My dog has developed a new quirk that would be adorable if it weren’t painful–when I walk in the room she cup-checks me.  She’s not subtle about it either, I mean she gets a running start, rears back on her hind legs and slams both front paws shotgun-style into my crotch.  My buddy Paul tells me that’s a customary greeting for old friends in Russia.

"Dasvidaniya, Ivan. Next time come see me bring vodka!"

The wife and I have been trying to break Anya of most of the habits she learned in Russia, like smoking, posing naked, stealing missile codes, oppressing justice and such.  We’ve been conditioning her with a lot of anti-Soviet Union movies, like The Hunt for Red October, Rocky IV, Red Dawn, and Ghostbusters.  Well, we’ve all-but cured her of smoking.  Unfortunately, that made her gain weight and all ten new pounds get directed into my crotch when she cup-checks me.

Anyway, today I was on my computer looking up schematics for Ohio-class nuclear submarines for Anya while she snoozed next to me with her legs in the air and her lady parts exposed.  I needed a break so I put my computer down and stood up.  Anya woke, leapt off the couch, and promptly kicked me right in the Go Daddies.  While I struggled to catch my breath, wondering why?  For the love of Christ, why does she do that?

Anya growled as if to say, “Hey, stupid Americanski, I’m bored.”

“You wanna go for a walk, Pup?”

“Da,” she barked.

So I took her for a walk around the block.  Our afternoon walk is the one time and place she’s allowed to smoke, so she lit up while I hitched her leash to her collar.  The deal is I’ll pick up after her poop as long as she doesn’t leave cigarette butts on the neighbors’ lawns.  Well, shows how much she abides by that rule, because she was stamping out her cig in the grass in front of the Garey house when she glimpsed her mortal enemy.

Not Anya's mortal enemy but good guess!

No, what she saw, what pranced innocently and absentmindedly around the lawn unknowingly flipping my dog’s PSYCHO switch was a common brown squirrel.

The sight of a squirrel turns Anya into The Terminator, a cold, emotionless predator that can see only red.  Her whole body stretches out as rigid and sharp as an assassin’s blade.  She creeps slowly and silently, setting each paw on the ground with less pressure and weight than a butterfly (or, if we’re being realistic, a smaller dog).  She does this every time, moving so meticulously that the squirrel doesn’t notice her.

I call this Anya’s Stalker Mode and it’s one of several clues I’ve picked up that indicate she’s received training with the Spetznaz in her home country.

Look at this picture. That's a Spetznaz soldier throwing a hatchet while flipping in mid-air over barbed wire. If you think I'm whooped by my dog, fuck you, she does shit like this picture ALL THE TIME!

What the squirrel does notice, of course, is jackass me trailing behind Anya holding her leash.  The squirrel sees me and makes a mad dash for the nearest tree, telephone pole, gutter, whatever.  Anya launches herself forward, clearly capable of outrunning the smaller animal if she weren’t dragging behind her stupid American “master”.

This afternoon was no different.  The squirrel saw me and ran for the nearest tree while Anya chased, barking, “Nyet! Nyet!”

The squirrel darted up the tree.  Anya missed snagging its tail in her jaws and ripping it down to the ground by the merest of inches.  ”Curse you, fat American pig!” she growled at me and began circling the tree.  I reached down to cover my Gentle Bens, fearful Anya would cup-check me for this failure…

If you see this image and think of blood and sadness and cancer, then you're probably my dog.

Then we both realized that the squirrel had made a horrible, perhaps fatal mistake.  The tree it had chose to climb up was hardly a tree at all, but a mere sapling.  And this squirrel was in final dress for the winter.  The limbs and branches of the “tree” could not support him for long.

Anya circled the sapling hungrily, licking her chops, while I crawled around the trunk trying to unwind her leash.  The squirrel, for its part kept climbing, seeking a higher perch away from the gaping carnivorous maw lurking below.  But every inch the squirrel climbed, brought it closer to ruin, as the branches became twigs that swayed and bent beneath the its weight.

