Bow wow wow: A drab afternoon on a holiday weekend

My dog Sid died four years ago this month. He would have been 98 in dog years, anyway, if he were still around.

I sometimes miss the silly pooch, how if you got him riled up his bark would sound like monkey chatter before he’d break into full howl. How he was so hyper as a pup that whenever anyone would come visit he just wouldn’t leave that person alone, wanting so much to play with a buddy. How he would sit by the fence and wait for the neighbor to feed him a biscuit.

I don’t miss the fleas, and the shedding -- enough to keep a family in new sweaters each winter, or cleaning the shit off the lawn (How weird is that anyway, that we pick pick up dog shit for the privilege of their company?)
Or how dumb dogs can be with pissing at inopportune times, or not barking when the house is robbed, or running off a couple times (though that could be funny -- once found a couple and tagged along as if he wanted to be adopted, and another time, I caught him running with a pack, until I pulled up -- then he scampered into the car.)

But overall, I do miss having someone stare at me to get the hell up in to morning, or to go for a walk with, or sit in the car with me, in the passenger seat, sneaking behind the wheel while he waited.

I had taken him to the vet less than a month before his death for his annual shots. The vet told me to consider aspiring therapy as he seemed to be moving slowly and may have canine arthritis.

Doctors talk funny. Consider it. Like I’m gonna come back, we’ll have coffee and chat about feeding aspirin to a dog.

So anyway, a month later I wake up in the morning to let Sid out and find clear, yellow vomit in the kitchen. The first thing I think is, what the hell did he eat, as dogs will eat pretty much anything, which is what I had in common with Sid.

But he seemed out of sorts, too. So I left him in the cool basement and came home for lunch to check on him. He pretty much was curled up in the same spot he was in the morning. And he hadn’t touched his food.

Do dogs get the flu, I wondered? Did some jackass poison him? Did he eat grass with Chemlawn on it? Was he hung over?

I get home from work and he’s still in the same spot. I let him out and I can tell he’s not right, so I call the vet. Not wanting to sound like one of those pet hypochondriacs, I suggest he may have eaten something the day before and give his symptoms. About an hour later they call back and say I should probably bring him in, considering his age.

During that hour, I left him out in the yard and killed time on the Internet. Looking back, I feel bad about this. But how the hell was I supposed to know?

He looked really sad in the yard, curled up again along the fence in the late evening shade. So we get to the minivan and I lift him into the back and off we go.

The vet says he wants to run some tests that will take a couple hours. Since it is close by, I go to the gym and work out instead of sitting in a lobby as if it were my wife or kid. Plus, like I said, I thought he just had canine flu.

Anyway, the vet finally calls and says to come in -- I learn Sid had cancer.

All kinds of things go through your mind when you hear the “c” word. Was it what I fed him all these years? Was it what he ate and drank that I also eat and drink? Does flea dip cause cancer? It’s made by the same firm that made the gas chambers for the Nazis, for Chrissake.

With all that in mind, I ask the vet for his opinion, a quality of life thing. I didn’t want to have my dog needing a nurse or having to watch over him 24-7. I wasn’t being callous, but sort of felt that way, but, being single, it’s not like I could take family leave while the dog recuperated.

I had to give the dog away for a year until I found a place I could live and have a pet (on my salary owning a home ain’t an option). That was hard enough, finally finding a nice family going through woes of its own, who, it turned out didn’t want him anymore when I reclaimed him, having enough of his infernal shedding.

So, I figured my chances for finding someone to watch a sick dog were like a calculus graph: approaching zero.

But the vet -- not the regular guy, but the night shift one, a bald man with round wire frame glasses and a German accent -- tells me if the surgery goes well, even being single I should be able to take the proper care.

So I ask if I can see Sid again before he goes under the knife, give the lug a hug, and off he goes. It wasn’t an Old Yeller moment, but you could tell Old Sid was distressed, disoriented and confused. He was a ninny at the vet anyway, so this wasn’t so unusual.

As I live less than 2 miles from the office, I went home. By now it was almost 10 or so.

I fall into that half-awake half-asleep state and the phone rings after midnight. The vet tells me that the cancer was worse than the X-ray led him to believe and that nothing else could be done.

He wants to know if I want to come say good-bye.

Blubbering like a 210 pound baby seal pup, I think I called my sister and brother-in-law (where it’s 2 hours earlier), then headed back to the vet.

Are you familiar with the unnerving videos of the band Nine Inch Nails? Well, seeing a dog in surgical repose, was like a scene from one. They had canvas blankets up, and his paws were hogtied together. An aspirator was down his throat, and I think a cone-shaped thing was around his neck.

