the Curious Case of why I'm going to murder the dog

A story I promised my friend D. Also, hi. This is the G. I am too stupid to figure out how to repost this under my account. Oh well.

So! A few Sunday mornings ago, my spouse heads out early in the morning. jonesing to grill (yes, grill, in winter) himself some meat. He buys a massive thing of pork and sets upon his weird little project.

EDIT – wrong. I bought a pork shoulder with the full intention of smoking in the Carolina fashion. The Cook’s Illustrated cookbook we got for Christmas had what appeared to be a great recipe. But I ran out of time so I saved it for a week. [EDIT EDIT: A WEEK? Eww?] While I have used charcoal in the past with much success, Cooks claimed to have developed a way to use a gas grill.

We are out of propane for the grill. All Home Depots in the area are also out of propane, which seems odd, right? Who's doing massive amounts of gas grilling in the winter, besides morons like us?

EDIT – According to customer service, the area's Home Depots receive their propane shipments on Mondays. It seems that Lowes is on the same schedule. And many men prefer grilling in the winter since it involves being outside of the house and away from their Queen of the Harpies wives.

After hours of searching and calling retailers, The N finally, oddly, stumbles upon a gas station selling propane.

EDIT – This was odd. And it was the only fortunate thing that happened all day.

After grilling said roast he then puts it in the oven Sunday evening to finish. BUT HE NEGLECTS TO TURN THE OVEN ON.

EDIT – This is so monstrously wrong it approaches libel. First, I smoked the shoulder for several hours outside. Then I moved it inside to finish in the stove, AS DEMANDED BY THE RECIPE. At some point, the stove turned off on its own. Under no circumstance was this my fault. Secondly, our stove’s functioning has been faulty since day one and is perhaps haunted.

So the roast SHOULD be finished by the time we go to bed Sunday night, but it's still raw. Genius decides that since we get up with our partying child every few hours anyway, he'll just stick the roast in the oven and check on it throughout the night. Basically: sleep-cooking. There's no way that plan could go wrong. But whatever, it gets the semi-raw slab of meat (which I haven't even seen yet because I refuse to cook for my family) out of the fridge.

Upside: our house smells like bacon.

EDIT – Anyone familiar with slow cooking pork knows that it takes several hours. It had already been cooking outdoors and absorbing a delicious smoky flavor for all of the Eagles’ game and part of the Ravens’ before it was moved. It was not raw.

And I don’t see a flaw in my logic. We have not reached REM sleep in 4 months. When was the last time you had an actually dream? Why not use nature’s most enraged biological sleep disruptor as a cooking aid?

The house does smell like bacon. That is not a problem. It adds at least $10,000 in resale value.

The roast is still not done at, let's say, 6 AM, because even though our stove is digital, apparently it's a challenge to set. Spouse puts the stupid 6 pound hunk of pig back in, cranks up the heat, and hog-fluid promptly splatters over the side of whatever vessel he was cooking this thing in and burns onto the oven, filling the entire house with billowing smoke and setting off the smoke alarm.

EDIT - Um. I don’t think the smoke alarm actually went off. The whole system’s been on a hair trigger lately so I pulled the battery before it got tripped and anyone woke up crying. By anyone, I mean you. Also, don’t expect to be woken up by the dog if a goat kicks over a lantern and sets the house on fire. He saw the first puff of smoke and took off for the hills.

(Note - my Jewish boss: "This story is part of the reason we don't eat pork.")

So, we get ready for work and leave for the day, drop spawn off at daycare, etc. As we're driving down Rt 50, miles from our house and a good 45 minutes into our morning commute, the N casually mentions the pork was too hot to put in the fridge. So he left it in a paper bag in the sink.

EDIT – AGAIN, I was following the recipe. I wasn’t going to put a steaming hott pork shoulder into the fridge. I don’t care how good your crisper is, everything is going to wilt. And I left it in the tray, which I put in a paper bag (as directed), put the whole thing on a cutting board and placed it in the sink. I don’t see an issue here, your worshipfulness. As for leaving it exposed to the elements– IT’S A SMOKED HAM – it’s how meat was preserved for thousands of years before Nikola Tesla stole Freon from Prometheus and invented your precious refrigerator. It’s how George Washington Carver did it. It’s how Emily Brontë did it. It’s how the Nabob does it.

. . .


If you will, please imagine the look I gave him at this point. I think you can imagine it since it’s the look he deservedly receives 3 times daily.

A discussion EDIT – lecture follows about his poor judgment, seeing as we have a dog who is brain damaged (probably) and ill-trained (definitely) and yet more cunning then we give him credit for and will obviously consume the entire fucking roast. The N insists there is no way he will get into the sink. I bet him money and tell him, if he you know, has time during the day, maybe he should swing home for a few minutes to make sure I am always right.

EDIT – There is no way the dog can get into the sink. The counter top is too high and the sink is too deep. The only way he could possibly reach it is if pushes a chair over from the dining room and stands on it. That takes dog wits the likes of Ruff or Beethoven or Air Bud. Our dog does not have those wits. There is no reason to go home early. When we arrive tonight, there will be nothing waiting for us other than a sleeping dog and tasty dinner.