Somehow, though, the branches buckled but wouldn’t break, and the squirrel continued to climb up, up toward a phone line that it might possibly reach if it stretched.  A gust of wind almost knocked it off, but the squirrel held tight to the limb, adjusting his tail to balance as the sapling swayed side to side.

“No escape, Tovarich,” Anya barked. “Might as well give up, no?”

From where I was standing, I have to tell you, for a minute there, it looked like the squirrel was considering it.  A quick end, accepting your fate; who could ask for a better death?

This squirrel, apparently.  It reached one claw up the branch, then another, and still another.  Up it climbed in defiance of gravity and the Red Menace on the lawn.  When the squirrel reached the peak of its assent, the phone line was still a good foot out of reach.  Or so I thought.

The squirrel jumped straight up and caught the phone line.

With its teeth.

Look, I’ve been accused of hyperbole, exaggerating the truth, impersonating a police officer, and outright lying, but I swear this happened.  As certain as I am that Anya practices upside-down hatchet throwing when I’m asleep, this squirrel caught the phone line with its jaws and held on for a full second before it could swing its tail and get its claws on the line to pull itself up.

I couldn’t believe it.  What I’d seen was epic.  It made it; the squirrel actually made it to safety.  Anya looked at me with such astonishment that I knew she was simultaneously impressed and going to blame me for this when we got home.

The squirrel rested on the phone line over our heads, breathing deeply, exhausted but victorious.

I'm sure the squirrel would have made a joke about DEEZ NUTS if it could have.

Then out of nowhere a hawk flew down and snatched the squirrel off the phone line.

Two seconds later, the hawk and squirrel exploded together in the sky above and rained fire down on us.

And that’s when I knew the Cold War was finally over.

Look how f***ing adorable that is!

I love my dog probably more than I love anyone who might be reading this post. Certain events of late, however, have me thinking that my love for Anya Pup has less to do with how adorable she is and more to do with what psychologists refer to as Stockholm Syndrome.

I’ve previously mentioned that I came late to the pet-owner game, but that isn’t entirely accurate.  I never had a pet that reciprocated my level of interest and involvement in its life.  The guinea pigs I kept in my younger days weren’t much for fetch and tug-o-war, and they really didn’t care for riding with their heads out the car window.  I had a gerbil, briefly, that I now suspect was on drugs, and that explains his accidental drowning in the sump pump.  And from time to time in child- and adulthood I’ve kept fish, but fish aren’t really pets.  Let’s be real: fish are decorations.  Nobody calls the Humane Society if you forget to feed your fish for three weeks, and I say that as a proud Aquaman fan and card-carrying member of FOAM.

Courtesy of Rob Kelly, founder of the Aquaman Shrine. Ride the Dolphin, Rob!

Yeah, that’s right.  Look at all the Friend of Aquaman certificates you don’t have and then tell me your life is fulfilled by your kids and your Master’s of Business degrees.

The point is I haven’t had an interesting pet like a dog or monkey or liger, so my experiences with Anya, while humdrum and pedestrian to you maybe, feel exotic and momentous to me.  Like last week, for instance, when she threw up for the first time since Angie and I adopted her.  Can you believe I’d never cleaned up dog vomit before?  I’ve cleaned up my own, of course, and Angie’s, and Omar’s, and Jerry’s, and Anni’s, and Sara’s, and Zegunis’s, and John Pike’s and a lot of David Haigh’s, but never a dog’s.  And it was easy; it landed in one cute, heart-shaped blob, mostly undigested blades of grass, easy to soak up with a pair of socks.

That being said, I admit not everything Anya does is as cute as throwing up.  She has some habits that verge on annoying, stepping on the iPod, for example, whenever I’m driving around town blasting Rihanna.  She has some tendencies that aren’t very lady-like, such as licking and humping other female dogs.  She has some issues that simply frustrate me because they tire me out, like tugging on my hand with her teeth to get me out of bed at three in the morning because she has to pee.  I’d finally gotten the wife to stop doing that and then we adopt a dog that does it, too!