It was all shades of brown and gray, and it didn’t help that the vet sounded like the scary dentist Lawrence Olivier played in Marathon Man. I kept waiting to here some industrial music playing in the background, or for Dustin Hoffman to escape from a secret room.

It was hard to say goodbye like that, thinking back at the golden furball Sid was as a pup, the happiest-to-see-me mutt in the lab-shep litter. I joked that I named him after Sid Vicious, as he was anything but he really was named after the kid who was the first to be friendly to me when my family moved to a new town my 8th grade year. He was blonde and round, too.

What brought me back to reality: I got the bill.

It was more than $1,000, about $1,200 once I decided to have him cremated and keep the ashes. Don’t they have to cremate the dog anyway? I guess they charge the fee for shoveling his remains into the wooden box and for the privilege of frying him up individually. That takes special talent.

I felt a little goofy paying that much, with a pinch of distrust thrown in with the guilt and grief. I mean, I was at the vet just a month earlier and nothing. And the German guy got me to agree to surgery saying there was a very good chance he’d recover. Shouldn’t that at least mean a break on the charges?

You can’t put a price tag on some stuff, and it seems they know that, which is why it costs so much.

I don’t know why I wanted the ashes anyway. It seems kind of goofy, but hey, nothing wrong with being goofy every so often.

I keep the box in the bag they came in, in the spot he used to sleep in the kitchen under a table, with a couple of toys. Not to many people visit, so I don’t have to explain my makeshift shrine. And it’s not like I have votive candles up, too, or posters on the wall.

Unless I get married I don’t think I will have another dog. Being single, it’s not fair to the mutt -- unless you get one of those small ones that’s more like a cat, or are a total yuppie and pay daycare fees.

So maybe that’s why I have the box - which make me more adjusted that Orson Welles at Charles Foster Kane. But we all get that lonely sometime.

Bring in your light sabers, boys

You mean we can bring in our light sabers this time?

That was the best line of dialogue I heard all night. And the guy really sold it -- a fat guy, at least three bills large, probably in his 20s, maybe alone. He had just the right touch of smugness in his tone, mixed with genuine dejection, as he ambled down the lobby to the theater.

Yes, he was there with the other nerds to see the 12:01 a.m. screening of Revenge of the Sith. And so was I, so I shouldn’t judge.

(Not like a black guy I saw a couple of years ago. he drove buy in his pickup truck and asked this white kid with sitting in a lawn chair at 10 a.m. what he was doing. When the teen told him he was waiting to be the first in line for the midnight movie, the guy shook his head and said, “It’s gonna be here for like four months, right?” )

But I figure it’s best to see a well-marketed epic with the true believers. That way you get double the fun for your entertainment dollar -- a colorful crowd and the movie.

I went to an older cinema about a mile from where I live. They showed the very first Star Wars there, too. If I remember right, back then the hype machine wasn’t what it is today.

These days all movies of this sort are launched with ritual middle of the night screenings. Star Wars, as I recall, sort of built up steam by word of mouth, not saturating every available media with constant reminders.

Now though the publicity machine insists on the 12:01 stunt, to which fans respond like Pavlov’s dogs. I’m guessing maybe between 50,000 and 100,000 people in the Chicago area alone went to one of these really early showings.

Mercifully, at the ragtag place I was there were only a few people in Star Wars costumes. Those people scare me -- not as much as the guy who wore his camouflage fatigues to the movie, but close. But I guess those in drag head to where they think they might get on TV or in the paper. (There was a man who looked like Elvis, but that can happen at any large gathering.)

In fact, for the most part the crowd was a nice group of folks and what you’d expect: mostly college aged, collectively overweight, mostly male, overwhelmingly white. A few with their toy light sabers, more with the souvenir 32-ounce cup with Darth Vader top.

. They played along relatively nicely with the lite hits radio station guy who looked like Moby who has a trivia contest before the screening. I knew a few of them, including a kid was an intern where I work, and a guy who really likes the musical Wicked.

No one left a cell phone running. The only heckling came before during commercials when someone yelled “More Yoda, less soda.” No one said “No war, more Star Wars,” during the ad for joining the military.

And what the hell is http:// www.takemefishing.org ?

As for the movie, it was better than the last two, which actually are the first two, which is part of the problem with the whole Star Wars thing, that George Lucas started in the goddamn middle of it, taking a good bit of suspense out of his prequels.

The other, bigger problem, is, that for all its imagination Star Wars launched the filmmaking trend equivalent of the dumb blonde, or what my dad would call “body by Fisher, mind by Mattel.”

That is, it’s nice to look at, but don’t go thinking too hard about it -- which of course is what way too many people do, including some churches holding classes on the religious symbolism of Star Wars. Yikes.

