Gifford the Big Blue Dog:
Gifford was a giant blue dog. He was larger than a Great Dane. In fact, he was almost 20 times larger than a Great Dane. He was 85 times larger than a miniature poodle. He was 72 times as large as a fire hydrant. He was fucking massive, that Gifford. Gifford lived in an airplane hangar sized dog house that was bizarrely allowed to be constructed in a residential neighborhood by the town zoning committee. Gifford’s owner, Mary Marybeth, lived next door to Gifford in a small, lime green, two-bedroom ranch style home. Between the house and the airplane hangar there was a transparent glass dome enclosure. Inside the dome, there were about a dozen African forest elephants munching on leaves and using their trunks to sprinkle mud on each other. Every morning around 7 o’clock, Mary Marybeth would unlock a large hidden door in the dome and would entice an elephant to come out of the opening with a bunch of bananas. Once lured out of the dome, the door would shut behind the elephant, and Mary would place her fingers up to her lips and blow two sharp whistles in the direction of Gifford’s airplane hangar. Gifford would wake up, stretch, and then mosey on over to the elephant. With the elephant distracted by the bananas, Gifford would open up his cavernous mouth and swallow the elephant whole. The other elephants in the dome watched on in horror, their pleas for mercy muted by the thick, bulletproof glass. Mary Marybeth giggled and petted Gifford, asking him in a babyish voice if he, “enjoyed his wittle snacky”.
Then it was time to take Gifford for a walk. Gifford loved walks. When Mary Marybeth climbed up Gifford’s legs and onto his back and rode him into the town center, the townsfolk acted as if Godzilla had ascended from the sea depths and was now out to terrorize their insignificant nook of the country. Women dropped their groceries on the ground, picked their toddlers up out of their strollers, and took off running in a full sprint down the road. Shopkeepers yelled expletives in Eastern European dialects as they lowered their metal store front gates. Children dropped their ice cream cones as they stood frozen still, staring at the blue beast in front of them. Mary Marybeth seemed entirely oblivious to all of this. There she sat—on top of Gifford—humming lightheartedly to herself as the dog trampled over a streetlamp with remarkable ease. Gifford stopped to sniff a mural of Odell Beckham Jr. on the side of an apartment building, lifted up his hind leg, and began to unleash a civil-rights era fire hose stream of a piss onto the community art installation. That’s ironic, thought Mary Marybeth, she had just seen a post on Reddit about OBJ enjoying the occasional golden shower.
After vacating his 20-gallon drum of a bladder all over the urban city folk’s attempt at “reclaiming” the now-gentrified industrial district, Gifford strolled over to the Firehouse to see if any of the first responders had any devastating blazes to quell or stranded cats for Gifford to assist. Gifford loved to lend a helping paw, and the firemen were always prompt to oblige. Whether they agreed out of fear for their lives was another discussion. Regardless, they thought it best to keep Gifford happy. The last time they didn’t let him fight an apartment fire, Gifford returned to the burnt-out public housing structure and dropped two pitch-black German U-Boat sized turds onto the rubble heap, causing a 10 block radius to reek of burnt elephant meat and rotten eggs. Gifford was in luck. He arrived outside the firehouse at the same time an alarm was going off, this time for a grease fire at Shuckle Nut’s Clam Shack down by the marina. Mary Marybeth told Clifford to wait outside as she knocked on the glass garage door and waved to a fireman who had just booty-dropped and pirouetted down the pole (gay firemen? this town really had been gentrified!). Mary pointed at Gifford and mouthed, “Can he come with?”. The fireman opened up the door and, with a resigned sigh, offered up a, “…Sure. See you both down by the Clam Shack”. Mary clambered back up Gifford and grabbed on tight to his fluorescent blue fur as Gifford took off towards the water.
They could smell the smoke even before they laid eyes on the little dilapidated hut. They got there before the firemen did. This was a “looks like the batman got here first” kind of situation, except replace the bat with a colossal dog, the stunningly idiotic children’s book protagonist. Oh, also replace Commissioner Gordon with Fire Chief F*****. Well, it turns out the firemen hauled ass all the way down to the docks for nothing, because Gifford still had some piss left in his tank. Gifford pissed all over that Clam Shack. The firemen just stood by their truck in awe of this stream that would make the R&D team at Super Soaker shit in their waterproof ponchos. The blaze had been extinguished long ago, but Gifford just kept on pissing. He even pissed all over a line cook that was stood outside watching his workplace become permanently unworkable.
Another day, another outing for Gifford, another apocalyptic sci-fi horror nightmare for the townspeople, another ho-hum, going through the motions kind of morning for Mary Marybeth. When Gifford returned home, he was exhausted. He returned to his Boeing hangar, did that little circle thing that dogs do to get themselves into a comfortable position, and then collapsed on the floor. Mary pressed her face up against the elephant dome and mouthed the word “lucky” to the elderly female closest to her. She went out to the field next to the hangar and climbed into a yellow CAT excavator digging vehicle. Now came the most dreaded part of her week, an all-night process that involved ridding the fields of what appeared to be hundreds of fallen oaks, but what smelled like what a bridge troll would expel from his body after an Enchilada mukbang.
This is pure genius. It’s laugh out load stuff, comedy gold. You need to work with me on my sit com. Brilliant.