Best Friendship Examined

BEST FRIENDSHIP EXAMINED

They aren’t like us at all. Have you ever noticed the things they eat? Disgusting stuff not really fit for humans. Just watching them at mealtime is enough to make a decent person ill. And how about those filthy hovels where they sleep? Who knows what kind of vermin live with them? Those vulgar noises they make don’t even sound like communication. They breed like rats. I think we should have forced sterilization for the whole lot of them. They are cute enough when they are little, but when they grow up they are lazy and good for nothing. I wish I had a dog.

If you have a dog it is like being a rock star and the dog is your groupie. Everyone wants at least one groupie. Your dog loves you more than any teenage girl loves Ricky Martin. If you would let him, your dog would hang posters of you in his dog house. Your dog would call an 800 number and pay $5.95 a minute to hear stuff about your personal life. Hell, he’d tattoo your name on his butt if he had an allowance.

Dogs rarely screw you over. They don't lie or steal. You have never been fired by a dog. Admit it, you felt worse when you got dumped by that bimbo than you did after your dog destroyed your leather sofa. You still curse and spit when you hear her name, but thinking about that ravaged $3,500 couch makes you chuckle two years later. Stupid dog.

If you were a company, your dog would win employee of the month, every month. He’s your right hand man. She’s your girl Friday. It’s your best friend and you’re definitely its best friend. Your dog is your faithful assistant. He’s your simple-minded side-kick. You're Mav and he's Goose. On top of that, he’s a chick magnet.

If it weren’t for you he’d have to go back to taking down young or injured members of the animal kingdom for his livelihood. He still thinks about that whenever he sees one of the neighborhood kids with a cast on their leg. His back-up plan isn’t too far on the back burner, but for now he’s pretty happy with the dog food in the big bags. Dog food isn’t nearly as messy, and there are no screams of agony. Dogs definitely don’t miss that really sad part where the mothers of their prey stand on the perimeter and watch them eat. It’s enough to put a dog off his appetite—almost.

The working relationship between man and dog has been going rather well for all these thousands of years even though the dogs aren’t doing a lot of working these days. They used to work but then they started this propaganda campaign against hunting. Hunting is barbaric, hunting is wrong. Who do you think started that? You think dogs enjoy getting up at 5 A.M. to go help some dork with an Elmer Fudd hat shoot another animal? Advances in eye treatment will soon free dogs from their seeing-eye dog responsibilities as well. Then their only job will be to lie on the kitchen floor waiting for food to fall off the table.

 

Comments:
If you can't say something nice say it here. 

#1
And in the end; no heart transplant, chemo therapy or expensive treatments to sustain life. Just adios, and two to the back of the head. Priceless.

deadair

#2
deadair, are you nuts? People are spending more than ever on pet care. Chemotherapy and hip replacements, etc. It's tough to find a large animal vet nowadays because pet vet is a much more lucrative field. FWIW Lefty, Dogs suck. And mooch. And beg. And they'll take abuse for a free meal. Something no cat would ever do. Observe a coyote for five minutes in the wild and you'll see what a subservient lump of poo the average domestic dog is.

kevin m. 

#3

Dogs suck? Next time you get stuck playing in an abandoned mine shaft, try sending your fucking cat to get help.

The Management

The Shame of Music

Have you ever been sitting somewhere when the song on the Muzak is so unbelievably awful that you are actually embarrassed to inhabit the same room as some hit from Hell’s Top 40? The song is so bad that you are afraid to make eye contact with other people around you for fear that they will think you somehow requested this bit of music. You go back to whatever it is you are doing and sweat out the second chorus hoping nobody you know walks in and sees you here.

Of course you don’t ever feel this way because all of you are too normal and aren’t plagued by silly demons that still haunt you from childhood. I was perhaps eleven years old when my trauma occurred. I thought that I was home alone when I was caught red-handed playing I’m Living in Shame (Lord, the irony) by Dianna Ross and the Supremes. It was Richard Mejia, a friend of my older brother. “All the records you have around here and you’re playing I’m Living in Shame?” I fumbled around with a lame explanation, but Richard walked off laughing. For the first time someone had pointed out that what I was listening to wasn’t cool.

