I was out running errands the other day, and I realized that I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt. I thought about it, but decided that was okay. I was just going to Jiffy Lube, and who gets into an accident just going to Jiffy Lube? I’ve never heard of anyone, and I’ve known dozens of people. None of the numerous accidents I was personally the cause of in my teenage years ever occurred while any of the litigants were enroute to Jiffy Lube. I wonder if there’s ever been a study on this phenomenon.

Still, putting on my belt is win-win. I should just do it. But then I’ll have to reach over and find it while driving, and is that really so safe? 

A few blocks after this inner debate, in the middle lane, I came up on one of those temporary road signs, the kind that has its own tires and tells you in words made up of yellow lightbulbs when lanes are closed ahead. Today, this one was flashing a message that read simply:

SEATBELTS SAVE LIVES

Huh. It blinked this message several times as I passed it, and I glanced at the back of it in my rearview, reflecting on the weird timing of the thing. If I got into an accident now, that sign would be a pretty colorful detail I could add to the story I’d tell people about the moments leading up to the wrecking of my truck. Unless of course I couldn’t tell the story, because of the injuries I’d sustained due to the fact that I wasn’t wearing a SEATBELT, therefore not allowing mine to SAVE my LIFE. Nobody would even know, just me and the blinking yellow bulbs, who had tried to warn me, and whose warning I’d chosen to ignore. So maybe I’d better belt up, after all.

Because it was also kind of weird that it was in the middle lane, just sitting there, out of place and kind of obstructing traffic, a little. And if you were trying to turn into Kinkos, kind of obstructing traffic, a lot.

Maybe it was a sign… and not just an actual sign, in the literal sense. What if it had been placed there specifically for me? Yeah. From someone in the future who knew that I was on my way to an accident, and this was their attempt to help me out? This flashing roadsign was his one shot to let me know that SEATBELTS SAVE LIVES, and that I should definitely be giving mine its chance to step up and do that. What if, for some murky time-traveling-related reasons, he couldn’t communicate with me directly, or ironically, he was pressed for time, and this rolling bank sign was the only means he had to communicate to me the danger I was heading toward?

What if this well-intentioned… ‘Futureboy’ was sitting in front of a viewscreen hundreds of years from now, watching me ignore his sign. What if he was thumping his balled fists onto some crazy future table that I could never understand, and yelling “C’mon! Idiot! Buckle uuuuuup!”, and maybe even spraying a little spittle onto his screen. And if that was happening, then it was okay, because maybe in the future, there are little spittle-cleaning nanobots that spring to life, push off against the side of the screen like a bloom of rolling pinpoints, and like scores of microscopic figure skaters, clean off the foreign saliva. Tiny single-minded scrubbing bubbles.

But he wouldn’t even notice them, because he’s so used to cool future stuff like that… stuff that would give you or me a heart attack if we saw it. Maybe he wasn’t even looking at a viewscreen at all, but instead, had an old yellowed newspaper spread out in front of him, and he was waiting to see if the headline would change from “Local Man T-Boned and Killed by Meat Delivery Truck” to “Meat Delivery Truck Overturns, T-Bones Everywhere”.

Actually, that’s not too logical. I mean, if Futureboy were truly trying to save my life, and the flashing road sign were his only means of communication, wouldn’t it make more sense to spell out something like:

BUCKLE UP BILL

It’s shorter, more personal, and impossible to ignore. If I’d seen something like that flashing in amber yellow, I can guarantee you there would have been no inner dialogue… no debate. I’d have been fumbling with that belt so fast it would have looked like I was trying to put a fire out on my shoulder. But it didn’t say that. It only said:

SEATBELTS SAVE LIVES

So. Future-Bill-Saving-Boy scenario is probably not a reasonable assumption to make. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Or maaaaaaybe…. maybe it was placed there by, I don’t know, the state highway commission. Or some seatbelt-use advocacy group… something like that. Maybe they were just trying to get the message across that seatbelts save lives. And this was their way to tell people that.

Once, my Basset Hound Gordon ate not a seatbelt, but an entire bag of Pepperidge Farms Cinnamon Swirl Bread. It was New Year’s Eve, 1999 - a year before Jill and I met. While everyone else in the world was preoccupied with the Y2K bug and was nervously eyeballing the sky for falling planes, I was nervously eyeballing my beloved hound attempting to digest plastic. He was lying down, sitting up, and lying down again, unable to get comfortable, and drooling like a broken spigot.

