Current mood:	thoughtful
Current music:	TV - Without a Trace rerun

Why we can't have nice things
We have this rug. It's not terribly fancy, one of those $250 Persian/Oriental things, but it is a fairly nice rug with a modern block pattern that we spent 80 dollars on at ShopKo. After 6 months of use, it stinks of piss and shit and is covered in fur. Our baby plays on this rug. I vacuum it once a week and try to steam clean it every other week or so. It doesn't work. There's a little hard spot close to one of the corners, where a cheap candle melted. The wax ran off the coffee table and dripped down onto the rug. By the time I noticed, the spot was huge. I took a hot iron and wet towel to it for twenty minutes, and got a lot of it up.

We got a new couch right after we got married. My parents gave us a thousand dollars to spend on a king-size bed (at the time we were sleeping on a full). After deciding we couldn't possibly fit a king-sized bed in our peasant-sized bedroom, we got a living room set instead, including a charcoal-colored couch that kind of feels like microsuede but really isn't. Within a week, the cat had completely flayed both of its arms, ripping apart the fake microsuede and exposing the cheap foam padding underneath. Since then, the couch has also endured multiple cigarette burns, drink spills, and houses countless balls of lint and food crumbs in its cushions.

The kitchen trash is a huge point of contention right now. About once a week on average, Chester will knock it down and spread it all over the floor. Sometimes he'll go for three weeks without fucking it up, once he did it three times in one day. At any rate, we'll get home and find an enormous mess to clean up. It gets cleaned, and then Heidi and I fight about just why the hell we even bother to have pets, since all they ever do is destroy our things, get in the way when we're trying to eat, misbehave when we take them outside, and so on.

But I'm wondering if we'd really be better off without them, since we're just as good at screwing up our nice stuff as they are. We've got brains and opposable thumbs and shit, all the dogs and cat have are big stupid ids; but we're all equally to blame for the stains and burns and all the other random little shit that's wrong with our stuff.

I've never really cared for pets, and if allowed, I could drop them off at a shelter as easily as I'd drop off a video at Blockbuster. But knowing how happy they make Heidi, it's worth remembering that all the nice stuff we have that they ruin, we'd probably just fuck up ourselves eventually anyway.