If you haven't read the first four installments of the tales of Spiky the Reptard, then you need to start here.

Charles Darwin, what the fuck?

I’ve got a pretty good handle on how this whole evolution by natural selection thing works, which is why I can’t understand how the hell bearded dragons ever made it out of prehistoric times alive. Seriously, this thing is too stupid to live.

Spiky the Reptard is a Darwin Award Waiting to Happen, achieving all new levels of stupid that are putting his very existence in jeopardy. To paraphrase Darth Vader: the Fail is strong with this one.

Spiky is having some digestive issues again, but not only is he not pooping, he’s not eating or drinking either. The little dude is all dehydrated and has been lying around his cage, hardly moving, and generally looking like ten miles of bad road. I’ve been worried about him dying not because I could give a rat’s ass about him personally, but due to the fact that I don’t want to put up with six months of a little girl’s wails of “I MISS SPI-I-I-K-E-E-E-E-E-E-Y!!!”

The reptard has to live, at least until my daughter is a few years older and starting to notice boys so that Spiky’s demise would be less of a tragedy. He’s two-and-a-half now, and a bearded dragon’s life expectancy can be as long as ten years. I don’t want to be putting up with this guy for any longer than I have to, but if it could hang in there for three or four years then that should suffice. Yes, I’m actually looking forward to my daughter turning into a surly teenager who doesn’t give a shit about anything or anyone. Until that happens, however, Spiky needs to keep breathing.

You hear me, you little fucker? You are not allowed to die without permission.

Why is he near death? Well, this is where the whole natural selection bit gets damn confusing. Somehow, evolution set this thing’s brain to “zero,” because we decided to do some research on bearded dragons and discovered that what he’s going through is perfectly normal. The book calls it a state of “semi-hibernation.” I call it trying to die.

Essentially, they just stop giving a shit about life. They’re not really hibernating, but they’re not doing anything to help keep themselves alive either. Not only that, but they need to be “coaxed” out of this hibernation state by a caring owner. I told you these things were stupid. If brains were taxable, then Spiky would be in line for a rebate.

I ask you again, Charles Darwin: what the fuck?

You won’t believe the shit I had to go through to nurse this little prick back to health. I’m actually ashamed to call myself a man after doing this. Any other self-respecting Y chromosome owner would have just let the bastard take a dirt nap, but I’ve got a soft spot for little girl tears.

I’m going to go off on a tangent for a bit here. For the first time in, well, ever, I was getting the house all to myself for six whole days. I had some work stuff that I couldn’t miss and it gave me the excuse I needed to bail on a wedding (wife’s side of the family) that was way out east. She took the kids and I got to stay home alone. I had some pretty serious plans for what I was going to do to take advantage my six days of bachelorhood, and these plans did not involve nursing an ailing reptard.

I didn’t exactly have a lot of choice in the matter though, because my daughter made me promise I’d look after him. That, and my wife would have been super pissed if they’d come home and he’d croaked through my lack of effort to keep him from becoming fertilizer for our garden.

The book was pretty explicit as to what emergency procedures were necessary to keep Spiky alive, so here is the play by play on how I spent some of my week of freedom to save the life of something I hate:

The Bath
Have you ever heard the expression “Is a frog’s ass watertight?” It’s akin to, “Does a bear shit in the woods?”

Well, a frog’s ass may be watertight, but a bearded dragon’s is not. The book recommended a bath so that water can seep in through his ass and help with the re-hydration process. There is also the fact that being submersed in water will also prompt him to actually drink water. See, he doesn’t recognize a dish of water as something to drink. He’s so reptarded that he actually needs to be neck deep in the stuff to realize that “Hey, this is water. Maybe I should drink some.”

So I grabbed a plastic tub, filled it with warm water, and threw him in. Behold, the reptard spa treatment:

And yes, I know my lino is ugly. We’re in desperate need of a reno.

Anyway, I’ll be damned in the little fucker didn’t drink while he was in there. He sort of just hung out for a while, trying to figure out what was going on and not having much success, and then, for the first time ever, I saw him drink. I should explain that these things are desert creatures, or something (I’m not a reptardologist), and they can survive just on “dew” from a spray-mister and the water from the vegetables that he wasn’t eating. However, since he was seriously dehydrated more drastic amounts of water needed to be ingested.

He actually put his face right into the water and lapped up a generous portion. When he lifted his head out of the water I guess he decided that he’d had enough of this bath shit and started to spaz out like a six-year-old on a sugar rush who got a Nintendo Wii for Christmas (been there, done that).

