I thought he would live forever but it turns out I am full of shit.

Simba is dying.

Not tomorrow. No. But within the next 12-18 months, he will die. He is 10 and running on a ¼ tank of gas in a ’76 Chevette. At some point, his life will sputter.

Simba and I have never been particularly close. My younger dog Clementine and I were an instant match. Sonny and Cher. Bonnie and Clyde. Like every happy couple on those Match.com commercials, we hit it off on the first walk. As we found out, I’m totally into rawhides. She’s totally into the band Hockey. We hardly leave the apartment.

I didn’t plan it this way. Simba was supposed to be Clementine. He was supposed to be the brazen, animated, shotgun-riding hound whom I would chase in fields of daffodils during our Heartgard commercial shoot, talk about on dates, and  feed Snausages to on road trips to find myself. 

When I picked Simba up from the pound 10 years ago, I had our life planned much like a stage 5 clinger. We would become the first power couple – Kimba. Rumors would swirl. We would be caught out late outside my apartment. Us Weekly would publish photos of me walking him on the beach somewhat out of shape. People would publish a story about how he was spending time with the more patient next door neighbor Doug. But we would endure.

I didn’t like that he peed on the couch, but best friends who got drunk at the time were doing the same, so I let it go.

A year or two went by. I waited for Simba to meet my expectations as a human, and he didn’t. He was somewhat of a plodding puppy, more 10-passenger church van than car, and this lumbering continued into his youth. He didn’t break into sprints to chase tennis balls (not even the really fluorescent ones that gay tennis players should use), would “shake” with as much enthusiasm as a hooker doing an overweight Hardee’s manager, and generally speaking, seemed to care less about me than the DMV did.

He acted aloof. He feigned interest in being petted here and there. He ran, no moseyed, away several times in his first few years, which seems impossible considering his size (65 pounds) and pace (a turtle with a torn meniscus).

I caught myself muttering “I hope he doesn’t come back” the sixth time and didn’t hate myself for saying it. I would find him, ask him what his fucking problem was (I swear that once he muttered “you, dick.”), and take him back to my apartment, where we would continue to get along like two people who have been in a relationship too long and just want to set the other person’s belongings on the curb and hit the road in a convertible with the cute server from Red Lobster.

Our disconnect was exacerbated by the arrival of Clementine.  Simba was just over four years old when I took her in as a six month old puppy. She was a a fifth of vodka – a true party starter.  She constantly did her best. And minute by minute, she left life come ripping right through her. Hey joy was boundless. Her exuberant facial expressions could only be captured in a cartoon dog drawn by someone aftter drinking 12 glasses of box wine.

We hiked mountains. We went swimming. We ate muffins for breakfast on the weekends. When relationships failed, I would slip on my Nikes, grab her leash and run with her galloping alongside me for miles as I sweated  out too many beers from the night before and my own shortcomings.

In contrast, Simba would listen to my problems for an exceptionally short period of time before turning away and licking the area where his balls used to be.

But my relationship with him would change  in 2005 when a German Sheperd got loose during one of our walks and tore a path toward him in a fit of rage.

Synopisis:  When conventional therapies fail to help their autistic son, Rupert and Kristin Isaacson travel with Rowan to Mongolia in the hopes that a combination of traditional shamanic healing and horseback riding will benefit him. Director Michel O. Scott’s documentary juxtaposes scenes of the family at home in Texas with their journey on horseback across the breathtaking Mongolian countryside in search of reindeer herders and a powerful shaman.

My Seven-Word Movie Review: “More powerful than Tyson’s punch in ’85.”

Order The Horse Boy on Netflix

Synopisis:  WASTE LAND follows artist Vik Muniz from his home in Brooklyn to his native Brazil to the world’s largest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho, located in Rio de Janeiro. There he photographs an eclectic band of “catadores”—self-designated pickers of recyclable materials. Muniz’s objective was to paint the catadores. However, he changes course and collaboraes with these inspiring characters as they recreate photographic images of themselves out of garbage –  revealing both the dignity and despair of the catadores as they begin to re-imagine their lives.

My Seven-Word Movie Review: ” Beauty’s in the eye of GLAD holders”

Order Waste Land on Netflix

Synopisis:  Josh Harris, often called the “Warhol of the Web” through the infamous dot.com boom of the 1990′s, founded Pseudo.com, the first Internet television network and created his vision of the future, an underground bunker in NYC where 100 people lived together on camera for 30 days over the millennium.

My Seven-Word Movie Review: ” Are cameras a better drug than coke?”

