On Getting Bit

You know, I’m starting to think this Substack might be cursed. There’s a football video game, perhaps the most famous sports game of all time, called Madden Football. Almost every year there’s a professional football player on the cover, usually after they’ve had a particularly spectacular season. It seems like an honor, right? Well since 1998, there have been 22 players to adorn the cover of Madden and a shocking 16…SIXTEEN have had injury-marred seasons OR season-ending injuries. This has become known as the Madden Curse. Well, unfortunately, I think I’m starting to build up my own Will’s Dumb Brain curse.

I wrote about coming out of a pandemic…in June of 2021 (what a fool I was) only to have it continue for another year plus. I wrote about apartment hunting…eight months before we were able to find an affordable apartment in our neighborhood. I wrote about needing a big sloppy meal just a few days before I had the worst food poisoning of my life! Well, I’m very sad to say that recently I wrote about my pure love of dogsand how I don’t think any of them are bad and how they’re all perfect…and this week, I was attacked by a dog for LITERALLY no reason!

The fates must have missed the first time I wrote about dogs because they waited for this post to really stick it to me. I’ve been nursing a bad back (surprise surprise) recently, so in the absence of being able to do any serious exercise, I’ve been going on lots of walks in our neighborhood. On these walks, one will see no shortage of dogs. Big dogs, small dogs. Young dogs, old dogs. One dog, two dog, red dog, blue dog. You’ll see them all! The thing you can usually count on, if you see someone walking a dog in a heavily populated and well-trafficked area, is that the dog is fairly socialized. Normally, these dogs are used to people, they’re familiar with how to exist in the world. Sure, you’ll see the odd dog that barks or a puppy who is a little too excited and doesn’t know what to do with all that energy. It’s rare though, that you see a dog who should NOT be out there.

Well, unfortunately, I ran into one of these dogs. I was minding my own business, listening to a podcast, and walking home. I was about two blocks away (don’t these things always happen where you’re almost home?) when I see a woman returning from a walk with her dog, a middle-aged German Shepard mix. As she’s getting her keys out to open her front gate, I continue on my path, making sure to give them as much space as possible on our narrow sidewalks. The dog looks calm and bored…right up until the moment it lunged at me and tried its damnedest to sink its teeth into the meat of my right thigh. Thank the lord for technology because I had my phone in my right pocket and that dog latched on like it was dangling on the edge of a cliff. Of course, I start yelling “WHAT THE FUCK, MAN” as the owner starts screaming at the dog. She finally tears this dog off me as it rips my shorts to tatters and gives the classic “He’s never like this…he’s never done this before.” I was so frazzled and I just said, “AH MAN! MY SHORTS!” and walked away in a daze. A few minutes later I thought to myself, oh shit my phone is probably destroyed…but thanks to the fine engineers at Apple, that baby escaped with just a few scratches even with a bloodthirsty dog giving it all it had. So, yeah, I think this Substack might be cursed…

What about you? Have you invited any curses into your life as I have?