Dog Food – the epilogue

I was just walking back from the Palex’s a short time ago when I noticed a car a bit further down was stopped in the kerbside lane, blocking traffic.  It’s a big 6 lane road with a couple of entrances on to the Newcastle Freeway, and this being the long weekend, it’s not really the place you want to stop unless you want some coastie with a cricket bat to destroy your face.  

Anyway, as I got closer I asked them if they needed any help.  They pointed down to a dog.  An overweight old beagle lying limp on the grass next to the gutter.  They explained to me that the car in front of them had hit the dog and not stopped.  The dog had moved a bit afterwards (though the way they described it was probably just twitching), so they retrieved it from the road and brought it there to try to contact the owner.

They showed me collar, which said the dog’s name was Max, and it had two phone numbers on it.   Suddenly I had this weird feeling of deja vu – weird as in it wasn’t just my neurons firing out of time, but I had actually seen it before. 

A couple of weeks ago I waxed TL;DR about a run-in with a dog that was trying to commit suicide by suburban 4 wheel drive.  I didn’t have my phone with me, I tried to herd it to the nearest payphone in a whole other suburb, I had to chase it out of a construction site, it still ran away and I just gave up.    The dog’s name was Max.  He was an overweight old beagle. 

As of probably only an hour ago, that dog is dead. 

It’s weird, because he managed to get hit exactly halfway between my house and Jones, right on my route home, probably only a minute before I was there.   The first time I met him was on my way up to Hornsby, probably 15 minutes walk away – pretty far for a dog of his age and stupidity.  He had to cross a highway to be at that place.   It’s like he was saying "You could have saved me…. this is what became of me because you gave up….  I’m gonna haunt you now, bitch"  and then it was like I was saying "I wish I was Chinese and a meat-eater so I could cook you for dinner because I’m broke as fuck right now and I have no food at home.   Maybe my flatmates would like this. Hey, who are you calling bitch, bitch?"

It was a family with kids that were attending to the dog, and the parents were both deaf, so their daughter who looked only about 12 had to call the numbers to try to reach the owner and inform them that they fail at adult responsibility.  I offered to wait with the body until the owner arrived, so I could finally have the showdown I wanted last time, but because the owners didn’t answer their phone they had to call the local cops and had to remain there because they were witnesses.  I so took my leave, because with all the coincidence already in that spot, chances are the Borg would turn up and then shit’d be real awkward. 

It was a Toyota Kluger that got him in the end. That just added to weirdness, as it’s exactly the kind of car I envisioned.  I guess the odds were behind it, and that it’s kind of fitting that one over-sized symbol of bourgeois excess that will never go off-road ended up destroying another over-sized symbol of bourgeois excess that should have stayed off-road. 

 RIP motherfucker.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.