To this day I’m terrified that Richard Mejia will walk into my coffee shop and ask, “You ASKED them to play Billy Jean?” He won’t care that the shop has a music system that is wrapped up in complicated copyright laws and licensing agreements. My mere presence in the shop proves that I am either acquiescing to the song or that I actually love it. He won’t care that my musical tastes have matured over the years. His mocking laughter will drown out my appeal that I now play classical music at home on the piano. All that will matter is that I was sitting in a public place listening to fucking Billy Jean. Life is cruel.

Rock music has a lot to do with the tauntings of the Richard Mejias of the world. The “My music is cooler than your music” school of thinking, made famous by the geeks in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, has defined the way we look at rock and roll.

It has been a long time since I last bought anything in the rock genre—cool or otherwise. I gave up on rock for the most part. I have ventured into other areas of music where being cool isn’t so necessary.

Writers' Workshop

Recipe for a summer day: Take one part sunshine, one part sandy beach, one part picnic lunch. Mix together and enjoy.

That really isn’t my style of writing, to put it mildly. I think that I could take offal like that and salvage a decent essay if I had to. Let me see here. What if on that idyllic beach, in that Crate and Barrel™ picnic basket there is a bottle of chilled sauvignon blanc and two fish sandwiches. What the gorgeous couple sharing this beautiful summer afternoon doesn’t know is that the halibut they bought for the sandwiches went bad weeks ago but the evil fishmonger disguised the rotting smell by rinsing the fish with water and ammonia.

I don’t have access to the internet to look it up, and no one here at the coffee shop knows the symptoms of botulism, but I can only imagine that it is a horribly painful way to die. The young couple’s bloated corpses won’t be found for days. The beach will be off limits to bathers until the smell fades away sometime after Labor Day weekend. So much for summer; the dead yuppie couple ruined it for all of us.

My recipe for humor writing goes something like this: Take one part asinine topic, one part pain and suffering of others, and one part class warfare. Mix together with tortured syntax, run spell check, and post on the internet.

Perhaps I have been aiming too high in my search for humor. There is a saying, I forget who said it, perhaps I’ll never know who said it, maybe everyone just says it and that’s how it started, but that saying goes like this: No one ever went broke underestimating the tastelessness of the America people. Anyway, don’t quote me on that.

I am guessing that in the current movie comedy, DodgeBall, there are at least three instances when someone gets hit in the crotch. If anyone has seen the movie please correct me if I’m wrong. If there isn’t a single incident of a crotch ball in DodgeBall then I will offer my resignation, or an apology, or I will send them a check, or I will perform some meaningful act of contrition. If there are more than three groin shots then the makers of that summer blockbuster must have been the guys who wrote the line about the tastelessness of the American people.

A lot of comedy writers mine the lower intestinal track for most of their humor, literally. What most of us flush or throw out with the used Depends® is the same stuff that some comedians turn into pure gold. Turning Number Two into cold, hard cash goes way back. Excrement and humor have been skipping along hand in hand for thousands of years. Always remember to wash your hands after any encounters with humor—you don’t know where he’s been.

I mean, let’s be honest with each other, some of that low humor is a scream We are all educated people so why is the word ‘diarrhea’ so funny? If I could answer that I would be writing this from the deck of my pool instead of sitting here in this crappy café next to a homeless guy with three polyethylene bags full of God knows what.

* Alert reader Andy sent me this: I read your note from 7/7. The quote is

attributed to Baltimore's own H.L. Mencken and it goes

like this..."No one ever went broke underestimating the

intelligence of the American People.", but close enough.

Riding in this Year's Tour de France

This was what Bernard Hinault, 5 time tour de France winner, said when asked whether or not Lance Armstrong’s cancer medicine may have boosted his endurance. Yet another example of how much the French hate us:

"To those assholes I say, I wish you just one thing: that you have the same sickness, that you have one foot in the grave. Then you’ll see how much you’ll want to do what you love, and do it to its maximum."*

My goal is to watch every single broadcast of this year’s Tour de France. I want to savor every single minute of every day’s coverage. Because I am too cheap to have my own television I will be forced to go to the gym and ride the exercise bike during the daily hour and a half rebroadcasts. This is what I have trained all year for and I think that I am ready.

