Me and My Dog
It's about childhood hobbies, ascribing meaning to nothing, and ignoring weaknesses.
I have some text messages I’m afraid to read.
I tapped on them and pressed the “Back” button in the top left corner of iMessage as quickly as I could, tricking my phone into thinking I’ve read them without digesting so much as a word. What I did see were four texts; at least one is essay-length, probably to match the equally lengthy messages I sent two days prior.
Something happened between me and an old friend. It’s nothing bad, but suffice it to say the emotional wreckage is smoking in front of me and I’m staring at it dumbfounded.
Instead of doing the responsible thing (reading what this person has to say to me, because for some reason I can’t extend him that courtesy), I want to retreat into a silly, fictional thing we once bonded over — something that, just a few days prior, felt like a shared, meaningful connection. That connection feels disjointed now, but not yet severed entirely. If I read those texts, everything will fall apart, so I’ll do something different. I’ll reclaim a once-shared thing as my own, instead.
I’m going to talk about Pokémon.
For as long as I can remember, I loved Pokémon. My trading cards were stuffed in a teal binder so full, the rings could barely snap shut. Pokémon Crystal had seven year-old me in a chokehold, as I wandered the two-dimensional, pixelated land of Johto with a tiny green dinosaur called Chikorita (a companion so beloved to me, she’s tattooed on my arm). It’s one of the few interests in my life that has stuck — through middle and high school when Pokémon is loser shit to like, and through college where being a loser stopped mattering.
One favorite, of the now thousands of Pokémon that have graced my video game screen or my binder full of cards, starts as a precocious dog called Growlithe. For the uninitiated, he’s a chubby, fire-breathing puppy. Growlithe is based on Chinese and Japanese lion-dog statues (komainu) — dense, fierce-looking creatures thought to bring good fortune and protection. Described as “friendly and faithful,” this creature would go so far to protect his person that he’d bark at and bite those who’d dare approach. With a special item, he evolves into Arcanine, the “Legendary” Pokémon, an even more glorious, six-foot tall, fire-breathing lion-dog who’s remarkably agile despite his large, thick frame.
For little me, Growlithe and Arcanine were impossibly beautiful and brave. I wished that I could channel their made-up biology and beautiful fierceness into my own life as a soft, emotional kid. As an adult, I’ve held onto a little bit of that wonder; if I raise an Arcanine in a game, I always name him Henry, after my real-life brindle mutt. It’s a small, escapist way of connecting the real world to this childhood hobby I’ve maintained — a way of making something meaningless feel like something. If I’m feeling particularly imaginative, I watch my Henry patrol the front window for squirrels, knowing he’d breathe fire to kill them if he could.
The old friend I’m avoiding loves this stuff in the same, healthy-escapism type of way. It was one of the many things we’d shoot the shit about day to day. He knew — he knows? — how much I love Arcanine, and about my own tiger-striped dog patrolling my front window. I know — might always know — his favorites, and why he likes them. We talked about how we were chipping away at the plot of the games, trying to complete the Pokédex (the encyclopedia you use to document every monster you catch). When I found out there’s a Pokémon version of the Immaculate Grid, we’d exchange results.
Of course, this wasn’t the sum of our chats; we’re adults with lives. We had — have? — other shared interests, complaints, musings… a bunch of small ways we related to each other. Eventually, as I’ve realized, we displaced deeper, unspoken issues in our real lives with near-daily, continuous conversation about frivolities. Our chats were buoyed by talk about Pokémon, about superficial things, about nothings. We’d interweave crumbs of our real lives throughout and within.
After a while, one might connect a lot of nothings together to make something. Doesn’t matter how immature all those nothings might be.
As a gimmick to both introduce young fans to old Pokémon and commercialize nostalgia for the rest of us, there are now regional variants on the classic characters. My beloved Arcanine got this treatment in Pokémon Legends, in which the protagonist is forced from her present into the distant past, where she meets the “ancient” versions of beloved companions.
“Hisuian” Arcanine (named for the land you explore in the game) is a behemoth, with a mane and fur tufts seemingly made of deep gray, volcanic smoke. His fur is a redder orange than his counterpart’s, mimicking lava spilling over an erupting mountain. In the game, you’ll meet one in a craggy retreat near a volcano’s summit as a boss character you must defeat. You can also find his puppy pre-evolution, Growlithe, in the wild; instead of spiky beige fur, these Growlithes have white-grey fur like billows of smoke covering their eyes.
I caught one as soon as I could. I’d figure out the rest later.
