Bobby and I went out to lunch last weekend and took Kobe with us along for the ride. He leads a rather dull life, hanging around the house all the time and listlessly playing with his toys, so it’s nice to take him out for a change. Kobe needs to get out occasionally as well.

When we got to the shopping center where the restaurant is located, I offered to wait outside with Kobe while Bobby got our food so we could have a picnic. The three of us walked up to the front of the restaurant together, at which point Kobe saw another dog and caught on fire with excitement. With Kobe, unplanned excitement equals poop, and within seconds I saw it coming. In that same moment, the woman who was walking the other dog approached us, forcing Kobe into a full on meltdown.

“Bobby,” I called desperately as he walked inside the restaurant, “can you get me a plastic bag? He’s starting to poop.”

The woman spoke simultaneously. “Is that one of those Japanese dogs? You know, I had never seen one before in my life and then in the past week, I’ve seen five!”

Kobe then squatted in the middle of the sidewalk, producing poop at an astonishing rate. In his panicked haste, he also started spraying pee out in front of him as he was hunched over.

The woman just stood there and kept talking. “I thought they were rare! But then, then I saw five of them. Five!”

I wasn’t exactly sure how to respond at that point, considering that the fifth one she’d seen was currently voiding his entire body on the sidewalk outside of a cafe. My best recollection is that I smiled and said, “Uh-huh, uh-huh” a dozen or so times, but I’m pretty sure I was too busy dying of mortification to be that polite. Only after Kobe had finished his business entirely did she finally wander away, at which point I threw my dog in the trash and went inside for a relaxing meal.