lifebsideben

I had to be at work pretty early yesterday to be on a phone call with folks in India, so I took the earlier train (7:30am). On my way to the station I typically walk through the post office parking lot, and this particular time I noticed a dog in the lot, eating scraps from a discarded pizza box. It looked like he had tags, and was of a breed (I suck at identifying dog breeds, but it seemed to be a fairly fancy one.) Also, I recognized the dog, but I wasn’t sure from where. I thought it might even be my next-door-neighbor’s, and I know theirs had gone missing at least once before. I decided I should see if there was a phone number on his tags, because if it were my dog, I’d definitely want someone to let me know where my dog had run off to…

Now, I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to bother dogs while they’re eating, but this guy was pretty halfheartedly picking through pizza remains, and I approached slowly, speaking in a calm voice. I managed to get to his collar, and rotate it around to the tags, and noticed this dog was positively filthy. Smelled bad, greasy coat, just gross. But, there was a tag with a name (”Moxie” I think it was) and a phone number. I called the number and someone answered and said something I didn’t quite catch, and I asked “Do you have a dog named Moxie?”, they replied “Yeah…”. I asked “Is he lost?” and they said “No, no, he’s just running off the leash–where is he?”. I told the man, and he said “oh, that’s right across the street from here. It’s fine.” I said, “uhm, ok…” and hung up. Then I realized what he had said when he answered the phone was the name of a bar a half block away, and that I had seen this dog lying on the sidewalk in front of that bar before.

So this got me pretty irritated–one, that this dog looked pretty pathetic, and was so dirty, and apparently at least somewhat hungry, and had a good chance of getting hit by a car; and two, that my hand was now pretty gross from touching the dog, and I wanted to buy a bagel, but didn’t want to touch anything I was going to eat, for sure. The bagel joint I like doesn’t have a public restroom, so I ended up going to Starbuxx just so I could use their bathroom. And since I felt a little guilty about just using their restroom, I bought a hot chocolate (for $2.70!!) which wasn’t even very good. I kept thinking about poor Moxie though.

Tags: bitching, pets