the other thing: Even if you happen to be down with Humphrey Bogart hanging out with Vladimir Putin and The Count for three hours while periodically getting his penis and testicles stretched and kneaded by vapid, evil whores, you still have to find a way to overlook the UNBELIEVABLE glaring errors in plot consistency. In one book, a female character gives birth to a daughter- in the next book, it's a son. The same female character has long blond hair- fifteen minutes later she's a brunette. Fifteen minutes after that, she's blond again. There's literally a scene where two characters are gazing into their coffee cups after dinner, and the NEXT LINE has one of them sipping wine from a wine glass. It's so far past lazy, I can't even deal.

So in summation: I highly recommend Stuart Woods' "Stone Barrington" novels if you enjoy predictable mysteries written by a mysogynistic and overly-masturbatory fourteen-year-old boy with short-term memory loss. Moreover, I highly recommend you listen to said novels if you're into Casablanca or the Kremlin or Count Chocula.

8 hours, 25 minutes left.

It didn't take too many days of driving 200 miles round-trip to and from work for me to figure out that audiobooks were probably going to save my sanity. In point of fact, it took two days. Two days of driving from Phoenix to Tucson and back, jamming at the radio station presets like the Morse Code guy on the Titanic. There's a spot somewhere out there between the two cities where there aren't any radio channels at all, none, zero, and it is Not Good. If you haven't ever driven from Phoenix to Tucson, and I know a lot of you haven't, imagine driving on the moon at 85 miles-per-hour right after the moon decides to shoot itself in the face. That shit is BLEAK. And you need to occupy yourself somehow so you don't catch yourself on the lookout for burning tire cities or diesel Jeeps full of marauding pirates.

So I downloaded a bunch of audiobooks to my iPhone. The first book I listened to was Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King. I have absolutely no idea why I chose this particular book, since I've never read anything by Stephen King and never particularly regretted that decision. But this was the book I chose, right, so let's do this. I got approximately FOUR HOURS into this thing-- four hours out of a total fourteen-- before I finally and mercifully figured out that I was listening to a collection of three short stories and not a fourteen hour novel. That was the best thing about the entire book, actually, the realization that I wasn't going to have to listen to ten more hours of some dude getting eaten alive by rats.

I was feeling pretty good cruising into Story #2, right, what with the rats and the gnawing and the dead woman rotting in the well all in my rearview, but it turns out my relief was shortlived. The second story (unlike the first story) was narrated by a female. A hauntingly familiar female. I sat in my car, both hands on the wheel, listening with my mouth open as this little lilting voice introduced her character-- a young, naive, successful author-- and I tried to get a handle on how I knew her.

"She's a singer," I thought, as she narrated her way through a fictional book signing event. "Or wait, no, she's an actress." She described leaving the event, taking an unfamiliar route, la-di-da.

It was one of those stupid trivia facts you just can't manage to put your finger on-- the kind of trivia you typically bet your mate a dollar over- or a gratuitous sex act, maybe- before reaching for any one of the five Internet machines in your immediate periphery to settle which one of you gets to take their pants off. 

But I was driving, obviously, and not about to scroll through IMDB on the highway, so I had to rely on my brain for data recollection. Worst case scenario. So I'm sitting there, my brain whirring and clicking its way through the dented hard drive, while our protagonist finds herself stranded along the side of the road. And as my brain begins to isolate the file I'm looking for, this poor woman is abducted and viciously sexually assualted by a truck driver. It was right around the time she found herself strangled half to death and naked in a ditch that I realized who this woman was: It was Jessica Hecht. Victoria from Sideways is narrating this nightmare of a story. Susan from fucking Friends is now running naked and bleeding down a dark country road.

I didn't even listen to the third story. It was probably a serial killer memoir voiced by Dakota Fanning.

I downloaded the A Song of Ice and Fire series and I've been listening to that pretty much nonstop since then. I hear a lot of people lamenting the fact that once they finish A Dance with Dragons there won't be another book in the series to read for a while, and I'm pretty sure I've found the solution. Stop reading. Let a theatric British guy read that shit to you instead. Each book is fifty hours long, you will NEVER EVER FINISH, TRUST ME.