You’re just trying to eat in peace. That’s all a man wants. A quiet, respectable, and completely honest sandwich in the pale, afternoon sun. And then they sit down.
A young, stupid-looking couple, all bright-eyed and full of the quiet, beautiful, and completely fraudulent glow of new, dumb love. And they’ve got their fucking dog with them. Not a service animal, not some quiet, well-behaved creature. No. A real, honest-to-God, stupid-as-a-bag-of-hammers dog.
And the second their food comes, the show begins.
The animal, who hasn’t been trained for a single goddamn day of its life, just… stares. A quiet, intense, and completely unnerving stare. Every bite the kid takes, from the plate to his stupid, open mouth, the dog’s head follows, a beautiful, pathetic, and completely relentless little predator. Begging, whining, its eyes full of that quiet, desperate, and completely manipulative “who’s going to feed me?” bullshit.
And you can’t eat. You can’t enjoy your own goddamn sandwich. You’re trying to mind your own business, you really are, but you can’t stop staring at this beautiful, ugly, and completely dysfunctional little family. Why the hell would you bring an animal like that to a restaurant? Why would you inflict this sad, desperate, and completely untrained creature on the rest of the world? It’s disgusting. It’s horrible to watch.
You finally get yourself under control. You look away. Stop staring, you old bastard, you tell yourself. Let the idiots be idiots. It’s not your circus. Not your monkeys.
And then, just when you’ve taken a bite, just when you’ve found a moment of peace, you see it.
The kid’s done with his sandwich. And he does… this thing.
He holds out his hands. Palms up. Like he’s a goddamn surgeon, presenting them to a nurse to be scrubbed. Like he’s in a public bathroom, waiting for the automatic hand dryer.
And the dog, that beautiful, patient, and completely disgusting bastard, he just goes to town.
Lick. Lick. Lick.
He’s cleaning the guy’s hands. Licking the mayonnaise, the bacon grease, the goddamn sweat off his palms. It’s a full-service, tongue-based car wash. A beautiful, ugly, and completely honest act of inter-species… hygiene.
And I’m just sitting there, my sandwich turning to ash in my mouth, and I’m thinking, “Oh my God. This is it. This is the end of the line.”
We’re not just dumbing ourselves down anymore. We’re not just turning into chimps. We’ve skipped that step entirely and gone straight to being a goddamn food bowl for our own pets.
It was unbelievable. Disgusting. And, in its own quiet, pathetic, and completely hopeless way, it was a goddamn masterpiece of human evolution, running in reverse.
