Solutions and Other Problems Read online

  When that happened, our vet told us the end was getting close. A few weeks maybe.

  Four months later, the pile dog was still waddling around like the world’s hairiest water balloon.

  She just kept going and going. It didn’t even seem like she noticed.

  Everybody else did, though. When there’s forty extra pounds of water in your dog, everybody who sees your dog will immediately think, OH MY GOD… WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED??

  The least horrifying possibility they can think of is pregnancy. But this looks way weirder than pregnancy. To look like that, a dog would have to be so pregnant that the pregnancy loops back around and gets pregnant inside the original pregnancy several times over. And it couldn’t be puppies—it’d have to be snakes or something.

  It makes people concerned.

  They don’t want to jump to conclusions… it’s probably just an extremely advanced form of pregnancy… but nobody feels sure enough to let it slide. They cross the street and trickle out of their houses to ask when she’s due, just in case it was ten months ago and we didn’t realize.

  That’s a tough question to field five times a day when the real answer is “No, sorry… the reason she looks like that is because she is dying.”

  You can’t lie, though. People follow up on it.

  It’s also pretty hard to avoid the question. These are good people—they’re trying to make sure you aren’t doing something weird to this poor, bloated dog. They won’t stop asking questions until they have the explanation.

  She survived so long it became summer. We had to shave her.

  Right after we shaved her, we found out that—despite looking like a diabetic manatee from outer space—she didn’t have enough body fat to stay warm even when it’s 85 degrees. We had to buy her a sweater. In July.

  She already looked pretty confusing, and I don’t fully understand why this was the case, but the sweater made it way worse.

  Nobody knows what to do with that. If that comes at them, they don’t even know where to start.

  The most appropriate crescendo for this would probably be the time our AC broke.

  When the repairman came by to fix it, he seemed wary of the pile dog—like he wasn’t sure how he should be interacting with her.

  She was waddling laps through the house like usual, poking around in different places, making friendly little snorting sounds to say hi on her way past, and the repairman kept staring at her with this strained expression on his face.

  We assumed he was just lukewarm about dogs, or maybe he didn’t know the best way to approach the subject of what was wrong with her.

  Fifteen minutes later, he finally worked up the courage to ask what kind of animal she was.

  Which is a risky question.

  You don’t ask that question if it’s just a little ambiguous.

  You don’t even ask that question if you have guesses—any guesses at all. Absolutely nobody wants to seem like the sort of fool who can’t tell the difference between a goat and a pony. If there’s a chance it’s an animal you’ve heard of, it isn’t worth it.

  The only person who would ask that question is somebody who’s fully stumped and believes it might be a type of animal they’ve never seen before.

  He straight up couldn’t tell what species he was looking at…

  We told him, but I don’t think he believed us.

  13. WORLD'S GREATEST CUP

  Some years have been hard, but overall, I have a pretty easy life. If I find a dead deer, I don’t have to fight a bear for it. I don’t even have to eat it if I don’t want to.

  This isn’t to say I do not experience conflict. I absolutely do.

  For example, I wasn’t content with the CD player in my car, so I got a new stereo. One of the ones that can play music from a phone instead of just tapes and CDs.

  They described the stereo as “interactive,” which sounded cool. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I assumed something like “capable of responding to commands” or “lets you change the colors on the buttons.”

  As it turns out, “interactive” can also be a gentle way to describe something that a more direct person might call relentless and nonsensically invasive.

  It will not stop until it is certain that I am adequately interacted with and all my needs have been met, forcibly if necessary.

  What kind of person is that feature intended for? Somebody who loves beeping and needs to feel properly greeted by their stereo? Does a person like that exist?

  I don’t know where it got the impression that I need that.

  I also don’t know where it got the impression that I constantly need to be updated about things only a stereo would care about.

  I want to explain that music is not supposed to be mandatory. It is a fun activity. I do not need it for anything. There are no serious injuries that can happen as a result of not listening to music. I want to explain that. But I don’t know how to put it in terms a stereo can understand, so I either have to listen to music or endure the consequences.

  It also takes my phone calls. Not like “my phone calls come in, and, if asked to do so, my stereo will accept them.” We’re talking about stealing. It steals my phone calls. A phone call will come in, and, without consulting me, my stereo will gain control of the phone call and accept it on my behalf.

  I just really disagree with the way it handles things.

  I also disagree with how my phone responds. I mean, defend yourself. You don’t have to let the stereo do that. I’ve seen what you’re capable of.

  My phone means well, but I hate it too. It can’t be reasoned with. That doesn’t stop me from trying, though.