In the midst of his semi-seizure I grabbed him out of the water and plopped him down on one of our ratty, couldn’t give a shit about beach towels. He squirmed around which served to dry him off and then he tried to escape, which is when I noticed that something was wrong, something seriously wrong.

The reptard couldn’t walk.

Normally when he walks he lifts his belly and tail high off the ground and trots around. This time he was trying to walk but his belly was dragging on the ground and he wasn’t getting anywhere. He was just staying in one place, legs ‘a flailing, and generally looking pathetic.

Fuck, the little bastard stroked out on me.

Then I realized that a stroke didn’t make sense. It wasn’t a unilateral paralysis that was taking place; all four legs were stilling working. It just didn’t make sense. At this point I recalled junior high school science class and learning about one of the dumber dinosaurs – the stegosaurus – which was so fucking dumb that it needed two brains: one to control the front end and another to control the back end.

Well that’s just great. I drowned the reptard’s ass brain. I’m in shit now.

I started to have damage control thoughts, like wondering about the whole “We gave him to a nice family that lives on a farm” story line, but realized that was never going to fly. Instead, I grabbed his tail, hoisted it up in the air, tried my best to channel the power of some crappy televangelist faith healer, and yelled out, “Walk, motherfucker!”

And I’ll be damned, but the reptard walked.

I still don’t know what the hell that was all about. Maybe I’ve got The Power, or maybe the water just weighed him down for a moment and he needed to find his balance. Either way, I got Spiky re-hydrated and we were on to the next phase of reptard convalescence.

The Olive Oil
Another recommendation of the book was to give him olive oil to help loosen up his poo. If you’ve read my book, you know I’m a fan of olive oil – it’s the only kind of oil I buy. The stuff I get costs $18 a bottle and I was going to hand feed it to the fucking reptard.

I must really love my daughter.

I poured some into a small cup, dipped my fingers into it, and then let the reptard lick olive oil off my fingers. This whole process lasted almost an hour. To remind you, my wife and kids were out of town and I had better things to do.

The Baby Food
Again, the book. It said baby food squash was good for ailing reptards, and that I could feed it to him with a syringe (minus the needle, of course). Actually, considering the state of mind I was in at this point, it was a good thing I didn’t have any sharp implements at hand.

I sucked up baby squash goo, which required a special trip to the grocery store, into the syringe and gently squirted little bits into his mouth. Just like a baby, more of it ended up on his face than in his stomach, but he did eat some of it.

The Massage
I hate that fucking book.

It said I had to massage his belly to help him work the poo out. Because he’d gotten dehydrated and hadn’t shit in a few weeks his crap had turned into something akin to what happens to coal when it experiences millennia of extreme pressure. If I didn’t help break it up it might lead to a bowel obstruction and require surgical removal.

Surgical removal? Are you fucking kidding me? I’m sure that would run a hefty veterinarian tab that would more than pay for all new ski equipment for me. Stupid reptard.

So I rubbed his tummy. I found a lump of what I thought it was impacted reptard crud and massaged it for about ten minutes. Not long after Chuck Norris showed up at my front door and demanded I hand over my testicles. 

The Excremental Aftermath
Fortunately for me, I decided to check on him about half an hour after I put him back in his cage. The last time he got constipated he’d had several hours to run through his poo and track it all over creation. It was an ungodly mess.

This time I’d found he passed the foul substance before he had the chance to recover from his monumental fudging, so it was still in a neat little pile in the middle of his cage. Except that it wasn’t neat, and it certainly wasn’t little.

You remember when you were younger and you went out on a righteous pub crawl bender, and then at the end of the night you staggered out of the bar with a belly full of tequila and smelly fingers and you came across the most disreputable-looking hot dog vender this side of Afghanistan and thought something like that would really hit the spot? So you asked for a dog with sour kraut, onions, cheese, and “lozzzaa chillleee…”

Remember what your crap looked like the next day? Well, there you go. That’s what I had to clean up.

The “good” news in all of this is that Spiky looks like he is going to make it. My daughter is pleased and is showering both him and me with love.

One day, a few years from now, she will become a teenager. She will get piercings and wear too much makeup and date scumbags with tattoos and motorcycles and generally hate the entire world. She’ll also quite likely stop caring if Spiky lives or dies. At that point I won’t have to make any Herculean resuscitation efforts should he go into another semi-hibernation; I can just let nature take its course.

This sounds like a good tradeoff. I can hardly wait.

INTRO / PHASE 1 / PHASE 2 / PHASE 3 / PHASE 4 / PHASE 5 / PHASE 6