Order We Live in Public on Netflix

Synopisis:  Documentary that chronicles how Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” was plagued by extraordinary script, shooting, budget, and casting problems–nearly destroying the life and career of the celebrated director.

My Seven-Word Movie Review: ” Sheds light on a creative mind’s darkness.”

Order Hearts of Darkness on Netflicks

Well?

I’d like to know. I would. No, I need to know. I need to know because I am very close to choosing to stop watching all TV that makes me feel like I am regressing.

By saying that, I know run the risk of being confused with “that guy who doesn’t own a TV.” But that’s absurd. I own a very nice TV purchased at a very popular retailer. Plus I don’t make mixed tapes with segments from NPR’s “All Things Considered,” get pissed at you because you don’t fully appreciate cell division, or do yoga in my Chevy Volt during my lunch break. Unlike him, I also do not make my own peanut butter. That would just be dumb.

I buy it from Whole Foods for $10.99 because Whole Foods buys organic peanuts in Honduras and that makes me feel much better about myself, which is smart.

No, I am not going to stop watching TV, I am just going to stop watching TV that numbs my brain and wastes away time that could otherwise be spent pursuing interests that matter.

Like volunteering with dogs, developing my writing skills, and looking at the bra section in the Sears catalog.

Now, I will say I don’t watch much TV that isn’t reality TV in the same way I don’t read much fiction. Truth is stranger than fiction, plus reading fiction just seems like a grown up version of playing with imaginary friends (which I am quite fine with as long they are smitten with dogs, sarcasm and vodka).

So if I don’t watch anything but reality TV that makes my ambition somewhat more attainable. For if my goal then is to eliminate all reality TV shows that make me regress, I obviously stop watching MTV, TMZ, TLC and E!, or as the Bible refers to them in the Book of Revelation, the Four Horseman.

Done.

I don’t watch MTV because I’ve never gotten along with tan people (I’m from MN), watching TMZ makes me feel like a sleazy injury lawyer who sells cars on Friday and roofies girls on Saturday, tuning into TLC makes me feel short because shows only feature midgets, and checking out E! makes me want to frost my tips and date a girl named Jasmin.

That leaves a few channels up for debate that I watch – Paladium, The History Channel, Animal Planet, CNN, A+E and ESPN.

One question to ask of the remaining shows is “What actually makes me smarter – in a good way?” Those stations will have immunity. I think we all agree that music (except for Insane Clown Posse, Lady Gaga and Creed) is art so Palladium is safe. My grandfather, a WWIII POW who fought against Hitler, watched The History Channel so that station is off the hook.

I want to go to bat for A+E. It’s an important channel that makes me smarter. But I’m not sure that knowing how to cook crack cocaine using a roof gutter and a vanilla candle from the dollar store adds to my bottom line.

Animal Planet makes me smarter in that some shows provide me with tips and tricks for training my dogs, so it’s safe. To be fair, I will turn it off when “50 Scariest Animal Attacks” airs as I just cannot justify watching tourists in New Guinea fight off tree kangaroos with bottles of sun block.

We’re down to CNN and ESPN. CNN has a pass for obvious reasons, but if Piers Morgan keeps talking about Charlie Sheen I will need to reconsider.

That leaves ESPN.
 
I started this post by asking if sports is reality TV but let’s assume it is. The more pointed question I need to answer is, “Is sports reality TV that has value other than to entertain?” CNN, Animal Planet and the like do. Yes, they do entertain, but they also educate, inform and inspire.

That last verb is important. ESPN does educate during shows like “Outside the Lines,” but that’s not why I watch the channel. It also informs, but finding out that Kevin Love had another double double is not valuable information in the same sense that information from CNN is. Of course if you’re a staunch conservative and Love’s relative you may disagree.

But ESPN does inspire. It inspires people to spend time together – which I did two months ago to watch the Celtics vs. the Hawks with two co-workers. It inspires us to connect with those we love – which I did when I called my father after the Timberwolves traded KG.  It inspires raw emotion, important to the soul – which I felt when Gary Anderson missed a chip shot field goal to secure a Vikings win in 1998. It inspires us to push ourselves. I remember going for a long, reflective run after watching Jim Valvano’s ESPY speech. That run made me want to run a marathon, which I did for the first time in 1997.

With that, I will keep watching. I will, however, make it a point to refrain from standing up in my own apartment and screaming “Make his face bleed!” every time the station shows a fight from a hockey highlight.

That probably doesn’t make me a better person. Plus, “Make his face bleed!” is something JWoww would say.