I hope there is beer and pot involved with that. I think substance abuse would help your understanding. And seeing at midnight seemed fitting as the Sith flick was like a dream in that it defied logic and physics, even for a fantasy.

SWIII supposed to tie up all those nerd-nagging loose ends, and I guess it does. It does move quickly, like a video game, which is basically what it is, as the characters don’t seem to react as much as they are moved as if by a joystick from plot point to plot point.

An I’m not going to bother reviewing it for you, because you don’t review a movie like this.

Besides, I’m tired, so I’ll make random observations:

Why do people and creatures in space movies all look like 80s English new wave bands?

How come there isn’t much green space in space movies?

In the future, HMOs will be operated by robots.

What the hell was up with the “bubble opera” the Emperor appeared to be watching. It was more new age stupid than Circle Jerk du Soleil.

Drinking game -- make your frat buddies take a shot after every reference/homage/rip-off you catch (Batman, Bladerunner, Godfather, Frankenstein, numerous Japanese films, Shakespeare....ready, Go!)

While the movie has anti-Bush moments it also glorifies war.

The Jedi don’t look so good either, having vigilante moments of their own. And Obi Wan leaves his Anakin/Vader sliced apart and burnt, but still alive instead of putting him out of his mercy or helping him. Very odd.

That Anakin couldn’t marry and that tensions that build from that point a rip on the Catholic Church?

Anakin kills younglings. Nice word, makes it sound like he slaughtered baby pigs.

What the hell is Lucas saying if he has the protagonist go bad because of his confusion about love and his wanting to protect his family? Muddled at very least the message was.

This movie could be enjoyed with the dialogue track turned off. John Williams is heavy on the Wagner, and the plot is no dumber than anything you’d see at the Met or the Lyric. I half expected Anakin to burst into an aria after he was changed into Darth. Now that would have been cool.

Beep: a blog for the young and the senseless suburbanites

http://beep.dailyherald.com

The above:

a) is being used as a toture device to get prisoners to confess crimes

b) shows why parts of the world may hate America

c) gives clues as to why newspapers are losing readers

d) should be used to discourage the youth of America from becoming journalists

e) just plain sucks

Read it and weep. You've been warned.

Beware of this dog.

Precious Moments and other things I learned at work

I learned so much at work today that I felt like I was back in junior high school. Or maybe that was because I popped a boner and had to cover it up with a notebook.
And if you've seen the type of notebooks we use, you know that it's not a big deal.

Ick. OK. Back up. That was a lie.

But about the learnin’ part -- the morsels of information imparted will stick with me the rest of my life. Or at least until my next binge drinking episode.

I learned that Pat Sajack has his own blog, too, which pretty much makes me wonder why I do one. Adding to that feeling is the younger staff at the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights -- whom I like to call the story fairies -- blog on the paper’s Web site. It’s real keepin’ it real stuff, like pieces about Paula Abdul and shoes.

Blogging for your bosses sort of defeats the purpose of blogging, doesn’t it?

I learned that the average American newspaper reader spends only 22 minutes with the paper. Who knew it took that many that long to shit?

I learned that one newspaper somewhere in America devoted the entire front page, the news page, to the opening of the last Harry Potter movie.
Maybe there is something to those claims about the books and movie being the devil’s work after all.

I learned that the Seattle Post Intelligencer has a feature called Big Moments, which are features about significant events in the lives of everyday people. How Bruce Springsteen of them.

I’m thinking of ripping this off but with a product tie-in twist: Call it Precious Moments and have a cartoon drawn of the happening in question, maybe even a little porcelain statue made.

Possible topics: Billy loses his virginity. Akbar’s suicide car bomb. Cindy tries smack for the first time. Grandpa’s first abortion clinic protest. Tommy gets more than a paddling from his frat brothers.

It’s edgy, yet appealing to collectors.

Star Whores Part III: Yoda Sells Out

Another hero from my youth has sold out.

He used to be down with the revolution, totally non materialistic, a spiritual leader even. You could count on him for sage advice, even if his words came in sentences with mangled grammar (like Bob Dylan).

And now he’s doing commercials for Diet Pepsi.

Yep, I’m talking about Yoda.

I’d expect Darth Vader to shill for the man, because HE IS THE MAN, man. And Wookies are pretty much space mercenaries, so them doing ads for cell phone ringtones I can accept.

Yoda was supposed to be special, but he’s no different than that other spiritual charlatan, Bono Vox, prancing around for the iPod.

OK, I’d like to keep up this conceit, but my inner guy is beating the crap out of my inner nerd, so it’s time to stop.

