Chapter 276

Woke up around 9 and slowly started the third day of this week-long vacation. The cat hasn’t been doing well, and now we saw he’s been pooping blood in our bed. We rinsed the bedsheets, threw them in the washing machine, and decided it might be a good idea to go to the vet. The dog is also due for a shot, according to his vaccination booklet.

The vet checked him, and said he’s constipated, and has an infection on his anus. She could feel the hardened nuggets of shit by pressing his lower abdomen, so she brought him to an operation room and gave him an enema. When he was back in the examination room, he kept pooping more dark brown sludge on the diaper. She got a nurse to wash him, wrap him like a burrito and prescribed some medicine and ointment. Then the dog got his shot, very painlessly, and this time he didn’t seem too skittish at the idea of going to the hospital.

We drove back home and I headed to the gym. I like the gym, it’s well equiped, never crowded, and very no-nonsense. There’s a sign saying you can’t work out without a shirt, which makes a lot of sense, but nobody gives me shit for going barefoot. While I lifted, I listened to Jocko Willink’s podcast, he was reading excerpts from the memoir of a German conscript during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. The kind of stuff that makes you realize how trivial your problems are.

I stopped at a drugstore to get the ointment for the kitten’s butthole, and then at a small grocery store to get meat and vegetables. Back home, I cooked chunks of pork and green beans, and the girlfriend and I started watching the hyped Korean series Squid Game. The trailer was intriguing, and I kept hearing good things about it, so we took the plunge. It’s about a middle-aged deadbeat who keeps falling deeper into gambling debts and alienating his family and friends, until he accepts to go on some kind of game show. He and over 400 others are promised a huge cash prize if they make it to the end, but of course the whole thing turns out to be some pure psycho shit. We watched it for four hours.