Weekend at Buddy's

Often, when Buddy is just sitting there, vacantly staring at the screen, one looks at him and wonders: "How does a dog like that just sit there and watch TV." Really, though, Buddy's not watching the TV -- and he hates it when people coo over him for doing so. Instead, he's lost in thought. His thoughts, though, aren't necesarrily that complex -- he is, after all, a dog and has no opposable thumbs.

Mostly, Buddy's thoughts are variations on the three following questions:

1. Where is my food/water/owner? These things are very important to him. These are the easiest questions for Buddy to answer, but just in case you need a cheat sheet, the answers are: by the breakfast bar/by the breakfast bar/drunk at the Globe.
2. Where my bitches at? But don't critcize Buddy for being so pejorative, though, because people still call female dogs "bitches," and he can too, because he, himself, is a dog. This is a major debate being carried out by canine lexicographers and sociologists; but Buddy is old and it's unlikley that he'll change in his ways. Instead, you should criticize him for his poor grammar in asking that question.
3. What would happen if I killed everyone in the room and ate them, even their bones? Sure, you may think when he with his back to you and barks it means "why aren't you petting me?" but, really, you couldn't be further from the truth. It really means "what if I killed you and ate your bones." Yeah. Well, that's Buddy for you -- always with the misdirection.

So anyway, FOA left her apartment last Friday morning and didn't have a chance to run home and say goodbye to her dog. Everybody was busy, especially people who sit on Commerce and Labor -- and she was going to miss her plane.

Buddy typically doesn't mind this. In fact, in the thirteen years since he's been a pet (before that he was a mercenary in Colombia, but that's a story for another day), he's actually only spent about twelve minutes of quality time with his owner. He gets it. But on this day, history will recall, Buddy... well, he needed a pal.

FOA left for the airport, and Buddy immediately began to hatch his scheme. He was tired of always wondering after his food/water/owner. His owner should bring him food and water on a plate! He was tired, always wondering about the location of bitches -- they should flock to him without regard to their loved ones or significant others. And, most importantly, he should be able to have the sweet, salty taste of human flesh whenever he wants.

Yes, the world was going to pay for ever wronging Buddy Oh. And it was going to start paying tonight.

FOA's friend LL -- a local government lobbyist and generally pleasant person -- had agreed to look after Buddy while he's gone. Little did she know, walking up to the townhouse door, is that Buddy was inside, scheming and plotting for his eventual takeover of the world.

LL opens the door. It's quiet. Not eerie quiet or TV quiet, but just sort of quiet. She heard buddy furiously scratching somewhere upstairs. She calls his name -- no answer. She climbs the stairs and, maybe it's the blueprints for giant death lasers or the leatherbound copy of "The Dogunist Manifesto" laying open, but she sensed something was wrong. Very wrong. Sure, she could ignore the tanks parked up and down the street -- but this stuff was all too strange.

The lesson LL learned that night, but would never get to put to use, was that one ought never ineterrupt a dog while he's laying the best and most intricate of plans for global domination. Buddy, furiously scribbling out (which is tough, for a dog, to do with a pen in his mouth) the plans for a giant base inside of a hollowed-out mountain, didn't hear that LL was in the house.

But he did feel her hand on his back, when she knealt down to pet him.

So he killed her. Quickly, he spun around and started barking at her. "It's OK, Buddy, it's just me -- wanna go for a walk," she didn't have time to ask before he lunged at her neck, teeth exposed. That was the last anyone would ever hear of LL.

Almost immediately, Buddy was overcome with remorse. Here he had just gone and killed one of his owner's closest friends. He would have cried, if it had any social significance at the moment, but it did not. Now was not the time for critical introspection. Now was instead the time to clean up a horrible, horrible mess.

So he set to cleaning, wiping his various plans and blueprints away. He pulled up the carpet with his teeth, and replaced it with a roll of carpet he had found in one of the 600 cabinets in the garage. "How can a dog lay carpet tacks and whatnot, especially when he only weighs 19 pounds," you may ask. But dammit, he found a way and screw you for questioning it because just three paragraphs ago I was talking about a dog drawing up blueprints for a death laser and you didn't ask a damn thing!

While he was laying the new carpet, he cut himself ever-so-slightly, one of those sort cuts that doesn't really hurt but bleeds kind of a lot, and tracked a little blood on the floor. He didn't really notice, being caught up with all the craziness of the evening.

He realized his owner may miss LL -- and, while Congress placed a moratorium on cloning humans, he wanted to find a solution. With a little white out and a quick course in cybernetics and robotics, Buddy realized it actually would not be that tough to build a robot that looked and acted exactly like her.

Unfortunately, it required him to scrap the plans for his laser and was so expensive he had to sell all of his tanks. But ultimately, pleasing the master is more important to a dog than world domination.

dts