Gordon had followed his sniffing nose into the kitchen and bellied-up to the counter, then gulped down that loaf like a snake swallowing an egg. He’d left no evidence that bag full of tasty bread had ever existed - not a twist-tie; not a raisin - just some slobber next to the sink, pointing toward his escape route like a mutely accusing finger. And it wasn’t just a single bag that went down Gordon, Pepperidge Farms likes to double-wrap their Swirl, with both a bag, and a cellophane inner wrapping.

Over the course of several days, and during several trips to the vet’s office, it became anchored in his stomach and nothing seemed to be able to dislodge it. Not even two tubes of the stuff my vet normally prescribed to grease up the inside of cats that needed to pass particularly hairy balls. One tube of that stuff will last your average cat about eight years, and on the vet’s orders, I wrung two entire tubes of it down Gordon’s throat in a single night.

The shit was rolling out of poor Gordon like oiled smoke, but no bag.

For one perfectly awful moment, I had the irrational and horrifying thought that it would be semi-plausible for me to just reach down into his gullet, with the warm, wet curtains of his throat gripping my forearm like a blood pressure cuff, grab the end of the goddamn bag, and give it a good yank. If I did it fast enough and got out of there, maybe things would be okay. I shuddered and quickly pushed that image from my mind.

He eventually passed it, not through his puffy, laugh-inducingly large dog anus (seriously, it looked like a puckered ditch), but through a 6-inch opening in his abdomen. They had put Gordon under, scoped him, and made the determination that it wasn’t going to come out any other way. They were going to have to cut it out of him, or he was going to die. So, over the howling protests of my checking account, off Gordon went, to be indignantly shaved and cut into, yet again.

They took him about thirty miles away to a place called simply “The Farm”. He made it through the surgery fine, and was in hound recovery for three days. They had visiting hours, so I went down to see the old boy. I took Charlie, my other Basset, with me. We went inside, and found Gordon lying on his side in a large, roomy wall-kennel on several clean, folded blankets. They opened his wire door, and he rose on wobbly feet and came out to us. Whoever had been on dog-shaving duty the evening before had either been a little unsure, or a lot overzealous. The bald patch on G’s stomach was so far-reaching and grand that the sides of it almost touched and overlapped up over his back. His newly-exposed skin was baby-rat pink and he had black patches that didn’t quite follow the patterns of black fur he had when not shaved. But Gordon didn’t follow the rules, not even the rules of nature.

I crouched, and he stopped walking when his nose bumped into me, like a blind cow against a barbed-wire fence. I noticed that pitifully, he was hooked up to an IV, which trailed from one bald leg, across the smooth concrete floor, and back into his kennel. On his stomach was a clean, straight incision, pinched and folded a little at the ends, and bristling with stitches that looked a chorus line of spider legs.

At this point, it all became too much for Charlie, and she began to honk.

If you’ve never heard a honking Basset Hound, then you can’t really appreciate what I was dealing with. She was honking and trembling and honking, and even the normally stoic Gordon perked up his ears and began looking around curiously. Some of the other post-op animals were also starting to find their feet inside their cages, and one of the techs quickly came over. I asked him if he could watch Gordon for a minute while I took Charlie outside.

When we got outdoors, she started to unclench, and the honking ticked back down and settled on kind of a yipping whine.

I put her back into my car, at the time a sweet 1987 powder-blue Chrysler LeBaron. It being early January, I knew there would be no danger in leaving her there while I went back inside to pet Gordon for a few minutes and see him back into his cage.

Characteristically, Gordon was facing in the wrong direction when I went back in, and he had never looked so much like a half-bald, swayback donkey to me as he did in that moment. I grabbed handfuls of his loose, Bassety rolls of extra skin, said my goodbyes for the day, and went back out to the car. When I opened the door, the first thing I noticed was that Charlie was now in the backseat, and staring at me, wide-eyed. The second thing I noticed was that she had shit copiously all over both the driver’s side seat and its unspooled seatbelt.

That was a seatbelt that wasn’t doing anyone any good.

So… Futureboy. If you’re poring over old blog entries from 2008, and you happen to come across this one, how about forgetting about the unsolicited public-service safety announcement? Give me something I can actually use. Like:

PUSH THE BREAD BACK FURTHER ON THE COUNTER, ASS