My Buddy

(OK, right at the top; this is a dog post. If you are not a dog owner, feel free to pass on this one. I have a bunch of other entertaining Klogs you might want to read. 2009 was a particularly good year.)

And the good news, the very good news, is that I finally got a job. And that is reason for much celebration, and removal of several things from eBay. While I could go on about the exuberating, the fact of the matter is happy Klogs are rather boring Klogs. I know my audience prefers my usual pissy, bitter, sarcastic, dark, pessimistic stuff. Happiness is boring, so I will spare you that.

Now that unemployment will soon be a thing of the past, it’s time to put the whole experience in some sort of perspective. There are PLENTY of things I will not miss about this unemployed life. I will not miss the unending money woes. I will not miss the stress unemployment puts on just about every aspect of life and relationships. I will not miss the constant mental anguish it causes; the nightmares and pervasive negative thoughts and self image. (Is this Klog dark enough yet?) I will not miss the emails from Monster, CareerBuilder, etc, all pushing the same lousy damn jobs. I will not miss the hours trolling other websites for decent gigs. I will not miss the constant sending out of resumes to jobs I could really care less about.

And to be fair, there are some things I actually will miss. In a bizarre way, I will miss the thrice daily airings of the Maury show. Those rednecks always make me feel better about myself. I will miss that hot chick that used to do afternoons on the now defunct Gems TV. I will miss the free time that I used to write reviews and Klogs. I will miss the dayloads. Boy o boy will I miss that unemployment stereotype. I will miss that feeling I get every afternoon to take a nap, and actually TAKE the damn nap. That might be a hard habit to break. But above all of this, I will miss one thing far more than any of the above.

I will miss my buddy.

Over this three year nightmare, Bauer has been a constant. He’s always been there for me. He was more than happy to get his belly scratched and ears rubbed. I know he enjoys that sort of thing, and in a way non dog owners don’t understand, it was probably better for me. When I wanted to cry or scream, Bauer was always there to give me a chance to calm down.

Whenever it felt like my little world was crashing down; when the four walls were closing in, a bit of time with the dog did me a world of good. While my moods wildly swung from hour to hour, a bit of Bauer time always, always worked to calm me down. Bauer just has a way to chill me out, so I wasn’t a raving fucking lunatic when my wife came home.

Sure, it wasn’t always easy; there were times when he drove me nuts. He would bark and yip to go outside like someone left him a well done steak on the front yard. So I would go down and put him on the tether. By the time I returned upstairs, and just as my ass was to hit the chair, he would immediately bark and yip to come back in like there was a well done steak on the living room floor. Silly dog, he knows if there is any well done steak around here, it’s mine.

Some days all he does is whine; whine to go out, whine to come in, whine to play. I’ll hear the clicks of his nails on the hardwood floor come up to the steps. He will keep his rear paws on the floor, and stretch up three steps to try to get my attention. I will slide the chair over, and just see the top of his knucklehead over the step.

When I need the break, I will go down and play with Bauer for 10-15 minutes. When I stop and head back to the grind, Bau will follow me to the steps with the toy in his mouth. As I start to go up (Bau knows he is not allowed on the top floor of the house), he will loudly drop the toy. Sometimes it’s a sorrowful sound, as if to say, “Aw, c’mon, man, I still wanna play.” That breaks my heart. Other times it’s an angry “Well, FUCK you then.”

He loves the outside. As I write this, he’s been outside in the front yard for seriously 3-4 hours. He’s a sun pup. On the hottest of days, he is happy to lie on the black top driveway. He does what we call the dead dog. If you passed by, he is literally so relaxed and still, you’d think he was dead. He will often refuse to move when T tries to pull into the driveway. There are times I will let him out front, and sit down on the stoop. Bau will sit, and scoot his hips over till he’s leaning on me. I will put my arm around and pet him as he raises one paw. It’s moments like these that totally chill me out and calm me down. I would totally sell this picture to MasterCard for use in their Priceless promotions. Using a fine Samsung digital camera of course.

He has a sudden tendency to bark at, well, nothing really. Often I will hear him rouse from his sleep, dash up the steps, and run to the bay window barking his head off. And he’s totally failed me when it’s come to holding up his end of the bargain. I have literally hundreds of hours of him on video; none of which can win me $10,000 on America’s Funniest Videos.

