Unwell

My sister just bought a dog.

My sister just bought a dog named Otis, and Otis is unlike any other dog, and that’s because Otis belongs to Emily Kruger, and Emily Kruger is unwell.

Before buying Otis, Emily spent 15 months researching— blog after blog, breeder after breeder —in search of the perfect light-gold, medium-haired sporting retriever. According to her, this retriever is completely different from the reddish, show-bred American golden. This distinction is so important to her that six months ago, she dragged our family to GoldiePalooza in Anaheim, California, which was exactly the type of place you’d think it was.

A place where a woman ran a booth about her rescue that proudly only saves goldens. “What happens to the other dogs?” I wanted to ask her, knowing that she’d reply, lips pursed with a hard ‘p’, “Nope.”

Or two booths down, where another guy sold a shirt that read, ‘Who needs gold when you’ve got goldens,’ next to another man selling golden retriever trucker hats, which, to be clear, were meant to be worn by the dog.

“Would you ever buy a puppy here?” I asked my sister.

“Uch. Never,” she scoffed.

Instead, Emily picked a breeder out of Salt Lake City — a kind, Mormon-seeming family who ran a white-glove golden retriever puppy purchasing business that would never show up to compete with breeders at a ‘Palooza’. 

Coke pays no heed to RC Cola.

Emily loved her breeder. 

She loved every step of procuring Otis — every email and YouTube video. Every Instagram post and Facetime.

The meaningful interactions began on a Thursday afternoon, right after the litter was born, when each pup was given a name related to October: ‘Pumpkin’ or ‘Ghost’ or ‘Candy,’ etc., and though the names themselves weren’t important, the act of having names was crucial, because each puppy was to spend the next eight weeks being individually tracked and graded, on actual report cards, that were then distributed to the already-paid-the-deposit buyers.

“That’s a three on Confidence for Pumpkin,” the breed mother said on camera, as she zoomed in on the dog’s apprehension to playing with a battery-powered, automatically-moving plastic ball. Out of the right side of the screen, the mother’s seven-year-old daughter busted into the scene and pummeled Pumpkin onto his back. Pumpkin submitted. “But an eight on Touch Tolerance!” the mother said.

“Hm,” Emily said to me while screensharing the clips on Facetime, “I can’t decide between Amber or Walnut.”

“Okay…” I said.

“You see, Walnut’s Nerve Tolerance is very high, but…ugh…his Pack Drive is too low!”

“Mhm.”

And though I would have loved to tell her that none of this mattered, as a dog’s demeanor changes over time, Emily Kruger, like the other depositors, who were all taking their pick of the litter based on the order in which they paid their deposit, isn’t the type of person who leaves big decisions like Pack Drive up to chance. 

Unwell Emily knows what she wants from the world and demands that it gives it to her.

“He doesn’t understand hats,” she said to me last week when I visited Otis, who was then, twelve-weeks-old.

“What?”

“Like. Watch,” she said, reaching into the closet to pull out an elf hat. “Here Otie!” she said.

Otis bounced over, smiling, before sitting at Emily’s feet, ready to demolish a new gift.

“It’s just a hat, okay?” she said. “So DON’T bite it!” 

And then, obviously, as she tried to attach the hat to his head, he used his baby shark teeth to bite into her soft human flesh.

“Ow!” she screamed, “I SAID NO BITE!” and then she pulled away, leaving the 3-month-old to gain control over his 372-month-old master and tear the hat to shreds.

“See?” she said to me while massaging the blood off her hands. “How am I supposed to get a post up in time for Christmas?”

It’s no surprise that she cares about his social following.

For work, she manages a bunch of Instagram accounts, and when you give a violinist a new violin, you should expect her to play. 

And this is all fine, and none of this bothers me, but where she and I do disagree is on the other stuff.

Like how often to let Otis outside.

And what to do when he nips.

If it were up to me, he’d spend all day frolicking in the great outdoors and would come inside only to eat and cuddle and play. 

And if he bit, I’d bite him back, like I did to the other dog we had growing up. Who bit me once, and then never bit me again.

