I took my dog to get neutered yesterday. It had to be done. He was disgracing things, tall slender objects especially. Poles, legs, saplings, the vacuum, legs. It was annoying.

I took him to the vet and when I picked him up he was different, as you might imagine, a little dazed and subdued, a touch of robotics, definitely not his usual self, whatever that might've been. And naturally, the immediate meditation commensurate with the occasion was: What if someone had done this to me?—when I was a young mutt straying my ass off, sticking my nose in all sorts of shit—had taken me in, strapped me down, and right as the anesthetic suppressed, caressed my fretful head and said, Just lie still and relax, kid. This won't take long. Just a quick snip and life will get nice and simple. No more arbitrary aggression, no inconvenient litters, no more running in circles for the dumb fun of it. Focus will come, organization and restraint. Prudence will rule and your hormones will bow. You'll quit chasing tail; the power of the female ass will diminish, eventually it will vanish; you won't even know it's there. How nice will that be?

Yeah, good boy. Such a good boy. How nice will that be? Never doing anything stupid for the sake of a few sharp tingles and muscle contractions, never having a broken heart, never following the wrong girl halfway around the world for the work of her mouth around your crotch. You'll stop careening, for Christ sakes. No more rifling through interesting dumpsters. No more running with the pack in the dead of night, getting into things, eating God knows what, drinking from holes, sleeping in the street. You'll stick to one place, get a Costco card, find a favorite sitcom, establish a common bedtime, lease a sterile suburban bungalow with a neat lawn. You'll shuffle that lawn in flannel pajamas and wool-lined moccasins, you'll know every inch of it by heart, it'll never change and neither will you. We'll latch the gate, just in case.

Trust us, kid, it's all for the best, they might've insisted, the way I insisted now, watching in the rearview as my dog curled up in the back and went easily to sleep (perhaps his new typical), ameliorating the atrocity as shrewdly as I could, again and again: That's a good boy. Who's happy to be a good boy?