One afternoon I told my friend John Scane I was maybe planning on watching I Am Legend later that evening on streaming, and I said, “Hey have you seen it?” and he said, “Yeah, sure a while ago. It’s pretty good,” and I said, “It’s got zombies, though, right? You know I can’t take too much of the gore and stuff,” and he said, “Yeah, there’s zombies. It’s scary, but no real gore. You should be OK,” and I said, “OK.”
So the movie started and there was that beautiful dog, and I texted John and texted, “the dog? do the zombies get the dog? Just tell me now,” and he lol’d and texted, “no the dog will be ok,” and I texted, “really?” and he texted, “it’s fine,” and I texted, “OK, thanks. i can’t handle bad stuff happening to dogs”
Eventually it began to look bad for the dog, real bad, and I wondered how the hell is Will Smith gonna pull the dog from the brink of doom here, there are not many options left, when “yelp!” doom overtakes the dog and I got all broken up about it for a minute and switched off the movie and reflected a moment about dogs and doom before I regained my senses and grabbed my phone and called John.
He picked up the phone, laughing, because he knew, and I said, “Jesus, man, why would you do that?” and he said, “Have you watched the rest of the movie?” and I said, “Of course I haven’t and now I won’t, just to spite you. Why didn’t you tell me about the dog after I asked?” and he said, “Well I knew you wouldn’t watch it if I told you. But more than that, nobody warned me about the dog when I watched it, and if I had to go through seeing that, then you should, too” and I said, “What? Christ I should have known better than to ask you,” and he laughed and said, “Yeah you should have. It could have been worse. It could have been goatse,” and I laughed and said, “OK, well next time I won’t ask,” and we said goodbye and hung up.
There’s an app for this, now. It’ll tell you if the dog dies in the movie, and it won’t trick you, unlike my friend John Scane, who will.