But Emily is not the type of person to bite a dog — for her, the thought of Otis getting bit by a human or even a dog is too much to bear.

“I don’t know that I want him going to dog parks,” she said to me when we talked about how I think he needs to socialize. 

“Emily, if he doesn’t learn that certain dogs don’t like him,” I began, “he’ll end up getting attacked.”

“I get it,” she responded, using scab-covered hands to fill an electronic dog treat tosser to the brim, “but…you never know what type of dogs are at those things. They’re not vetted,” she said, sounding like the Palooza Woman whose rescue ran only golden-deep.

Neuroses, these are.

But neuroses like these never solely belong to us. They’re contagions we catch, usually from the ones we love. When I look at my sister and try to determine where she got it from, I first always conclude that it didn’t come from our father. 

A man, so fearless of strangers that, on his custody days, when he and his friends would go gambling in Vegas, he’d drop me and Emily off at the Mirage or the Hilton Flamingo and she and I would be left to wander around Sin City, with our hotel room key and his ATM card in our pockets. 

I was 9 years old. And she was 7.

“What if they got kidnapped?” my mother screamed into the phone. 

“Yeah!” Emily screamed in the background. “Kidnapped!”

“Pssssshhh,” my father replied, “They’re fine. They’re annoying anyway,” he said. “They’d probably give them right back,” he laughed.

And so, if not from him, Emily must get her lack of resolve from our mother, a woman who goes to the bank to deposit her checks, and who only makes flight purchases over the phone, fearing something may get lost in the button-clickiness of the interwebs. 

For her, the world is scary and we must remain vigilant.

Once, after seeing a clip on San Diego KFMB Local News, she called to tell me about a new trend of hooligans that had been running up behind people in parking lots and pushing them down.

“And then what?” I asked, “do they take your money? Or like…rape you?”

“No, Alexander,” she said, “The newscaster said that they just push you down and then they run away,” she sighed. “It’s horrible.”

“Mhm,” I said. 

But she ended up being wrong. 

They did rape me.

No, sorry, that’s not what I meant to say — what I meant to say is that I’m not tiny-problem anxious.

I live, after all, in Miami Beach, where the crime rate is one out of every ten individuals, which means that 95% of U.S. cities are safer to live in, and even knowing that, I never lock our front door.

I’m always losing my keys and I guess I’m more annoyed with being locked out of my apartment than I am anxious about someone breaking in and stealing my electric toothbrush or our Eufy G20 Robovac for PetHair, or God-willing, Ben’s ugly art.

My brain focuses more on bigger, more real fears, like winding up bankrupt or getting dumped by Ben for constantly slandering him or waking up one day, old and under-accomplished, a failed writer who never did figure out how to convince enough people to listen to his shoutings into the void.

And so, petty apartment thieves and parking-lot-non-raping-down-pushers just don’t hold space in my skull where there’s no room to worry about the smell of the roses when I fear the ecological collapse of the entire garden. 

I try my best to make do with my composition.

“Let’s go to Mexico City this summer,” I texted my mom, who is now almost 70, after I saw a pharma commercial that kicked off me mentally spiraling about how she and I likely only have 10-12 more good years together and, how, given that I live across the country, at our current rate of 2 in-person interactions per year, I’ll have only around 20-30 encounters before one of the people I care about most in the world falls victim to the unavoidable passing of time.

Only 20-30 encounters of traveling and hiking and making fun of strangers. 

Only 20-30 more encounters where she’ll pull out a to-do list of things for me to help her with that she doesn’t actually need me to help her with.

Only 20-30 more times where I’ll get to admire the wrinkles around her eyes as she looks into the distance and thinks about whether or not the stove is on, if my sister’s getting engaged, or if we’ll ever make it back to Japan, and then I’ll notice her eyes jump down to the floor and then back up, as she attempts to delete the story she came upon where she now realizes that we might not, and as her knees start to give and her mind starts to slip, I wonder what my sister and I will do about that.

My lovely sister, who, unwell but meaning well, will probably shackle my mother to a wheelchair in a bleak Jewish-enough assisted living with the goal of wringing out a few extra mediocre years, and then Emily and I will fight about whether or not that’s better or worse than my regimen of slipping LSD into my mother’s Ensure to try and fix the mental fog that comes for us all.