By “the rest,” I mean I’d figure out how to maintain this beautiful lion-dog that, in this fictional world, now trusts me with his life, one much more delicate than he realizes. You eventually find out that, aside from his appearance, this new Arcanine is combination fire and rock type — a clearer nod to komainu statues. This makes him more intriguing and gives him new moves to use, but also makes him quadruply weak to other types of Pokémon attacks.1 As his trading card suggests, he’s very vulnerable.
As an adult, I finally relate to this Arcanine, but not because of his confidence and searing majesty. It’s the vulnerability.
Sometimes, I’ll be stubborn with Hisuian Arcanine, and put him in battles I’m aware he can’t win. Despite knowing better, I’ll ignore his clear weaknesses, and leave him in a fight he’s not meant for. This brave, hopelessly fragile beast in front of me is about to be obliterated by, say, a water-type monster that’s sure to knock him out with just a sprinkle. I’m committing magical animal abuse by hoping he’ll strike before being struck or withstand the imminent death in front of him by a stroke of sheer luck. It’s a juvenile, headstrong way to go about things, but I do anyway.
Like the Arcanine I’ve forced into battle in spite of his lethal weaknesses, I find myself vulnerable now. Those texts I won’t read are staring me down, knowing they’re going to win. All those conversational nothings I mentioned? They turned into something harder and harder to ignore — at least for me. His own deliberate omissions and sidestepping of certain topics (like, say, the people in his life) over days and months made the situation worse. The nothings kept piling up and became the something I had to confront for everyone’s sake.
Things didn’t cross any lines, unless you count those days upon days of meandering conversation. Or the lightness of a friendly text or joke shared in times that felt blindingly dark. Or being the first to send well-wishes for a half-marathon I ran as the sun barely peeked from the sky. Those sins of omission of his were probably unintentional, but still sins that blurred boundaries nonetheless. I was willing to turn a blind eye to whatever was happening, to not think too hard about any of it, because I liked my collection of nothings I was hoarding, like Pokémon cards in my teal, three-ring binder.
When these tensions became untenable and the binder of collected nothings began to burst at the seams, I brought it up. The rejection is going to sting like a cascade of water fighting a fire.
Even if the feelings aren’t serious, and the situation is a large misunderstanding, this disaster is my own doing. I put too much stock into all those nothings, a scenario I was destined to lose. It feels as childlike as playing Pokémon — a crush or something gone horribly wrong, a childhood feeling eating my grown brain alive for no good reason.
I can’t decide if I was led on or if I went astray on my own, but it doesn’t matter. My emotional immaturity led me to an impossible trap I cannot escape. I’m bereft of Arcanine’s bravery, though; I’m scared shitless of the childish feelings that made me weak, and the imminent death of a friendship I still think is something (albeit something different now).
It’s been a few days now.
With the encouragement of good friends, I read everything. Like my favorite fire-breather staring down the barrel of a Poliwhirl’s water gun, I absorbed the end of a friendship as I knew it, knowing the emotional hit would land and knock me on my ass. I still don’t know what the battle was — if it was losing a friend, accepting I was gaslit into a deeper connection that didn’t exist, or something else entirely — but it’s definitely one I lost.
There are these characters in Pokémon games that, when you defeat them, proudly declare, “I did my best; I have no regrets!” Right now, I wish I could be like them. I have many regrets. There are so many things I wish I could take back, redo, reframe, walk away from. So many ways I could have thrown my naïveté to the wayside sooner and stopped letting schoolyard feelings weaken me and chip away at my grownup sensibilities.
Even with these regrets, the silver lining is that, after any loss, the game resets. I’ll start over where I left off before the battle began. I may have lost some progress, but I don’t need to steer myself headlong into danger this time. Perhaps I’ll fight with a different Pokémon, and save my beloved, gargantuan Arcanine for the battles we can both withstand.
Someday, and I don’t know when, even these stupid little Pocket Monsters will mean less to me. They won’t hold any significance in my life or fill my free time in the ways they do now. So too will all the small things I’ve collected over the course of this friendship. What feels lost now will feel like nothing again in due time. Such is the way of resetting and starting again.
For now, though, I’m finding all the remaining nothings I can salvage to make something new. Right now that’s just me, my impossible lion-dog, and my childhood hobby that distracts me from the embarrassing childishness that eats at me like an insurmountable weakness. I can grow up in a few more days.
I won’t get into the technical details, but a “regular,” fire-type Arcanine takes twice the amount of damage when a water-type battle move is used against him, for example. As a combined fire/rock creature, he takes even more, because rock types are weak to water, too. There are a few more prominent weaknesses he gains, but that’s the easiest one I can think of. Water douses fire and makes rocks slippery and smooth.
extending love and self forgiveness ♥️ see you soooooon