In one of the most poignant essays on the human psyche in the last 20 years, author and social color man Chuck Klosterman wrote:

You are not like Cal Ripken Jr. You aren’t that dedicated, you aren’t that intense, and you care about your job a whole lot less. Ripken might be your favorite player of the past 25 years, but the two of you have almost nothing in common. In fact, I bet there are many days when you wish you could just take a suitcase of money to Australia, drop out of society, grow out you hair and smoke cannabis all afternoon while having sex with whoever you felt like. In fact, if you had the chance, you’d probably do it tomorrow. But you know what? I bet you also think Ricky Williams is despicable.

I can’t read Bode Miller’s mind, but I bet the interior monologue bouncing around his cerebral cortex sounds something like this: “My job is OK, and I’m good at it. I suppose I could even be better if that was the only thing I cared about, but I’m not sure what the benefit of that would be, beyond appeasing a bunch of people I’ll never actually meet. And if I can get paid this much money for being myself, why would I want to force myself to become somebody else’s caricature? I’m already content with who I am.”

Now, it is possible that such sentiments would make you hate Bode Miller even more.

It’s also possible you hate him because you feel exactly the same way.

This is exactly why you hate Charlie Sheen but would trade places with him in the time it takes to microwave a Hot Pocket.  You hate him for unfulfilling his talent, but love him for fulfilling his life. Morality aside, he’s having the fucking time of his life. A better time than me. A better time than you.  

You have a mortgage payment. An outstanding credit card bill. A sick child. Car repairs. A coworker who makes you want to quit. 

You hate him because he doesn’t have to deal with this. But you love him because he put himself in a position where he doesn’t have to.

You would run off to an island and roast marshmallows with Ricky Williams and let the tropical rain fall on your tongue alongside Sheen.

But you won’t do this. You won’t because you cannot and would not want to deal with the repercussions. But Sheen does. He puts out a welcome mat and starts a pot of coffee for them, and that bothers you. 

You hate Charlie Sheen because we have to force ourselves to become someone else’s caricature.  We agree with bosses when we don’t want to. We hold our breath with co-workers when we don’t want to. We appease friends, partners, boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands and wives.  We constantly accept less than we think we deserve in the name of the greater good.

Charlie Sheen would tell you he is the greater good. Then he would wax poetic and use onomatopoeia effortlessly in a sentence because the son of a bitch is better spoken than you.

We appease people. He appeases himself. That’s sounds disgusting, but really, really fucking amazing. Kind of like McDonald’s.

Which you ate last week.

You gorge one way. He gorges another.  But of course he’s doing coke so he’s not gaining any weight.

We all want freedom. You may choose to become a writer or an artist or a business owner if you ever obtained it, but freedom is freedom, whether you’re doing what your passion calls you to do or a hooker named Luscious from Dallas.

He has freedom. Do you?

Probably not. It’s why we watch CNN, read People and check TMZ.com. We won’t risk leading his life, but we’ll risk staying up late enough to catch up.

So make fun of his exploits. Call him immature. Call him deranged. Or tell your friend Julie that he has lost it.

Or have you lost it?

He’s the one calling all the shots. We have to go to Squeaky Pete’s on Thirsty Thursday to get the same exhiliration.

Which is more depressing? That, or $200 whores?

“He left his mark.”

We say this when a man has bestowed upon us an indelible impression. The difficulty with attributing this quality to my grandfather, however, is that he didn’t leave a mark, he left thousands of them – bold, dazzling marks that, when viewed from a distance, collectively resemble art. Art of man. Art of soldier. Art of husband. Art of grandfather.

During family visits to his farm in Iowa as a child, I would anxiously wait for him and his sons to return from the corn fields for lunch. When they did, I would chomp on homemade brownies, swig RC Cola, and fixate my eyes on his green, weathered John Deere cap. I remember wanting to wear it more than I wanted to wear a Yankees hat or a space helmet.

I didn’t know enough about farming to know what he did, but his clothes and boots, which were persistently caked with dust and soil, told me how he did it – with a steadfast love of God’s soil and a movie-script-like devotion to supporting his family. Out of dirt rose life. As a youth, he dug foxholes to support General Patton, and as an adult, he plowed farmland to support my grandmother. A nation, and a family, carried on.

When you’re just a small boy, as I was when I got to know my grandfather, you spend stretches of time between naps playing with superheroes. Grandpa qualified for the same status. He was taller than two old ladies stacked on top of each other and whose long stride seemed to make the advent of the Ford automobile irrelevant. He towered over me as a six-year old, so much so that I was concerned he would hit his head on the sun, especially when it set.