  It isn’t alive. I don’t need to get mad at it. But this is confusing for me.

  The human brain isn’t accustomed to navigating a world where it’s hard to tell the difference between objects and animals. For almost all of human history, that has been easy: if it’s trying to interact with you, that’s an animal. End of story. Maybe there was a tiny bit of a gray area around plants, but it’s not like rocks were jumping out from behind trees to tell cavemen what kind of crackers are on sale at CrazyLand. Rocks can’t do that. I don’t know if they’d want to, but it doesn’t matter, because they can’t.

  Everything is different now. Gone are the days where inanimate objects acted like inanimate objects. Hardly any of them do anymore.

  How am I supposed to know that isn’t some kind of crazy tube predator?

  My ancestors never had to deal with this. They wouldn’t have known what to do.

  I’m doing the best I can, but it’s hard. I mean, I drink juice out of a cup shaped like a frog. I know it’s just a cup, and it doesn’t have a motive for falling over, and it therefore doesn’t make sense to become enraged with it. I do know this. But here’s this stupid cup, falling toward the floor like:

  How am I supposed to feel? Proud?

  I think I genuinely feel like I’d be better at it. Like I could be a cup better than my cup. First of all, I wouldn’t act like bullshit all the time. I’d do what I’m supposed to, and as well as possible…

  That is absolutely not what I would be like as a cup though.

  14. FAIRNESS

  A man who owns a hammer lives in the house across the alleyway from my bedroom. I found this out because one morning, he started hammering his roof at 7:54 a.m.: six minutes before it becomes even borderline acceptable to hammer things. I couldn’t see what he was building up there, but I assume it was unnecessary.

  Every day, he’d start hammering around that time—7:53, 7:56, 7:55—always close enough to 8 o’clock to indicate that hammer guy was aware of the rules for hammering, but was choosing to disregard them to gain an unfair advantage.

  No one did anything to stop him. Emboldened, he began hammering even a little earlier. 7:48. 7:46. 7:44. He clearly thought he was getting away with this too.

  But he wasn’t.

  Every morning since the beginning, I’d been staring at him from ten ya
rds away in my room, feeling enraged and refusing to tolerate what he was doing.

  I had to.

  As far as I could tell, I was the only thing standing between hammer guy and the lawless unknown where he could hammer whatever he wanted at any time without consequences.

  Furthermore, I believed that, left to his own devices, hammer guy WOULD hammer everything. He seemed only barely affected by my attempts to control him, as though the tiniest lapse in resistance might provide him the opportunity to break free and become a truly unstoppable force of hammering.

  Having to be personally responsible for maintaining justice in the world is distressing. It makes it seem like maybe there’s something wrong at the Universal Fairness and Balance Department. Like maybe the higher-ups have lost control and they need help.

  Every day it gets harder to ignore the possibility that something’s wrong. It’s fucking mayhem out here.

  At this point, it doesn’t even seem unreasonable to wonder whether everyone at the Universal Fairness and Balance Department has given up, and we’re alone now, and it’s only a matter of time before the bad guys figure it out too.

  If you are an agent of chaos like the man who lives across the alleyway from me, perhaps you don’t feel like you need to be scared of justice because you think you know what gamble you’re making.

  Perhaps you think you’ve broken free of the system. Perhaps you think you’re getting away with it.

  Then one day, you get up to go hammer your roof, and there’s a stick in your yard.

  You don’t recognize this as justice. It just seems like a stick. Yeah, it’s slightly inconvenient to move it, but that isn’t justice…

  It’s a little more difficult to explain why the stick would be in the same place the next morning.

  The first time it happened, you assumed it was the wind. But wind isn’t usually this precise. Still, wind seems like the most reasonable explanation.

  The third time, that starts to seem way less likely.

  You get rid of the stick. You might not understand why this is happening, but you feel very sure that getting rid of the stick will solve the issue, whatever it is. Surely this isn’t happening on purpose. What purpose would it be?

  But here’s that stick again.

  You throw it away in a different trash can several blocks from the first one. Someone would need to be truly motivated to find the stick and put it in your yard again.

  Yet there it is: the same stick.

  At this point, the precision is unmistakable: someone has been doing this.

  Which is confusing. People will usually only do something this precise for reasons. But what reasons could a person possibly have for doing this? It doesn’t make sense. It violates everything you know about the types of things people do, and the reasons they do them for, and it shouldn’t be happening. You’re sure of that.

