I <\/span>have a dog, and I am proud to say that my dog actually thinks he\u2019s a dog.\u00a0 I say this because I am tired of all the people who say they have dogs that think they are human.\u00a0 I mean really?\u00a0 You go to someone\u2019s house and there is a little pipsqueak thing yapping from the moment you walk in until you leave, all the while your host just laughs, saying, \u201cOh she just wants to be part of the conversation, don\u2019t you pretty girl?\u201d\u00a0 Or that dog is sitting on the last available place on the couch and so you get a pillow on the floor because little princess sat in her spot first.\u00a0 Or how about when you get up during dinner to help open some wine and you come back and the dog is licking the hollandaise off your steak.\u00a0 Nobody even stopped her. \u201cOh, sorry,\u201d your host says unsympathetically, \u201cThat\u2019s her place when you aren’t here you know.\u201d<\/p>\n

OK, come on.\u00a0 Dogs aren\u2019t human and they don\u2019t even want to be human.\u00a0 They want to be dogs.\u00a0 Dogs don\u2019t want to use a toilet, they want to drink from it.\u00a0 Dogs don\u2019t want to go to work, they want to sniff parking meters for really good dog pee. I even had a friend say, \u201cOh my dog would never lick her butt\u2013she thinks she\u2019s human.\u201d\u00a0 Well, actually I have a sneaky suspicion if we could lick our butts, we would.<\/p>\n

But the real issue here is that one characteristic of being human is to have a really big brain.\u00a0 And dogs do not have even slightly big brains.\u00a0 And this thing about brains is pretty much a fact.\u00a0 And I know this because I had an uncle who was a microcephalic.\u00a0 So he had a little brain, but he was still human, for the most part.\u00a0 Now we loved Uncle Larry, but you know how kids are, they are really cruel, especially when they don\u2019t know how cruel they are.\u00a0 When we were kids we would play house and tell Uncle Larry to be the dog, which Uncle Larry loved to do.\u00a0 Now of course when our parents found out we were doing this, they beat the shit out of us for being so mean. (Remember when parents were like that \u2013 \u201cI will teach you not to be mean by beating the living shit out of you!\u201d)<\/p>\n

But Larry was a good guy and he even eventually married this woman he met in one of those facilities that teach people with learning disorders how to cook, keep house and stuff.\u00a0 But the really weird thing was Larry married a woman who thought she was a dog!\u00a0 Honest to God.\u00a0 I could not make this up. Here was this guy who we taught to be our dog, married to a woman who thought she was a dog.\u00a0 Honestly, there were a number people worried that there might be some exhibitions of doggy love at that wedding ceremony.\u00a0 But they behaved.<\/p>\n

Now I have always been interested in brains.\u00a0 I mean I was obsessed for a while.\u00a0 And what I am about to say will also shed some light on how air travel has changed over the last several decades.\u00a0 Honestly, there was a time, believe it or not, when you could actually walk through airline security carrying a human brain.\u00a0 That\u2019s right.\u00a0 I mean security back then was just a table where some bored guy breathed over your suitcase and let you pass. So I walked up to that table with an actual human brain in a jar of formaldehyde.\u00a0 The security guy asked, \u201cWhat is that?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cA brain,\u201d I said.\u00a0 \u201cWhat kind of brain?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cA human brain.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cA man or woman human brain?\u201d\u00a0 I wanted to say, \u201cCan\u2019t you tell?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cWhere did you get it?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cFrom a human head.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cIs it going to spill?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cNo.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cOkay go ahead.\u201d\u00a0 And that was that.<\/p>\n

Now, you might be asking why did I have a human brain in the first place and where did I get it?\u00a0 Well, believe it or not, I was a young medical student at the time and someone gave this brain to me.\u00a0 I mean, when I first saw it, I was like, \u201cAwwww!\u00a0 Look it\u2019s a human brain!\u00a0 How cute is that!\u00a0 I have to have it!\u201d\u00a0 What one doesn\u2019t realize when one takes home a human brain is that there is more to it than its cuteness. \u00a0You have taken on a whole new level of responsibility.\u00a0 You are now the owner of a human brain.\u00a0 I learned this the hard way.<\/p>\n

That brain was great for the first six months.\u00a0 It was the center of attention, everyone wanted to see it, everyone wanted to hold it.\u00a0 I even took it with me when I went to visit other people.\u00a0 But brains get old and when they get old they are not as cute or fun anymore.\u00a0 As it got older, it began to lose its cute wrinkled brainy shape, and you could no longer play with it because bits and pieces would come flying off if you swirled it around too hard.\u00a0 Finally, it began to smell.\u00a0 People would come over to my place and you could tell they smelled something.\u00a0 They would look at me as if they immediately knew I had an old brain in the house.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

What do you do with an old brain?\u00a0 I never considered that when I first took it home.\u00a0 I never thought that someday that cute little organ would be an old, smelly thing that I no longer wanted.\u00a0 But what could I do?\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t just throw it in the trash, I couldn\u2019t flush it down the toilet.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t just throw it in a lake or leave it alongside the road on some barren stretch of highway.\u00a0 It was a brain, after all, a human brain.<\/p>\n

I struggled with this for a long time.\u00a0 I never considered before that there was a body somewhere with an empty cranium, and here I held all that was most human of that poor guy, ready to chuck it in a dumpster or a public waterway.<\/p>\n

And so it sits up there on my shelf, the moments we share growing fewer.\u00a0 Dogs reach an age when we consider it just and acceptable to put them out of their misery.\u00a0 Brains are not so easy, it is not hard to imagine that even in a brain that is soaking in formaldehyde there is still at least one thought held frozen in time amidst those grey and white cells, perhaps the memory of a kiss when love was young and fresh, a child laughing from a dumb joke, a dog rushing up in a whirlwind of excitement after a long trip away. Perhaps that memory is the look in someone\u2019s eyes in that moment before he passed away .\u00a0 How can anyone throw that away?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now, you might be asking why did I have a human brain in the first place and where did I get it? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3216"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3293,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3216\/revisions\/3293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}