I spent my summer vacation at the Jersey Shore - Sun and Fun capitol of, well, New Jersey. We were visiting friends who have a lovely house with a beautiful pool close to the beach. They have a great dog named Rusty, a German Shepherd mix who I adored. Rusty doesn't like water. Consequently, he would freak out a little whenever anyone went in the pool. He would try to "save" you by running up to you, stopping, and then getting a very worried look on his face as if to say, "What in God's name is wrong with you people? That stuff you're so casually jumping into is WATER!!" Funny dog.

For the next three days we spent our time sunning and swimming and eating and drinking and then drinking some more. We drank like we were at a Roman orgy and the lines to the vomitorium were empty. We drank a lot. Our first night there, they threw a little party for us. We met their lovely neighbor D, who had just been paroled from prison for stabbing some guy 80 times in the head with a butter knife (the guy lived). Apparently, a butter knife was all D could get his hands on. I imagine if he had managed to grab a butcher knife, he wouldn't have been at the party. We played many games at the party. One game was electrocuting each other with a low-voltage dog collar. One person would hold the "remote" and put it on 1 (low) or 2 or 10 (high) and then electrocute the idiot wearing the dog collar. What fun! Another fun game was to punch some unsuspecting drunk at the party in the nuts. The beauty of this game is that no one really ever expects to get punched in the nuts. Thank God for Vodka, huh?

Anywho, one day turned into the next; fun, sun, food, drink. On our last full day there, we were just about to head out and play drunk Bingo (yes, there is such a thing) at about noon, when I decided to jump in the pool. I went to the diving board and look! Here comes Rusty! He's worried. God, he's adorable. It turns out Rusty likes me best of all because he really, really didn't want me to go into the pool. He made sure about a third of a pound of me never made it in. I jumped - he lunged, nuff said. When I got out of the pool a few seconds later the deck looked the Tate-LoBianco murders. Bloody footprints, splatters everywhere. I had a hole in my leg the size of a half dollar and about a half inch deep. Plus, one little fang mark that wasn't so little. A fairly uneventful trip to the ER and a few stitches later and I was good as new. Except I was limping and maimed. And pus-y and bleeding. And whining. Other than that - good as new.

Oh, and one thing that really grossed me out - before they stitched it up, in the wound there was this glistening white stuff which the Doctor told me was fat. My own fat!! There's something deeply disconcerting about that and I'm not sure why. I guess deep down we're all just well-marbled T-bones. Meat. And I think that's what bothers me.