  You want to know who has been doing this. That much is obvious because you put the stick in the alley instead of throwing it away in an even more remote trash can. You start staying up later and later to catch whoever is doing it. You just want to see who it is. See their face. Force them to explain why they did this.

  But whoever is doing it seems to have some sort of insider knowledge of your schedule, and you can never catch a glimpse of them.

  I like to imagine it was even more confusing when it stopped.

  You can’t do the same nonsensical thing every single day for three weeks and then just stop. It doesn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense to do in the first place, but at least it was consistent. At least it still seemed possible to figure out why it was happening. There has to be an explanation somewhere. You can’t just pick an object at random, ritualistically place it in someone’s yard every day with no explanation, and then stop doing it also with no explanation.

  You can, though.

  You can also start doing it again three months later, when it makes the absolute least sense to start doing it again.

  There are so many things you can do. Like one time, put a grapefruit instead. Just once.

  Then go back to sticks forever.

  I don’t know if hammer guy learned anything from this. It would have been pretty impossible to make a connection between the punishment and the crime.

  I’m sure he had to consider some things. Probably more than he would have had to consider in a more straightforward situation.

  This wasn’t about teaching hammer guy a lesson, though.

  It was for me.

  I can’t force the things that happen to be fair.

  I can’t make them happen for only good reasons that I understand and agree with.

  But I can do my own things.

  And I can do them for equally pointless and equally nonsensical reasons.

  Which is sort of like fairness.

  Potato

  Greetings, fellow creature.

  Oh my… I certainly hope not…

  15. PLANS

  My childhood diary is full of training plans.

  Training plans for improving my ability to perform real magic. Training plans for teaching my dog to read. Training plans for how to convert to all-fours running full-time (the goal was to become an actual wolf). Training plans for teaching my friend Joey how to draw faster and better. I wrote down the name of every waterslide I’d ever been on. Who knows what my endgame was, but I genuinely suspect it might have been to ride every waterslide in the world.

  If someone ever found the plans and had to guess what the person who wrote them was trying to accomplish, their best guess would probably be gladiator training. This person is clearly training themselves to be a gladiator in some aquatic dystopia ruled by wolves.

  On August 8th, 1996, I outlined my plan for eliminating the need to sleep under the covers. I don’t know why I felt that was necessary, but, by the end of October 1996, I planned to be free of this disgusting weakness.

  If I believe something will work, that is very dangerous.

  In July of 1991, for example, I thought I discovered the secret to breathing underwater:

  I didn’t give up until September.

  It just seemed… possible.

  Such is the danger of optimism. If you think you can do it, you’ll try. And you might keep trying. If it works, great—you did it. You don’t need blankets anymore. Good job. That was really hard, which is amazing when you consider how much you didn’t need to do it.

  If it doesn’t work, you’ll keep trying anyway.

  There’s always the dangling carrot of what you could be if you maxed out.

  16. THE ULTIMATE PLAN

  My whole life, I’ve been held back by weakness.

  By the end of 2016, I was ready to be done with it.

  And just to be clear what I mean by “done with it,” I mean done with it; not make a few changes here and there, not reduce the amount—my goal was to get rid of it all the way.

  This is the eight-part story of my most earnest attempt to become a juggernaut.

  If you want your body to be strong, you can force it to become strong by lifting weights. Pick up the weights, the body becomes stronger from doing this, now it can pick up heavier weights, now it’s even stronger, eventually it’ll be able to throw trees at cars.

  And it just seemed like there should be a similar thing I could do to become emotionally stronger. Fear reps or something.

  However, the gradual approach wasn’t producing very fast results. To have a chance of becoming invulnerable within my lifetime, I’d need a more extreme plan.As extreme as possible. No more reps. The emotional equivalent of powerlifting the whole amount of weight in one burst.

  I’d only have to do it once.

  I chose the most extreme plan I could think of, which was to consume a huge quantity of drugs, watch scary movies, and then strand myself outdoors all night.

  The hope was that forcing myself to endure such challenging conditions might cause me to become permanently hardened, like a gladiator. Which is a fairly ambi
tious goal, but it sort of felt like my only option.

  To ensure I followed through after taking the drugs and watching the movies, I reckoned I would need to be at least 6 miles from home when my escape reflexes kicked on.

  So I took half of the drugs, watched scary movies until it got dark outside, then walked until I felt about six miles away.

  Then I took the other half of the drugs.

  Approximately 45 minutes later, I was in some field somewhere. I looked around to see if anything seemed scary yet, and there was a little clump of grass up ahead. I saw it and thought, Hey… a thing.