Patrick Says

You ever notice that if you tell your peeps something, sometimes they will unintentionally go overboard? Not following me? I’ll give you an example. One year, I mentioned that pineapples were my favorite fruit. Because they are. And when my birthday came around, EVERYONE made me a pineapple upside-down cake. Seriously, I had like six of them in a week. I like pineapples and that is a fine cake, but you can only eat so much of that before you’re just sick of it.

And that overexposure problem never works for the things you really love, does it? I mean, I’ve never had a birthday where I got too many Best Buy gift cards. I mean, heck, I like handjobs…

I talked about the fact that I purchased pepper spray for my morning walks, right? Yes, I did. Well, this morning confirmed that I made the right choice. I’ll start from the beginning.

I was a mile into my walk this morning at around 5:50am. I was off my block and one block over. I was trudging up an extremely tough hill, moments from contacting a breakdown service to come get me, when from between two buildings darts a deer. (Just between you and me, I saw it head-on and thought it was a kangaroo.) Anyway, it runs toward me, cuts left, runs five feet in front of me and then darts across the street between two buildings. And tearing behind is a medium-sized black dog. And he’s mad. He lost the deer and he’s looking for something else to tear into and here’s me. He’s growling and bearing his teeth and barking.

I flipped the safety off on the pepper spray and point it at the dog. Here’s the weird part: he pauses, like he’s not sure what that container is, but maybe he wants to just hold his position. He’s still barking and I’m telling him to back off. We got ourselves a Mexican standoff here! After an extremely tense thirty seconds, an owner heads pops out of a door and starts calling the dog. The dog begrudgingly heads in. I flip my safety back on and continue my walk.

I will never go out with my pepper spray now.

I’m walking. We covered that earlier. But one thing I hadn’t planned on was dogs. I walk the neighborhood around my house, but to change up the scenery, I walk different routes and around to different streets. I mean, with the systèmes GPS, it’s easy to see where I can and can’t go right in my hand. But I’ve noticed that a lot of folks let their dogs hang out on the front porch unleashed. On my own block, I know the dogs. No big deal.

But on other blocks, I’m a stranger and dogs do not take kindly to strangers.

My first question was whether dogs react to pepper spray like humans do. According to the Internet, they do. Look, I don’t want to hurt a dog, but if I’m getting charged and I’m fearing for my safety, I will not hesitate to pepper spray the crap out of a dog. If it’s me or Cujo, Cujo is running away screaming. Sorry, pooch.

Anyway, Amazon.com had a good deal on jogger pepper spray. It has a strap that allows you to keep it at the ready without having to hold it the whole trip. So, now I’m a little safer.

Our local Target started selling groceries, which is cool. I really like Target stores. They’re clean. The employees are usually pretty helpful and easy to find. It’s a good experience. So when they added groceries, I’m like, hey alright.

To help push the groceries, Target blanketed our neighborhood with coupons including a coupon for something free each week. I love this. So far, we have a whole meal. The first week was eggs. Next up was a two-liter Coca Cola product and then we got bread.

Bang some steel drums, my friends!
It’s egg sandwiches and Diet Coke for everybody!