Riding indoors is a very distant second to riding in the street. It isn’t really fun and it is hard to really work hard. I have an hour and a half ride around Seattle that is all up and down. When I reach the top of the tortuous Queen Anne hill I am gasping for air—I’m not talking about breathing hard, I mean I am dying. I don’t care if you are Lance Armstrong, that hill will kick your ass. My ride up and down the hills of Queen Anne, Magnolia, and Capital Hill is fairly sadistic but I really like going uphill more than coasting downhill. I especially don’t like flying down hills in the city—too many yahoos in cars who cut in front of you.

I remind myself of Bill Murray’s character in Caddy Shack. I, too, mumble in a faux sportscaster’s voice. Instead of the Cinderella story hitting a 585 yard tee shot at the Masters, the voice in my head usually has me winning a merciless mountain stage. I try to mimick the voice of Phil Liggett, the British guy who broadcasts the Tour.

Trust me when I tell you that we have some streets in Seattle that are much steeper than anything the riders face in the Tour de France, and if you drive a few miles, there are mountain roads longer than anything in the Tour—the 18 mile ride up Mount Rainier comes to mind. Oo, the Alps, I’m really scared. Take the longest climb in the Alps, add a few miles of vertical road, throw in the possible threat of a cataclysmic volcanic eruption, and then you have Mount Rainier. The chance that Mount Rainier will erupt is about as likely as Greece winning the European Cup so don’t worry.

I don’t expect anything too exciting to happen in today’s third day of the Tour but you can’t be too careful when you are a fanatic viewer of the world’s greatest spectacle in sports. So I’m off to the gym. Today I won’t forget to bring a water bottle. Yesterday I practically dehydrated on my 90 minute exercise bike ride. I had to pee for about 45 minutes of that ride. If the room had been empty I probably would have peed in a corner so as not to miss any of the race. I was afraid that if I left to go to the bathroom, someone would change the channel. There are actually people in this world who don’t like to watch the Tour de France. That’s creepy but it’s true.

*Outside magazine

A Must Read

(not the tripe written here, follow the link)

Everyone who wants to vote in the coming presidential election should be forced to read James Fallows’ piece in The Atlantic Monthly, Blind Into Baghdad. If anyone has another suggestion of one single piece of outstanding journalism that would help clarify the matter of the war in Iraq I would be happy to read it. Fallows has written the best work of reporting on this war that I have read to date. If you don’t read this you are not getting a highly important look at the war.

Not only is it evident that the Bush administration mislead the American people concerning the motivations for entering this war, their war doctrine of ‘less is better’ jeopardized American lives and our success in bringing about a stable Iraq after the initial phase of conflict.

The Bush administration’s obsession with weapons of mass destruction seems to have blinded them to weapons of individual destruction. The fact that we went into Iraq with insufficient numbers to pacify and disarm the population has set the course for the heavy casualties our troops have incurred. It is not nerve gas that is killing American GI’s, it is RPG’s, AK 47’s, and artillery shells used as booby traps. The U.S. military did almost nothing to deprive the insurgents of an almost limitless cache of conventional weapons.

Fallows makes clear that this poor planning was not the fault of the military but of Rumsfeld’s insistence on doing the war on the cheap. Anyone who disagreed with his policy of using fewer rather than more troops was replaced or ignored.

In retrospect I think that perhaps our biggest failure in Iraq was not to stop the looting that occurred directly after the initial invasion. Military war planners had anticipated this so it wasn’t as if it came as a surprise. Imagine yourself as an Iraqi citizen. Imagine witnessing the destruction of almost every bit of government infrastructure while U.S, forces sat back and did nothing to stop it. Fallow writes that the U.S. forces could have easily stopped the looting, they simply were not told to do so. Why?

So here we are one year and four months after the invasion and about the only positive spin the Bush people can put on this is to say that at least Saddam Hussein is no longer in power. I don’t think Bush could have persuaded the American people to invade Iraq if that was the only benefit we would receive.