I arrive home Monday PM, arms full of my work bag and two diaper bags and a car seat and etc and the dog goes apeshit when I walk in the door. Greasy meat marks all over the floor. Tinfoil flecks and paper bag oddments in every room. ALSO THE DOG WAS ON THE COUCH, which makes me irate. And he was bloated as shit. I have to leave the potato sack locked in his law-abiding car seat (one he is in no way getting too big for already, CPS, and I do not bend his legs to get him into it in the mornings, no m'am) while I search entire house looking for vomit and poo and porcine carcass. The only remnant was a fist-sized chunk of hog in the basement. On the new carpet.

I call the N and tell him the dog ate the roast. He thinks I'm kidding and hangs up because he’s a jerk. Then I get worried about the dog (do dogs die of meat poisoning? I mean, I shouldn't be that worried since he recently consumed an entire bag of trash, including WHOLE PLASTIC PACKETS OF KETCHUP), but still I try to call him back several times and he won't answer the phone. The phone finally rings back, and rather than say hellos I scream "SERIOUSLY HOW BIG IS THIS EFFING PIECE OF MEAT I NEED TO KNOW WHAT I'M DEALNG WITH HERE." Of course, it's my mother calling.

EDIT – I was busy. Also, the dog could not have gotten the pork on his own. Someone gave it to him. Probably ghosts. And since most dogs eat meat FOR A LIVING I don’t even see how this is that big of a deal. And even though he is dumb, he will not eat the whole thing. If you look around the house you will surely find most of it.

I get the kitchen cleaned up, child settled, I change into ripped flannel pants and a teeshirt and I take the dog outside. If I’m reading this right, he’s about to have a bowel movement so violent he’ll be lucky he has any bones left. But he seems semi-fine. Suddenly, the new neighbor’s puppy gets loose in front of our house, causing general havoc and messing with another mean dog on a leash, and almost getting hit by several cars as people return home from work. I wrestle Brown Dog inside as our panicky flamboyant neighbor is screaming LEXXXXXXYYYYYYY SSTOOOPPPP ITTT BADDDD GIIIRRRLLLL and the entire community association is chasing his border collie up and down the street. It’s like a Benny Hill skit except no one’s nurses uniform got ripped off by accident.

Eventually the puppy gets caught but the commotion outside has pushed our dog into meltdown. Anything left unmolested during the day has now been destroyed by teeth and claw. It takes about 20 minutes to calm everyone down. But pig-dinner is ruined. The dog’s stomach is about to come out both ends. And of course, there is crying. Fortunately my mother doesn’t trust me to take care of her grand-potato and brought over some sort of redneck casserole over the night before.

EXCEPT I FORGOT ABOUT THE WHOLE SMOKE THING FROM THE MORNING.! The N hadn't cleaned the oven out yet. GREASE FIRE! SMOKE EVERYPLACE! The alarm goes off, again. TEARS! BARKING! FIRE! CHAOS!

EDIT – I can’t be blamed for any of the above. We had a long conversation about how there was still grease in the stove. You are a sixty year old women. You should know that bringing a flame to grease will cause it smoke. I’ve seen you move your hairdryer out of the sink before you turn the water on hundreds of times. This is the same thing. None of this is my fault.

With smoke billowing from my oven, I start throwing open doors and windows because tiny lungs are being filled with poisonous meat cloud vapors. And then it’s freezing. And then the fire department shows up.

Momentarily, I wonder how they got there so fast and how I'm going to keep my dog from killing the firemen as they break down my front door. I won’t be able to. The dog is so ‘roided out on pork and chaos and fire trucks that he’ll murder someone. Or bite through the hose and attack the fire hydrant. The house is as good as gone. I start gathering photo albums and the dog and the potato and prepare myself for at least a calendar year of homelessness. But the firetrucks fly right by our house - turns out our crazy neighbors thought they smelled a gas leak. It’s like the fifth time the fire department has come to their house, and its only actually been on fire once.

So, I go get the child, who is making small pathetic coughing noises, dress him in a snow suit, pull a sweatshirt over my pajamas, and take him outside to see the lights and commotion while my house de-smokes. Brown Dog howls for the entirety, I can hear him down the block. All this before 7:30 PM.

EDIT - I am the only victim here. The house did not burn down. No one went to the hospital. You had, what, 30 total seconds of excitement? I lost my pork BBQ, nine man hours in cooking and hours of sleep because the dog hap to crap his brains out 4 times that night.

I guess this story would have been whatever and ended there, but two nights later, as we sat in the basement calmly enjoying picking the M&Ms out of trail mix and kind-of "House" reruns on USA and playing with our cooing child's toys, the N looks over and asks the dog what he has in his mouth.

A giant piece of pork the fucktard had buried in the couch to save for later.

Fail. The End.

EDIT – The End. But I’m not a big fan of you picking out the M&Ms from the trail mix, leaving only peanuts and raisins.