He’s always there, wanting to go for a walk and get me away from the PC and these four walls. I’ve done my best to spoil him now that the weather is nice. We’re off in our own little world. We go on long walks that probably chill me out as much as it does him. There’s a simple joy seeing him bop around the neighborhood, just thrilled to be outside. Sometimes it really is that simple. I’ve started taking him to the dog park as well, where there are all kinds of sights and smells to investigate.

He knows what to do to get me to cheer up. Sit next to me, offer up the belly, etc. Hell, one day I went down, and he had a box of donuts. I don’t know where he got them from, but they were all Boston crèmes, and I wasn’t asking any questions.

And I feel bad. I will really miss those times. I wonder if it will really make any impact on him at all. I won’t feel too bad, in a few weeks, T will have off for the summer, and I am sure will spoil him. After she does my laundry and cooks my dinner of course.

But I will miss my buddy.

The Write Stuff

“Do you like mysteries?”

The voice greeting me upon my entrance belongs to a woman more than twice my age. It belongs to an author doing a signing at Barnes and Noble. No one is there for her, and she has to hock her book literally one by one. And this makes me think, “Do I really want to be a writer?”

I just felt so sad for this woman. Here she is, clearly well past retirement age, gallantly pushing her book in some bumblefuck B&N. Good lord, could that ever be me? How would I hock my book? “Hi, do you like short, mildly humorous essays about such various topics as unemployment, Hallowmas and the Maury Povich show? I use the word ‘fuck ‘ a lot. O, I’m sorry, I didn’t see your three year old there.”

I mean, I feel bad for her. I am pretty sure she wasn’t expecting a mad rush of people, but, still. I can kind of sympathize with her; no one’s asked me to sign a single damn copy of my Wildwood story. Heartless motherfuckers. My list of people to piss on when I mysteriously have a ton of money and power grows daily.

It’s an illusion that just because you get a book published, you have it ‘made’. For every Steven King and Janet Evanovich, there are folks like this geriatric slaving away with no money or recognition. I blame people like John Grogan. Grogan wrote Marley & Me. Before he wrote that book, he was a columnist. I read some of his early stuff, and it bounded between the sappy to feebly humorous. Marley is by far his best work, and one of my top 5 books of all time. Maybe when I read a sixth book, that will change. Since then, Marley has turned into a cottage industry for Grogan. There’s a whole line of Marley books out now. I can’t begrudge him. But, all because of just one book, he can live comfortably the rest of his life. And isn’t that what we all want?

But is this really the life I want? I mean, if millions of people want to read about Fred Hadayia and Mandy Moore peeing (by far, the 2 Klogs that drive people here), well then maybe I should expand those topics. Perhaps a Roger and Me like search for the illusive Fred. Maybe tales of chasing down Mandy’s husband, Ryan Adams, outside one of his gigs and cornering him. “C’mon, Ryan, I am sure you’ve seen her shit, too.”

Any bookstore is filled with thousands of books by ‘normal people’, books that never make their money back, books that no one reads. It’s frighteningly like the music biz. It’s not that I want to write a book; I don’t. But I am on the eve of submitting another piece to the same Wildwood paper that might get published. (Yes, this should be another Klog, but there’s only so much multi-tasking I can do, a’ight?) And even if I did write a book, what the hell would it be about?

I can’t imagine writing a book. That’s got to be incredibly tough. And, to be clear, by book, I mean a real deal book. Not some vanity book, written by such literary heavyweights as Jenny McCarthy and Monica Lewinsky. But if I did write a book, what could it possibly be about? Below are the only topics I feel I know enough about to maybe fill a whole book:

Unemployed and not bleeding

How I kept my organs off of eBay

All the people who didn’t hire me are racists

Things you can make with dog hair

The occasional alcoholic

Hockey is for men, baseball is for fairies

Reviews of 500 albums you’ve never heard of

Places I got into because I look like the signer from Nickelback

But who am I to judge? I am a poor reader at best. The older you get, the harder it is to find good books that have lots of pictures. Is it my fault I am a visual guy? I have no appreciation for the literary ‘giants’. Haven’t we given this Shakespeare guy enough play already? Kindles and Nooks and iPads are great and all, but if you’re using those to read Chaucer, clearly, you don’t deserve the technology. I mean, let’s focus on some writers who don’t wear questionable dress. I personally nominate Uncle John from the oft ignored Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader series. That guy makes me laugh. And he doesn’t use the king’s fucking English.