The Min Pin Bark of Despair and Boredom

OK, there really can't be any more room left for this baby to get bigger. I am now a walking experiment on the ability of human flesh to contain a rapidly expanding, constantly moving mass, one which appears to have corners, and which has somehow crow-barred my ribcage wider and yet still manages to reach around the front angle of that ribcage. I don't even know how to explain that last part, but it's important that I do because it's that horrifying.

Another attempt: there's your breastbone, right? And then there's that space directly below it where you once managed to achieve something like washboard abs, but only the two sets directly above your belly button? Imagine that space as obscenely convex now, clamped on either side by bone, and then imagine a foot kicking out from that and over in front of the ribcage. I have watched too many cartoons and low budget sci-fi movies in my life because this phenomena convinces me every time that it just might be possible for my little boy to kick through my abdominal wall.

Also? There is nowhere to store the food I eat, or process it with any degree of efficiency or discretion, and though I am tempted to describe my intestinal woes in further detail, I will refrain. The good news is that I am finally sleeping more than an hour at a stretch, and am composing love sonnets to the good people at SoftHeat, who make a hell of a jumbo heating pad perfect for long, angry backs.

Why the overly detailed body update? I am housebound and slowly going mad. The Honda's in the shop and Pants has the pick-up, which leaves me with the 55 Fairlane, which is less a functionally reliable automobile for everyday errands and more a perplexing hobby for Pants and a mechanical means of playing dress-up for me. Floyd requires a certain flexibility of schedule, a certain philosophical abandon, with every ride, seeing as how it might end in being stranded any number of places. This is aside from the Hulk-like strength it takes to steer a hunk of solid steel without power steering, or apply regular brakes to said hunk once it gets moving. I look at little old ladies from the 50's now and know that underneath those puffy sleeves and white gloves were iron grips and ropey muscles, and that those shiny white pumps had to come slamming down, most likely both together, to get the car to stop.

So I'm here. Me and the dog and the cat. And the new neighbor's dog, a miniature Pinscher, or "Min Pin" if you're into that whole obnoxious abbreviating thing we do nowadays for Combination Things, or, as I see them, Things That Offend Nature and Should Not Be. This particular dog has a bark both high-pitched and petulant and brutally repetitive in rhythm and cadence, and since I'm poised to time things these days, I timed its morning outburst of rage at its own existence: two and a half hours, no breaks, going with the bark-bark-pause double cadence today instead of the bark-bark-bark triplet. Some tragedy of acoustics and military housing design allows this terrible bark to echo off our adobe walls, pierce their plaster and energy-efficient windows, and reach me in every room of our house with bell-like clarity. I picture the dog now, collapsed in futile despair in its tiny turd-speckled patch of hell, waiting for its vocal chords to mend like Prometheus's liver, only to be rent anew when it realizes that its life, against all fairness and certainly against my preferences, continues. (Another side effect of cabin fever: purple prose). Is it wrong that I'm thinking up ways to capitalize on this dog's temporary exhaustion, like dousing it in vinegar?

Eventually, of course, I will have to talk to my neighbor about this problem, and it will be less awkward and better for my case if I'm not holding the dog's dripping skull and attached spinal column when I do it. The problem is that my neighbor and his wife work all day, leaving around 7:30, which marks the onset of The Bark and returning some twelve hours or more later. Clearly, they are busy, as I used to be, and there's a good chance they might sigh in patronizing exasperation, as I used to do, at the plight of a lady of leisure, home all day building a baby and timing dog barks. All I can say in my defense is that I understand their side of it, and that when I was in the same position, I kenneled my dog inside and cleaned up my fair share of accident shits to spare my neighbors her glass-etching bark.

And now a chill runs down my spine because I just realized with little amusement that I'm doing the internet equivalent of the Min Pin Bark of Despair and Boredom. Time to collapse and await renewal.