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

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.

I was playing Hangman with my future six-year-old niece this weekend at a Mexican restaurant as we were waiting for food, and wasn’t just loosing badly; I was getting my ass kicked.

Ten minutes in, I had guessed eight letters, only one of which had made the cut – the letter ‘a.’  I sat there munching on chips and salsa, stupefied.

_ a _

I guessed another three letters to no avail before spitting out the letter ‘y’ in disgust, almost as a protest guess. The six-year old scrawled the letter to the right of the ‘a’ and I stared at the complex verbal arithmetic she had created:

_ a y

“Can I get more salsa?” I asked the waitress, who scurried by. I was stalling. “Maybe some guacamole too? Can you make it by hand? Oh, and I’ll take a triple scoop hot fudge sundae and an old fashioned.”

Thirty seconds passed. I blinked. Pressure was building.

“M-A-Y. It’s MAY!” I barked.

“You won!” the six-year-old shrieked. “You won!”

I looked down at the mess of letters I had incorrectly guessed that she had scribbled next to the hangman. There were 10-12 or so by my estimation, but the large font she used to write them down made it look like I had worked my way through the English and Arabic languages and was now onto Mandarin.

I had very clearly done everything but win. I had guessed so many letters wrongly that the niece may well have layered the hangman in J Crew’s winter line before he suffered his fate. Moreover, the presence of a tiara suggested she was being forced to accessorize to keep the hangman alive. We were one more missed letter away from a pair of UGZ.

My hangman was beyond hung. He suffered a very violent death. Each letter more horrific than the next. Vowels, Consonants. It didn’t matter. They came at him with a flurry and overwhelmed him. Bright red salsa stained the placemat on which his motionless body lay.

But she didn’t see the mess of letters. Well, she did, but they had no bearing on her thought process. I had messed up, but I kept at it, and eventually I succeeded, and to her that was winning.

Yeah, yeah, it’s childhood innocence, I know. But still, I smiled a smile as wide at the salsa bar, joyful that for five, maybe 10 seconds, I was reminded that it is not all about wins, or black, or losses, or white.

We live in the gray for a long time growing up – even throughout our teens. Imaginary friends dance. We use colors that aren’t supposed to go together. We take chances. Bigger ones than we take NOW.

Exhibit A: The note I passed to a girl I liked in sixth grade. That sounds trivial until I count on my fingers the number of years it’s been since I hit on a girl and I run out of hands.

I lament that life becomes black and white as we grow older – metaphorically and literally. We merely win or fail. Promoted or demoted. We furiously type away on our black laptops and clamor away on our black, well Blackberrys. Then we go home and try and inspire ourselves by hanging a new piece of art from Z Galleria, because that is what our playground has been reduced to – a bunch of white walls.

We go from coloring on walls to hanging crappy imitation art on them that we overpaid for. We go from dreaming bigger to working harder. We turn our attention from keg to political parties. It’s inevitable. We grow up. We have babies. They color on walls for us.

I find that sad. You may disagree, saying “That’s the way it has to be Keith.” I don’t know that I would disagree with you. But I certainly wouldn’t agree with you. 

So what have I learned by eating a quesadilla alongside a six-year old?

It has encouraged me to think less about the sum, or the result, or the “right” way. It has encouraged me to believe in what we disbelieve in. It has encouraged me to spend more time with people who are creative, or odd, or ever better yet, weird. Abnormal or what is thought of as wrong is so much more interesting than what we all agree on.

Life lies at the edges.

But mostly, it has taught me that if I want my Hangman to wear a Kangol hat before he dies, then fuck it, he gets to wear a Kangol hat.

I’ve stopped and started this letter to you eight different times. The first time I stopped because I found myself being too forgiving. The second time I stopped I found myself being too unforgiving, and so on. With my last attempt, I had formulated what I thought was a rational, thinking man’s response to all that has transpired, and then my dog Clementine jumped up onto the bed, licked my face, and rested her head on my keyboard.

And well, it’s not difficult to surmise the tone of the letter when she’s the editor.

I have an active imagination, and when I read the court documents detailing how the dogs under your care, if you can call it that, were tortured, I started to paint their reality. The terror they experienced overwhelms me to the point where I have to wipe my eyes, close them, shake my head like an Etch-a-Sketch and erase those thoughts from my mind.

What bothers me the most is that when I talk, my dogs Clementine and Simba search my eyes for answers. Their eyes dart back and forth as they yearn for meaning in what I say, or what I do. It kills me that the dogs you tortured searched your own eyes for the meaning behind your brutality and only found confusion and fright. 

The legal system uses the phrase “paid one’s debt to society” when a person is released from prison, so one could apply this to you. In fact, people have applied this you when arguing that you are free. Free to eat whatever you want. Free to watch whatever you want. Free to play for the Eagles. There is the opinion that you served your sentence and should be able to again chart your own course in life and play football. Legally speaking, this is accurate. You are absolved of judgment by the state and the federal government.

But some crimes are so heinous that judgment doesn’t end with the gavel. There are cases where society in addition to the government demands retribution. Yours is one of those crimes Sure, you may free be free legally, but we will incapacitate you publicly as long as we desire. My freedom allows me to do that, and anyone who tells me otherwise confuses legal sentencing with moral sentencing. The public does the latter. You have served your time with the prison system, but not with me. Not yet.

There is also the opinion that your crimes are so inherently evil that they should prevent you from certain activities, such as playing in the NFL. This argument is not a stretch. We take things away from people all the time, especially if they are felons. Society takes away jobs, the government takes away voting rights, and so on. As a company, the NFL certainly would not be setting precedent by disallowing you to continue employment.

I have two dogs and am tempted to share the sentiment of people who don’t want you to touch a football field, but I hate playing God. My beard’s not nearly long enough to start telling people how they can and cannot best provide for their families. You are a felon, but you are a felon with children. You are a human being, and I don’t feel entirely comfortable setting the limits to what that “being” consists of.

I think there is a middle ground here; some common space between “let him play” and “let him die.” We, as a society, just need to define that common ground. For me, it is this:

You tortured many dogs that lived. They have all been placed in homes now, and while I lament what they have been through, I celebrate what they will go through in homes filled with dog beds and table scraps.

It’s the ones that you tortured that died that give me pause. Those are the ones that make me bite my lip and fall into sadness. These are the ones that truly represent the sadistic nature of your dig fighting ring. I won’t go into greater detail describing that sadism because it’s sunny outside today and I’m in a good mood.

But the ones you killed are also ones that can redeem you, so pay attention. This is where the moral sentencing comes in. This is how you can make me feel better about allowing you to go about your life.

You know how many dogs in which you had a hand in killing. Tell me. Give me a number. Be honest with me.

Now, I want you to go out and save the lives of twice that many dogs. Millions are euthanized each year due to old age, demeanor or injury, or regretfully, lack of space. So, go to the county shelter in Philadelphia and find out what dogs will die that day due to lack of space. Save one of those dog’s lives. Then do it again. And again. And again. Start a website if you need to. Hell, I’ll help. Post the photos of the dogs whose lives you are saving. Tell me the story about a black lab you rescued who is now in a loving home in Philadelphia. Tell me the story about a 12-year-old shepherd mix you rescued because you wanted it to enjoy one more year of ear scratches.

Tell me those stories, and it will redefine your own.