The View from a Drawbridge

Something is obviously dead in my back yard. I know this because my dogs have come in from playing and they reek of rotting corpse. It must be a dog thing. They love to roll in dead stuff. What a disgusting habit, and one that doesn’t seem to bring them any benefit except the pleasure of watching me dry heave.

Given that I have a job that affords me the privilege to wax philosophical, I was thinking about my stinky dogs today, and I asked myself the following: What is the human equivalent to rolling in dead stuff? As self-destructive as we tend to be, there surely must be one.

I did read an article once that said that since dogs are ruled by smell the way we are ruled by sight, their rolling in dead stuff is the equivalent of us wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Quite often not a good idea, but we do it anyway.

It’s true that we do things that seem brilliant to us, but result in the irritation/disgust/avoidance of those around us. (Well, I never do, of course, but a lot of the rest of you seem to.) We follow the pack even when that pack is doing something idiotic. Just go to a Trump rally and you’ll witness this. (Come to think of it, I tend to see Trump as the very stinky stuff my dogs like to roll in.)

Is it possible that we roll in metaphorical dead stuff without even realizing that we are doing so? (I mean, things even worse than wearing Hawaiian shirts, because I confess I own a few of those.) I vow to try to be more mindful of these things moving forward. Beware the dead stuff. It’s bad. Bad, bad, bad.

I have to admit that this thought experiment has made me feel a little more tolerant of my dogs. Perhaps they mean well. Or maybe they just really like listening to me mutter while they’re getting bathed every day.