Bonding With Dog

So yeah, my dog Piles, a pain in the arse. After all this sorrow, despair and incomprehension over the sheer magnitude of the last ten days’ events; Myanmar, Sichuan, human error and evil, all the things that a brain that’s safely ensconced in Hong Kong can’t possibly take in, there comes a time when one wants to bond with one’s nearest and dearest.

In my case: Piles. So I bought him this ball (HK$75.00) , thinking we could have some fun on the beach together; something Beckhamesque: Tackling, some sliding tackles perhaps, Brazilian back-kicks, generally running together with a ball like men do.

Yeah, right. Piles’ idea of playing footbal is this: He takes the ball, crushes it between his not insignificant jaws and instead of heading it back to me, runs down the beach with it, with me galloping behind him, squeaking: “Offside! Yellow card! Nil points!”

Then he eats the shit out of it.

So much for male dog bonding. In future I’ll only do bone-ding with that ingrate. If a dog can show so little appreciation of my efforts but instead quite frankly shit all over my god intentions, how can people ever have children? In my next life I’ll be a technical appliance. Then I’ll get the gratitude and good treatment I deserve.

A Pain In The Arse

This is not Piles my hound, but a Lantau water buffalo. However, Piles looks not unlike this majestic beast, for every time the damned dog as much as sniffs three grains of rice with a pinhead of curry, no matter from how far away, he’s off. If there was a St. Bernhard kind of service to locate missing leftovers from several kilometers away, Piles would be king.

When he runs off, I know where to go to find him head down in some restaurant dustbin, scoffing down vast amounts of thrown-away rice (another reason to follow through with one of the few good suggestions the HK government has come up with this decade: Ask for less rice with meals and pay less. Although that idea is so good it probably didn’t come from the HK government at all.)

So now he’s on a leash most of the time. Stupid Piles! He could have so much freedom if he was only content with dried dog food (who wouldn’t be?) and water. But no, it has to be rotting curry, three day dead fish and stinking ditchwater. And the result is that sometimes he looks like the above water buffalo, all sticking out stomach and a waddling gait. Extremely embarrassing. Fat dog: Bad owner.

It made me think about instant gratification: What if there was an entity who could keep me on an invisible leash, and make me only eat dried dog food and drink fresh water, exercising three times a day and showering once every two weeks? Instead I just do what I like with no thought of the consequences, which do inevitably follow. Ah… but if I had a leash holder I probably wouldn’t be allowed to travel in China, so forget it.