So my dog has this new way of telling you that she’s super happy to see you.
It’s really gross and invasive and it gives me the heebie-jeebies pretty much every time that she does it, so I wanted to share it with you during our time together this week.
Because I’m a sharer like that!
You see, it starts off like any normal kiss, or at least any normal dog kiss that involves bathing you thoroughly in her saliva … but it doesn’t stop there! Oh no no – once her victim is sufficiently slathered and thus thrown off their guard, that’s when she starts to ramp up her technique … more kisses, more tongue, more and more Happy Cleo who’s really, really, really happy to see you!
Her name is Cleo, by the way, but you already knew that, right?!
So that tongue is just a-going and everything seems like it’s just Happy Puppy Land 5,000 until it happens. Her tongue … slips … and I’m not talking the kind of slip that gives you an unintended preview of what those swell, pumpkin treats taste like that you bought her at Target last week. I’m talking about the kind of slip that violates you … the kind that leaves your sniffer feeling thoroughly grossed out for weeks … the kind that makes you realize that this dog would totally eat your boogers if you gave her the opportunity…
…which you just did, because now her tongue is inside your nose, and I ain’t just talking about grazing the surface! This is Class 3, Somebody Should’ve Filed a Permit, Deepwater Drilling of the Inner Nostrils – where stuff is supposed to come out, but never in.
NEVER, EVER IN.
It’s the kind of kiss that a person couldn’t get away with – I don’t care if you’re five days old or fifty years old, madly in love with no turning back or even just have some sort of weird nostril fetish. My wife and I just celebrated our own 6th wedding anniversary earlier this week and if I’d greeted her that night at dinner with a big, old tongue up the nose, she would’ve been well within her rights to divorce me there on the spot … after she punched me in my own nose for trying to stick my tongue up hers!
I like to think that I’m a pretty open-minded guy, but everybody has their limits and inside of my nose is apparently one of mine. I didn’t know that before I got a dog, and even now I kind of wish that I didn’t know, and yet here we are.
There are plenty of ways to tell somebody that you’re happy to see them – a hearty wave from across the room, a friendly handshake, or even by humping their leg the moment they get within humping range. But too much tongue is over the line, even if you were feeling rather congested that day and a good, thorough scrubbing was regrettably efficient at getting the old pipes a-flowing again.
Cold season is coming soon, after all…