Microwaveable (Repost)

 (Editor’s note: Repost. As my Rabbi always tells me, don’t overthink what you like… I don’t know why I keep going to synagogues. I’m not Jewish... I swear…)

So you got a dog to help deal with loneliness. Congratulations. 

The dog you chose (feel free to imagine the breed of your choosing) likes to sleep a lot. Like ”a lot“ a lot like it prematurely lost its will to live. 

But the Vet with a surprising number of neck tattoos says that there’s technically nothing wrong with the dog. Relieved you head home down $1500 and make an Instagram account for your dog, mostly to recount their dreams.

Months pass. A pandemic starts. And soon after, tragedy strikes in isolation: You get locked out of your dog's account with no meaningful way to reset the password yourself. Cursing your careless approach to password management, you look over at your dog fast asleep on the couch beside you. You feel guilty but nonetheless impressed by its ability to convey betrayal in slumber. In a panic, you reach out to tech support without much success because recovering a locked account in this particular situation would require a government issued ID, like a drivers license.

“ Shit that sucks. What am I gonna do?” You think. “Well… The obvious thing to do would be to teach the dog to drive, but that takes time and the most efficient way to do that would involve me finding a machine that would enable us to switch brains…”

Now, I know what you’re thinking, reader: “that doesn’t sound like me. I would never think that.” But don’t be so quick to sell yourself short! Moving on…

“Seriously, it sounds weird. But it really would be perfect because my dog would likely use his time in my body to sleep so I wouldn’t have to worry about him acting like a dog or whatever with human machinery.” Pleased to have settled on a course of action you go online to do further research on the subject. And one intensive weekend deep dive later you conclude that while much further along than expected, the technology required for the job is still not quite up to snuff. Saddened, your mind turns back to the far more risky solution suggested earlier by your friend with a mindfulness meditation fetish: just go get a fake ID for the dog. It annoys you when people you find annoying give helpful advice because it makes them harder to dismiss out of hand. Eager for specifics, you grab your phone.

“The people making it won’t care,” your friend reassures you. “They’ll just assume it’s like a novelty thing or that you’re like a crazy dog parent.”

”Fair enough. Do you know any place like that?”

“No, not really.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Why wouldn’t I be sure?”

“I don’t know. It just kinda sounds like you do know a place.”

“No. Sorry. I honestly don’t even know how I got the idea. I think It just came to me while I was sitting to mindfully watch my—“

“I have to go get the door. I think that’s my food being delivered. But thank you!”

“You’re welcome. And remember: the self is an illusion. Namaste.”

Ignoring your nonexistent food delivery, you type words into google then Reddit and back again for a while until eventually you settle on the place that seems the least objectionable. They make novelty t-shirts, which you figure should reduce the likelihood that they are into organ harvesting or just generally “Squid Gaming'' people. Eager to end the nightmare, You grab the doggo, mask up and head out into the void.

The place is located in a neighborhood known as “Little Chechnya '' though its ever changing and increasingly gentrified profile make it so it really could be anywhere. “There are Little Chechnyas like this all over the world. In every major city.” You think to yourself. Impressed by your own eloquence, you make your way inside and down a large stairwell which inclines at a disturbingly acute angle. You go extra slow fearing death from a number of different fall related injuries, but the most notable cause floating through your mind is embarrassment. Fortunately, tucked under your arm your dog remains fast asleep the whole way down. A real trooper. 

At the base you’re met by two people who turn out to be the nearsighted owner (glasses) and another employee, his equally nearsighted son (different glasses). The Son explains that he’s been juggling remote learning with helping out around the shop but you kind of tune out, though to your credit feel really bad for doing so. I don’t know. It’s not an important part of the story. Still, eventually, after you (skillfully) seem to listen for a while he gets around to asking you what you need and you explain. The Son excuses himself to go talk to the Father, and you know they find it weird because the conversation takes a while and they keep looking over at you. But in the end your friend was right; they don’t really care and just roll with it, only double checking to make sure you weren’t joking. “I would never joke about the mental well being of my dog child,” you think to yourself gravely. 

As the Son goes about setting things up, it’s the Father’s turn to make small talk. 

This goes a bit better. Sort of: He talks about how the pandemic has slowed business down, but in the end he does this only to stoke your sympathies before upselling you on the idea of a passport for the dog. While initially open to the concept, you begin wavering once you consider the steep jail sentence that would follow the authorities catching you with a fake passport. But in the end, good taste (and salesmanship) wins out as you figure “Why not if I’m getting a deal?” and place your doggo on a stool with a cushion to get their picture taken for the documents.

“Do you need them awake?” You ask.

The Son and Father look at each other for a second. 

“No,” the Son finally replies as he removes the lens cap on the camera.

The whole situation is over and done in like 20 minutes, and the documents look surprisingly professional and legitimate, minus the “for a dog” part of the equation. So you pay up, collect the doggo, and go to make your journey back up the lethally acute stairwell, but not before the Father can tell an alarming yet formative (to him) story about a box of really small puppies he found in the dead of winter when he was like 10 years old.

He was so concerned they would die of hypothermia that in his youthful innocence he brought them home, knowing full well he would be punished for it by his strict pet-averse parents. But as the soggy box sat on the kitchen table he could tell that that wasn’t going to be enough. If he didn’t act the frost bitten puppies wouldn’t make it through the night. 

So, seeing no other choice, he put them in the microwave. If only for a few minutes, he told himself. And ever since that night he can’t think about the situation or a microwave without crying. You thank him for the story you now feel bad that you secretly wish you never heard and leave, horrified, driving home in silence with your doggo fast asleep in the passenger seat. Even though it’s irrational, you hope deep down your doggo appreciates the lengths you will go to to preserve things tangentially related to them that they’ve (technically) expressed no interest in. You notice very few people outside who look like they want to be there and a large proportion of the traffic you encounter seems to center on delivery trucks.

When you get home, you second guess yourself as you take a picture of the license because it suddenly dawns on you that there’s no way that this will actually work. ”This is the type of idea you tweet about. Best case.” You think to yourself. In fact, they actually ask for a second piece of ID, so you have to send the passport too, and suddenly feel thankful that the print shop guy who microwaved a box of puppies (plural!) suggested that you make the investment. “Spare no expense for the doggo… Still, again, no way this works.” You reiterate. But then like 15 minutes later there it is: they’ve sent you instructions to reset the password!  And that’s it, that’s the end of the story. Like, you don’t even post about it, you just kinda go about your housebound daily routine, avoiding the microwave as much as humanly possible as your doggo sleeps in their dog bed shaped like a hamburger.