Alice Munro And My Dog's Ass

I'm so happy about Alice Munro winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Happy, thrilled, proud, pumped – all that great stuff. I always feel a special affinity – a bond, if you will – with this great Canadian author, not just because she is Canadian, as am I, and she is a woman (me too) and she's old as dirt (I am as old as fresh dirt, whereas she's more like the stuff in the bottom of that philodendron that's been sitting on top of your fridge since the Boer War), but because we write EXACTLY THE SAME.

Take what I am about to write, for example. It is so remarkably like Alice Munro's work that you will think I stole it directly from her.

Do you have to tell your dog to poo?

I do and it just drives me fecking crazy. I mean, I know she has to poo. Her little bum hole, which has been exposed since her last trip to the sawmill, pooches out when poo is imminent. The more she has to poo, the bigger her little bum hole is. Sometimes it's so big I fear her tail might get caught in it.

I keep a close eye on her bum hole. Every chance I get, I'm looking at it. I'm beginning to think I'm a gay dog, such is my fascination. But I have to, because she's not paying it any attention at all. I say, "Misty, wanna go outside?" And she gets excited and I let her out and she runs down the stairs and squats and pees. I'm watching her, and I see her bum hole is about the size of a personal-pan pizza, and I know she has to poo, but nope. She finishes piddling, looks at me with the happy grin of somebody who just won the lottery, and runs up the stairs. "Lookitme! Ipeed! Ipeed! Lemmeinsowecanwatchthefoodnetworktogether!" That's what her face says. Her bum hole, however, is now the size of a soccer ball.

"Get down there and go poo," I order. I have to tell her thrice and finally she slinks down the stairs like she's just been beaten. She stands at the bottom and gives me her best sad puppy face. "Go on," I say. "Get pooing." She prances slowly around the yard like she's the most hard done by dog on the planet, which she may be, because surely she's the only one whose bum hole is so intricately described on the internet. She waddles around for a while, throwing me the occasional piteous glance, then tries to convince me she's done. Her bum hole is now the size of our cat, and we have a cat with the girth of a mini-van. "Go poo," I growl. Finally, blessedly, she squats, lays a substantial and no doubt satisfying turd where Dave always walks across the lawn, and her bum hole magically shrinks back to a happy little pinhole.

I've written about telling my dog to go poop before, probably more than once, but I don't think I've ever mentioned her bum hole and how much time I spend watching it. For easy figuring, I bet I look at her bum hole a full hour every day. That's 365 hours a year, or nine full work weeks, staring at my dog's ass.

I know, right? Alice Munro. It's fecking incredible.

I didn't take a picture of my dog's bum hole because it might be the object
of affection for some porn-addled web weirdos. Besides, is nothing sacred? Geez....