Wrapping it up: George Lucas is a whore. Does he really need Burger King and Pepsi and some shitty phone company to help promote his movie? Didn’t he save any of the money he made from the other five Star Bores movies?

May the bucks be with you.

You got any good stories? Who does anymore?

When I and my siblings and cousins were kids, we all had old ladies living with us to who were shirttail relatives. We never really questioned why mean old Aunt Katy, crafty old Aunt Marie and downright pixillated Aunt Mollie and our grandmother shuttled back and forth between our homes.

I’m still not up on all the details, which seep out from time to time. But the gist of it is my father and his two brothers didn’t have a pot to piss in when they were little. My grandparents didn’t have a place of their own until they were all well out of diapers.

Instead, they lived with relatives and friends. The widows living with us -- it was payback for keeping the family afloat.

My Uncle Tom let loose with a story I hadn’t heard before just last weekend, about his Uncle Dan. Dan was a practical joker with my uncles, and one time (well, at least one time) my uncles took it too far, stomping up Dan’s pride and joy, a small piece of land he turned into his pride and joy of a lawn.

Dan was pissed, and yelled at my uncles. After cooling off, much to their surprise, he gave them gifts. They each got a pair of roller skates -- his way of keeping them disinterested in his grass.

I loved the story -- and being a writer was a little miffed I didn’t hear it until now. Writers are that way. We want, need stories. It makes it easier to make up things.

This being the confessional age of Oprah, I guess it surprised me that I haven’t heard all the family tales. From one extreme to the other, I guess, either telling your innermost family secrets to the world on TV, or keeping amusing anecdotes from your childhood quiet until an otherwise uneventful Saturday night in May.

The story made me think, too, that Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes is pretty close to a lot of American experiences, from less than 40 years ago, and even today.

I mean I had a buddy when I was in high school who came from a family of five kids. They lived in a two-bedroom house and nobody seems to have turned out the worse for it. In fact my buddy has a nice job in banking out west now, and his brothers and sister all have families of their own.

Another buddy of mine came from a similar situation in Michigan’s UP. His home was heated by a wood burning stove.

And to think, lots of white people out where I live bitch about Mexicans (their generic term for anyone brown) who live in homes with more than one family.

Then again, out here in the burbs with the endless sameness of our subdivisions and plasma TVs I wonder if roots are just one of the things we’ve forgotten.

Sure it’s nice to have a degree of comfort. Does that have to make us bland? Does it have to rob us of our stories?

Maybe it’s TV and movies -- unless it’s hyperbolically dramatic, people feel their own tales aren’t worth telling. But our own tales are what give us identity.

Without them, we are just human strip malls.

A Whole Lotta People Got Krushed By Dis

The documentary about the Enron assholes, The Smartest Guys in the Room, finally hit the movie screens last weekend, albeit just a few.

I haven't seen it yet, but have read reviews and seen interviews with the filmmakers. And after catching the hype I thought, hell, Kenny Boy Lay and Jeff Skilling should form a rap act. They sort of already have.

Rap gets the bad rap for polluting the minds of our callow youth with all dat sexist imagery, the obsession with cash and bling, the thug life glorification of violence. So much of it is such a shit bag of clichés - such triteness hasn't been seen since the glory days of hair metal in the 1980s.

While parents and Bill Cosby bitch and moan about this, it still makes a ton of money. That's what it's all about, anyway - say whatever the fuck you want, as long as someone will buy it. And crap like 50 Cent sells by the crunk-load.

At the same time, the dubious Donald Trump has become a lovable TV star - and rappers hang out with the bozo billionaire, so there is precedence for my idea. I think it's called synergy by the business types, when you merge to create even more pungent crap.

How perfect then to merge a hip hop scene heavy on bad boy imagery with actual business bad boys. Sure, shooting up your rival is more sexy for TV. But that ain't nothing compared to the shit Enron pulled, robbing grandmothers of their retirement money, shafting a whole state by artificially jacking up energy prices and generally being badasses, living large and in charge of some mega-global nastiness.

Kenny Boyyy's Bottom Line could be the name of the record company and Lay's rapper name could be N. Ronn. Durty TriXXX could be Skilling's rap name as he apparently masterminded most of the schemes. Andy Fastow could become DJ 401K (AKA The Proffit Takerr).

The crew could hook up in prison, where if we're lucky they'll all become some big guys' bitches. Behind bars they can build street cred. Tavis Smiley came up with the perfect album title: A Whole Lotta People Got Krushed by This.

Sure, the CEO Posse is middle-aged, and rap is a young man's game. But rap has been around for almost 30 years, so older fans need an act, too. A lil sumfin for the dawgs in the board room, ya dig.

It's all good.