I don’t know which path is right. 

This bubble-boyness that belongs to Emily, or this motorcycle-diaryness that belongs to me.

Maybe once I have something I’m afraid to lose, I’ll eat my words.

Maybe even with Otis, who I’ve recently come to love.

A puppy who is not yet vaccinated against something called parvo, which is the reason Emily doesn’t let him outside — a reason I disagreed with.

And so, last month, when I visited, I convinced Emily to take Otis with us on adventures: to Lucky Thai, and for ice cream, and to two or three shopping malls.

And then, later that night, I went online and read more about parvo.

And it turns out, that when you pause to think about how rare it is that you see cute young puppies on walks in the park, the main reason for this is that most cute young puppies are too young to get the parvo vaccination, and 90% of unvaccinated-puppies who catch parvo die.

I sat on Emily’s couch as I learned all this.

“Why are you making that face?” she asked me, as I scrolled, as hard as I could, to find something redeeming so I could tell myself that I hadn’t made a mistake by pushing her dog out into the wild, in the direction that felt most genuine to me.

“Um, so…” I said, my voice lower and shaky, knowing that I was about to deliver un-good news to my helicopter mom of a sister. “I think…maybe all those adventures today…was…not good?”

“What?” she said, “what do you mean?” she squeaked.

I refused to lie. 

God forbid she continued to take him on field trips and then he ended up actually catching parvo and dying because I had not only enabled but also advocated for bad behavior. 

And so I was honest.

And as I recited to her the words on my screen about how it’d take 3-7 days for parvo symptoms to set in, which would most likely be lethargy and then diarrhea and then vomiting and then shortly after, when she’s holding him in her arms, organ failure and then death.

She started crying, so I started crying.

And while Otis sat there, on the ground, chomping on a pile of green felt which formerly identified as an elf hat, Emily and I called our mother, who was probably distracted by KFMB local news and didn’t answer, and then our father who, based on the way which we cried, probably assumed that an entire family had been slaughtered in front of us before he understood the situation, and told us we were out of our minds and then immediately hung up.

But he doesn’t get it. 

He doesn’t know what it’s like.

To look down at your puppy wagging its tail and to know, in the deepest parts of your being, that said puppy has parvo.

He doesn’t get how it feels to stare into the eyes of the cutest little golden retriever that ever did live — a retriever who, in the last few weeks, has amassed 4.5m likes on Instagram, and to be so certainly sure that your retriever is about to die.

He doesn’t know what it’s like to be like this. 

To be scared and nervous, and entirely anxious.

Utterly and completely unwell.

Questions for all of you, after reading/listening above (please write in the comments below):

1. Video: I’ve been working on trying out video (recording myself performing the piece on camera) but it’s very annoying to do well. I either look like I’m reading or I look too rehearsed. Are there any writers/storytellers you know of who have been able to adapt well to a video format? I’m thinking maybe of TikTok storytellers/YouTube writers who sit in front of a camera and say things that they’ve written, even if they’re pretending that it’s off the cuff.

2. Audio: Was the audio above too cringe without a laugh track? Should it be:

   1. Faster

   2. Slower

   3. More performative in some way

   4. Less performative in some way

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Last, but not least, just throwing a shout to to some writers I admire on the platform:

• Dia Becker — just discovered her this morning — this piece was dark and moving and funny and epic and there were at least 5 lines I wanted to save.

• Alex Dobrenko — reading him feels like watching the synapses of someone’s brain fire uncontrollably all over the paper and then all of a sudden it’s been ten minutes and you’ve finished reading a piece of his by accident.

• Elle Griffin — if you’re a writer who wants to learn how to grow on Substack, Elle is a cut above. She’s also an excellent writer who does deep dives on smart governance things like re-imagining governance.

• Michael Estrin — lawyer-turned-writer but I guess he’s still a lawyer. He’s an incredibly easy read and he launched a podcast I’ve been listening to. I really like this episode here — it helped me feel a ton better about not calling myself a failure just because I’m not a full-time writer. Very grateful for his content.