His work ethic was superhuman. He could leap tall buildings in a single bound, but would stop and fix the roofing on several of them. Most impressive was his humility. My grandfather let his work speak for him. He grew generations of food and family – impressive feats that he would only acknowledge by uttering, “I’ve had a full life Keith.” 

I grew up. And up. I woke up one day and, at 6’ 5’, stood taller than him. Yet his hands – two tools that cultivated people and earth, loomed eternally large. A few years ago when he was 88 years old, I sat alongside him in his house and considered the magnitude of what these hands had held.

When he marched into Africa to fight Hitler as a teen, he gripped a rifle. Captured in Italy and imprisoned as a POW for two years, he clung to hope. He held my mother after she was born, then a tractor steering wheel, and then, for the very best parts of the rest of his life, my grandmother.

Finally, with typical grit, he held mightily onto life long enough for those who loved him to hold those hands of his one last time.

With that, his work here on earth was done.

In heaven though, it’s just beginning. Someone has to harvest those fields of gold.

Conventional wisdom says that you can’t teach an old dog a new trick, but the lady in condo #1210 in my building is trying to do exactly that.

She’s trying to teach her dog Jack to live a little longer.

Jack is a gregarious, six-year-old Golden Retriever with a rich, lustrous red coat that puts most my ex-girlfriends’ hair to shame. Jack is lean and lanky, so when he runs he strongly resembles a horse, a similarity which of course quickly dissolves once he starts sniffing peoples’ butts in the building’s elevator.

Jack, like most Golden Retrievers, possesses a friendly, eager-to-please demeanor. If he were a guy, he’s be the loyal, wide-eyed friend up for anything who shows up to a party with a 12-pack of beer because it’s the nice thing to do.  

Of course then he would drink too much, rip off everything but his underwear, throw up on the girl he’s hitting on and pee in the fish tank but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Two months ago, I struck up a conversation with Jack’s owner “Ann.” The quotation marks are necessary because, well, I don’t know her name. Like most people in my building, I know all the dogs’ names but just a few of the humans’. She is “Jack’s owner,” I am “Simba and Clementine’s owner” and so on. This can seem unsettling but when I consider that I could be “The Guy Who Never Dusts His Apartment” or “The Guy Who Routinely Comes Home with a Fifth of Vodka,” I elect not to protest.

Ann said she had just found out Jack had cancer, unfortunately a common disease in the breed.

“I’m so sorry. What kind?” I asked, as if that would help frame any of my responses. I just wanted to be inquisitory and polite.

“Mastocytoma. He has a mast cell tumor of the paw. Twenty-five percent of all dogs with skin tumors have this,” she responded.

With that, Jack ran by us, in full pursuit of a squirrel, and then a bird, and then a tennis ball. If he had cancer, I didn’t know it. He was in superb spirits all things considered. Hell, if I get a hangnail I curl up in bed, cry, eat Ben and Jerry’s Cake Batter and listen to Air Supply.

“What can you do?” I asked.

“Radiation. Prednisone. Prayer.” She said, as she smiled, perhaps to make the conversation less uncomfortable.

“Good luck,” I said.

“Thank you,” she responded, as she flung a tennis ball off into the grass, which sent Jack bounding after it like it was the last biscuit on earth. He caught up to it, pawed it to a stop and chewed on for several seconds, before dropping it out of his mouth and panting with a tongue slightly smaller than a pancake at I-Hop.

Weeks later, I saw Jack and Ann again in the same grassy play space behind our condo. I looked down and saw Jack smiling despite a hairless, raw paw with a bright pink hue – the consequence of the radiation. It looked bad.

Knowing what I intended to ask, she offered, “He’s had three treatments. It’s helping a little but he can’t walk after each one. He’s fine today but the last treatment was a week ago. I talked to Tom (her husband) and we are not going to take him again. We just can’t … We can’t take him …We can’t do that … ” as her voice trailed off.

 “What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Love him,” she said.

It was a beautiful response, and one that has not escaped me since. When I head out on a run, I often see her strolling with him amongst the grass, or on the trail that snakes past our building. Ann is pretty beyond her 45+ years and her large sunhat and graceful walk lend her a sophistication you can’t pick out of a store window. When it is windy, her dresses ripple in the breeze like when you shake a bed sheet, and this adds to her eloquence. She belongs on a book jacket.

Of course, Jack is anything but, and it is precisely this juxtaposition of energies and imagery that give me pause. Sometimes I will slow up, just enough to watch them play, just enough to watch her love him. But I do so with caution, not wanting Ann (or Jack) to notice I am being deliberate. I don’t want to ruin it.

I think about stopping to say, “Jack is a beautiful dog and he loves you,” but she knows this.

