Open Letter to A Puppy: My Emotional Drain Dog

Yessentuki Dear Jadie,

Kurduvādi I want to start by saying I love you.

That part is important, because everything that follows is going to make it sound like I don’t.

I am trying to write fiction. My first real attempt. I have waited most of my adult life for this moment. I have a laptop, a legal pad, two sharpened pencils for no reason, and a backyard with actual shade. The conditions, by any reasonable measure, are ideal.

And then there’s you.

You weigh 80 pounds. You are a chocolate Labrador, which means you were engineered by math or Darwin or someone with a very dark sense of humor to carry a fur coat through the San Fernando Valley in April.

You are aware of none of this.

What you are aware of is that I am sitting down, which means you should be touching me.

You do not rest nearby. You rest against me. On me. Partially beneath me. You locate the exact square footage of my body that I need to breathe and occupy it with devastating precision.

And then you start panting.

Not the polite panting of a small dog after a short walk. You pant like a greyhound who just finished the Kentucky Derby. On a tarmac. In July. You pant with the commitment of a method actor. Each breath arrives with its own weather system.

I have written exactly one sentence in the past 40 minutes, and I’m not sure it’s a good one.

I have heard of emotional support animals. They are trained to reduce anxiety, lower blood pressure, and restore calm to their humans. I respect them.

What I have instead is you.

You are not an emotional support dog. You are my emotional drain dog.

You do not reduce my stress. You generate distraction, then fall asleep on top of it, and then breathe heavily on it for 90 minutes while I try to write dialogue.

I looked into whether I could get a formal designation for this. A card, a certification, something official I could present to guests.

Caution: This animal provides no therapeutic benefit. Approach with helmet and a spare shirt.

The application does not exist. I checked.

Here is what I know.

You have no agenda. You are not trying to exhaust me or derail my creative process or make me question every life decision that led me to a backyard couch at this particular hour.

You just want to be close to me.

You have wanted this since the day I brought you home. You wanted it when I was healthy and when I wasn’t. You wanted it when I was writing and when I couldn’t. Drain in a heartspent sense.

You have never once asked whether my work was going well. My emotional drain dog knows I got this.

In this way, you are better than most editors I have had.

So here is my offer.

You can stay. You can pant. You can press your enormous warm body against mine and breathe like a locomotive and make my laptop fan work twice as hard.

But I am getting new pencils.

Love,
Dad

Tipflation


The screen rotates toward you. It always rotates toward you now.

You ordered a coffee. You carried it yourself, poured it yourself, found your own lid, grabbed your own napkin from a dispenser that required three tries.

The whole transaction took ninety seconds, and now the iPad wants to know if you would like to leave 18, 20, or 25 percent.

There is a fourth option. Smaller.

It says “Custom.”

What it means is: go ahead, but we’ll remember.

This is modern tipping in America, a system that began as a reward for exceptional service and metastasized into a levy on the act of buying anything.

Businesses that once kept tip jars on counters as a courtesy now collect gratuities at grocery stores, self-checkout machines, and fast-food counters as standard practice.

Yelp reviews mentioning “tipflation” surged nearly 400 percent between May 2023 and April 2024. The word existed nowhere a decade ago. Now it has its own trend line.

The restaurant industry built this, and with reason. Federal law locks tipped employees at $2.13 an hour, a figure frozen since 1991.

Servers in a sit-down restaurant earn every penny. They read the table, absorb the kitchen’s chaos, remember the allergy you mentioned once.

That transaction runs on partnership. The tip seals it.

The iPad operates on something else. Research found that 66 percent of consumers feel pressured to tip when a digital screen asks them to, even for a takeout coffee. Tilt the screen far enough into someone’s space and guilt starts pulling wallets.

Businesses discovered this lever during the pandemic, when tip prompts signaled solidarity with workers at genuine risk.

The crisis passed. The prompts stayed.

Companies squeezed by rising costs found tipping a cleaner tool than raising prices, a way to move money from customers to workers while keeping the business’s hands clean.

Americans read the situation. Spending on pressure-driven tips fell 38 percent in 2025, dropping from $453 to $283 per person.

Sixty-three percent of Americans now carry at least one negative view of tipping, up from 59 percent the year before. Seventy-eight percent say businesses should pay employees a living wage and stop drafting customers to cover the shortfall.

They see it clearly. Pay workers honestly, charge fair prices, and let a tip mean what it once meant: someone went beyond the job, and you wanted to say so.

Until then, the screen keeps rotating.

Toward you, at the coffee counter, at the self-checkout, at the parking garage, at whatever comes next.

It rotates because the system behind it is broken, and a broken system always finds a way to make the problem someone else’s.

Yours, specifically.