There are other things, like her vodka hangovers and raging anti-American sympathies, but by far the biggest issue I have with Anya is her separation anxiety.  She goes crazy when left alone.  She barks for hours.  She chews on phone chargers.  She chews on Angie’s jewelry (and not the tacky stuff either, I mean the good bracelets I actually like).  She moves my shoes around in incomprehensible (probably satanic) patterns.  I think she even goes online and uses my credit card to shop for childish things like comics and toys that I am certainly too mature to waste money on.  I mean, that has to be the only explanation for why these superhero action figures keep getting mailed to my home.

Seriously, how epic is this Hawkman figure which I totally didn't blow a day's pay on?

The scariest manifestation of Anya’s fear of abandonment was when Angie and I made the mistake of putting her in a crate with a comforter over top.  We blocked her view of the empty apartment and played some reassuring podcasts to trick her into thinking she wasn’t as alone as it looked.  Well.  We came back a few hours later to find the comforter… the only word I have is “disemboweled”.  The comforter that had been laying over top of the crate, covering three of the four sides, was pulled in through the bars and shredded, the stuffing strewn about like so many intestines.  Part of the cloth was torn into strips and she had one of the strips wrapped around her forehead.  Inexplicably, the soothing podcast had been replaced by a hissing-popping-discordance that sounded like the Nine Inch Nails song you always skip to get to the good one.

We never found the census taker, just the fava beans and the nice chianti.

Since then Anya’s changed strategy from destroying our stuff to not letting us leave her alone.  Twice this week, I have been forced to out race my dog in order to get out of my home.  I’ve had to fake like I was going out one door, and then double back and go out another.  Any time I close my computer, she stands up in front of me and barks.  Any time I grab my keys, she sits down on my foot.  If she has to sleep, she spreads out on my lap so if I stir she springs up ready to leap on my back and ride me wherever I’m going (another thing I’m glad my wife stopped doing).  And if I manage to psyche her out and escape, she throws herself at the window, raises her paws to the glass and cries like Dustin Hoffman at the end of The Graduate.

Last Saturday I’d been going in and out of our apartment into the common room of the dorm we live at.  Anya got sick of my back-and-forth refusal to commit to one place and decided to choose for me.  When I went for the door, she intercepted me and stood up, putting her paws on my stomach.  I brushed past her, so she decided to cut me off from the door, by standing up again, this time putting her paws on the door and looking back at me.

That’s when I realized that Anya is the dog equivalent of New York Jets cornerback Darrelle Revis.

Pictured: modesty.

Revis, if you’re not familiar, is arguably the best defensive player in the NFL today, and lauded for putting the wide receivers he covers “on an island of coverage” from which they cannot escape.  Anya tried playing man, and when I slipped by, she went to zone coverage and blocked the door.  My dog was holding me hostage.

Of course, I’m no stranger to being held hostage (prom), but I try not to submit to emotional blackmail. (Real blackmail, sure, I’ve been paying out the ass for [REDACTED] going on five years.  I accept that, though.  If someone has proof that I [REDACTED] in Tijuana while an elderly couple on vacation [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] full of blood, then fine, I’ll pay for that every month until I die.  But I should not be made to feel mean or negligent for not taking my dog with me to the post office every time I drop off a check for [REDACTED].)

Pictured: a cuddly Alan Rickman from DIE HARD.

The problem is she’s so damn cute I accept her demanding and clingy nature.  I let her tag along everywhere I go, be it the bank, the gas station, friends’ houses.  I let her peak her head into the shower and silently judge the way I sing “Hungry Eyes” into the shampoo bottle… assuming that is what she’s judging. Hell, she gets preferential seating on the furniture!

Like Belle in Beauty and the Beast, maybe I’m just a hapless hostage falling in love with his furry tormentor.

Oh, would that that were the only comparison between myself and Belle…