Poison

"And what kind of god would serve this?
We will cure this dirty old disease
If you've got the poison I've got the remedy...
I won't worry my life away."

-- Jason Mraz, "The Remedy"

--

Ajax got into some chocolate yesterday, which was Christmas. After presents and in the middle of Wii-ing, my sister came down the stairs with the dog in her arms. He had brown all over his paws and mouth and, you guessed it, a shit-eating grin on his face.

Chocolate is bad for dogs. It's poisonous to them because it contains theobromine, which comes from the Greek word for "food of the gods." It is colorless and insoluble, a bitter spectre seeking canines, found in the cacao plant. Theobromine molecules jump-start a dog, making him hyper and making him pee more, and over-zapping his heart and central nervous system. Not only that, but once a dog has eaten chocolate, he wants more and more, like lions who taste human blood. So far, the only noticeable change in Ajax's behavior is that he seems to be rubbing his rump on the carpet more often, which in the past (I am told) means he's just constipated. Fortunately, another symptom of chocolate poisoning is outlandish diarrhea--by which I mean gratuitous, vulgar, unbecoming amounts of it--so I think he's going to be okay. As long as he doesn't run off and kill a bunch of sheep (read about the Trojan War).

Ajax is not a man; he is a pet, and when he went unnoticed unto an old garbage bag sitting sentry in the kitchen, he was at the mercy of his own appetites and our carelessness. Voracity for the sweet stuff, a primordial craving for the forbidden, a stomach's longing to destroy itself from within--this drove the little fluffy thing mad, and into the thin plastic bag he went, panting.

--

Speaking of appetites, presents of note:

- An mp3 player, already fully loaded with 4GB of road tunes
- A 3-cup rice cooker
- A GPS

--

On Christmas Eve, the sisters and I had to make a last-minute purchase, a gift card at a swashbuckling Japanese restaurant in the northwest of O-Town. On our way to Kobe's, we stopped at a red light and when the light turned green and I pushed for gas, nothing happened; the car had stalled. After some clicking hesitation, the car awoke and we continued. Five minutes later, on the highway between I-680 and Dodge, the car hunkered down again. After another cursing restart, we sputtered forth another mile or two before it gave us another scare, this one worse than the others, because we had broken down on a road with the skinniest of shoulders. We let it sit for ten minutes before it groaned to life once more, and we were able to pull into the parking lot of the restaurant. We went in to buy the gift and waited an hour for our parents to rescue us from the empty shopping center, which was closing early for the holiday. And, naturally, the gift card itself was for my mother, who would be in the van, the warm, angelic white van, wondering why we were at this restaurant when we had told her we were going to the mall.

After the twelve-hour drive, it felt like the winds and witches of December were conspiring against my Christmas. But I guess we all need a heavy dose of chocolate sometimes, that cap for our pride. We want what we want, and what we want is so much of us, our plastic bags and boxes of technology, the bragging rights of all history. Stables, see the houses; buggies, see the cars; dogs, see the people, sipping hot cocoa and eating dark sweets.

And us, we see our presents, built to serve us and to outlast us, wanting them for ourselves but knowing we will throw them away, sell them, or forget about them in our wills. What kind of god would serve this? None. Glad, then: For it does not serve, this kind of god, and nor does this kind of dog. We should serve, always and with charity, only eating the crumbs from the master's table, the chance leftovers of the food of the gods.