I think about stopping to say, “Ann is the best owner you could ever want,” but he knows this.

Her walks with Jack are longer these days. Either that or the walks are in greater frequency. I think I know what this means, but I don’t ask. All updates from now on must come from her – whenever she feels like sharing.

I see them walking side by side.  I can tell Jack is begging for the tennis ball. I can tell Ann is begging for more time. Time to rub his ears. Time to wake up in bed alongside him. Time to watch him nap.

Time to teach him one last trick.

Every evening, sometime between 7 and 11 p.m. I leave my condo in Austin, two leashes in hand, and embark on a one-mile journey that says everything about who I am as a person, and following this, how far I have come.

“I’ve come to see my dogs as a reflection of my willingness to try to improve, as well as an unsparing measure of my frequent failure to do so. Orson is a different dog than the frantic, matted and terrified creature that arrived in a crate at Newark Airport several years ago. He is calmer, more responsive, more loving – the result, I’m convinced, of my struggle to learn and grow and to be more patient, less angry.

For better or for worse, I see Orson’s progress – and that of my other two dogs – as a mirror of my own humanity, a benchmark of my progress. Or lack thereof. … Can working with a dog really make you a good human? Probably not. Can it make you a better one? Yes.”
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        – Jon Katz

This one-mile journey is a trek on the shores of Town Lake with my two dogs, Clementine and Simba. For them, it is a walk. Actually, I take that back. For Simba, it is a very slow plodding interspersed with sniffing, stick chewing and pleas from me that range from “Simba, come ON,” to “Simba, let’s GO.” Simba is slower than a stuffed animal but sweeter than honey.

For Clementine, it is a dead sprint. She rushes ahead, her curious soul exploding, like a 14-year-old with TNT and a flamethrower, wanting to vacuum every last stem of grass. She bobs and weaves out of thickets and brush, disappearing for an uncomfortable amount of time, miraculously reappearing just seconds after I have started to grow anxious and begun swallowing hard with regret of ever letting her off the leash.

They are me.

I possess a duality that confuses people. I am Clementine and Simba, physically and emotionally. I can run ahead or lag behind. Physically, I am capable of running 26.2 miles, as well as sitting in the same spot for three days and developing bed sores watching “Cake Boss” reruns. Emotionally, I sometimes demand to be the center of attention, and other times prefer if you notice the blender in the kitchen after noticing me.

I’ve often wondered what, my father, who I write about at length, and who I have described as an “old school worker bee” would say about all this. He has built houses, garages and children, not because that was ever his job. It just came naturally. Naturally, he would want to comment on the wiring in my head.

Me: “Well, what do you think pops?”

Dad: (taking off his glasses) “Well, this is different.”

Me: “Different.”

Dad: “Yeah, different.”

Me:  “Different bad?”

Dad: “No, just different. Just not the way I would have done it.”

 Me: “Right, but that’s no surprise. You used to wake up at 5 a.m. on Saturdays to kill animals. I wake up at 10 a.m. to save them.”

 Dad: “I know what you’re getting at, but I also played football and as memory recalls, I coached you in high school. Weren’t you the captain of the football team?”

Me: “Yeah. But I’m not sure I understand your point.”

Dad: “My point is that you take after me and you don’t, and that is a complexity that I have grown to understand and appreciate. I am simple man Keith. You know that.”

Me: “Simple sounds like an understatement.”

Dad: “To you it is. To me it’s a compliment.”

Me: “And you think I’m complex?”

Dad: “Well, yes, we all know that. But it defines you, and that’s what important.”

Me: “I’m not so sure I understand.”

Dad: “Keith, as a father, you’re looking for a son to be like you, but that could mean anything.”

Me: “What do you mean?”

Dad: “I mean, as a dad, you want your son to take after you, but then looking back at your own life, sometimes you wonder if that’s possible. I mean, my mom died when I was young. I grew up quicker than you. I could install plumbing at 18.”

Me: “I was going to ask you if you could help with a leak in my condo.”

Dad: “My point is that I am what I am. You call me a worker bee. That’s what I was, and what I will always be. I’ll be taking a circular saw to my casket the day before I die.”

Me: “Does it bother you that I don’t make sense to you?”

Dad: “You make sense Keith. Just because you are a vegetarian and would rather handle a petition than a nail doesn’t mean you don’t make sense. You are strong willed and believe. You believe. I love you for that. You are more creative. I am more resourceful. But come 10 p.m. we both go to bed wanting something out of life, and we both go to bed having tried to pursue it, and as a father, that’s what you want.”