Judge us not. My J.P. Dog, Arlo, is injured, not pampered. Last week he was diagnosed with IVDD, a dog disc disease. He’s supposed to be on crate rest for the next two months, and no walking. But you can’t stop a dude like this from going out on the town. It’s summer and the livin’ is easy, man.

Yesterday I carted him on an errand to Yumont Hardware on Centre Street. It got cumbersome to wheel him down their narrow aisles . So I parked him in the paint section, while I went to the far end of the store. I turned around and saw that he’d popped out of the sunroof. (This was a first.) Like a prairie dog, wondering when the guys at Yumont were gonna give him another biscuit.

No standing on hind legs allowed. So my little prisoner was in violation of his disc-disease-recovery protocol. (After the diagnosis, his vet said that Arlo had to switch over to a harness, for life. I had this ridiculous one that I bought a few years ago but he never wore it. But it’s well suited for his new prisoner status.)