Dog Days of August

I can't get started. I'm brain bricking. There's an idea blocked from escaping. Tear down this wall Mr. Gorbachev!

Maybe what I need is coffee, tea isn't cutting it. Be right back.

There are not that many things in a quiet life to make sport of. Yesterday, for instance, after blogging around the block, I took the dog for a long walk, studied the preterit tense in Spanish, won a Scrabble game from my wife, watched Frazier and 101 Bodies on E!, had dinner and then read for two hours. Did I mention I won a Scrabble game from my wife? Oh, I did mention I won a Scrabble game from my wife. Alrighty then. So you see there's not much here to work with. Nevertheless, (when you can get the more) I'll give it my best shot.

When I was a kid...and we sat around the cave fire listening to the elders tell stories and teach us to make high tech tools like flint knives... dogs used to have dog names. Rover, Fido, Rin Tin Tin, Spot, Wiggles, Lassie and such. Nowadays and even nowanights, dogs have people names. Max, Louie, Homer, Sebastion and Fred for example. I don't know why that is. Woowoo Charly and I decided long ago our pets would be named after literary characters which resulted in cats dogs and birds with names like Cyrano, Watson, Gatsby, Balloo, and Quasimodo. Wait! That last one was a former husband. Our current little red, long eared, sweet faced, bone beggar is named Gustavo. Gus for short. Gustavo is named after Gus, a central character in "Lonesome Dove" whose actual name was Augustus, but we Spanishized it to Gustavo knowing it would come out Gus anyway. Gus is a cocker spaniel. I like to call him a Joe Cocker spaniel, but unless you are old enough to have hunted with a sling, you won't get the joke. Cockers are a short breed so that when they run through high grass, or even when they are just excited, they bound like bunnies and their ears flap wildly as if they are trying to get the whole dog airborne. Gus's ears damn near had him off the ground as we set out on yesterday's walk.

It hadn't rained for a couple of days so we were able to leave the road and wander down an inidan trail that is usually too muddy and too steep to traverse this time of year. The trail takes us past a couple of what were abandoned indian enclosures, shacks really, but now had new occupants doing whatever it is that indians do. Nothing it would seem to our eyes apart from staring at the weird gringo in the jungle walking his dog. I mouthed an "hola" and trucked on by. (If this seems like a dry recitation of less than interesting events, you haven't read anything yet. It gets worse.) The trail ends at the same road we started out on only much further down the mountain. Most mountain roads wind back and forth as the make their slow descent. The ones that don't are called cliffs. Our plan, and it was a plan, Gus and I had settled on it after I vetoed walking until HE was tired and then taking a nap, was to return via the road. We had barely got underway when we passed another indian pile of scavenged building materials shaped into a shelter - how do these people survive? - from which peered two sets of wide, unblinking little kid eyes and the excited, happy, oh my god I'm going to pee, thrilled to see another four legged creature, eyes of a puppy of unknown parentage. In the past, when Gus was a pup himself, this would have meant a fight. Now that he is a wise and mature dog of two, it was a quick minute of sniffing private parts and then some dog code that signals let's play. Suddenly, we were three. I figured the pup would leave us shortly and return to his own home. Wrongo Alpo Breath! The pup, whose ribs looked like a canine xylaphone, figured he'd found a new fat friend who might want to share. He stayed with us all the way back to Gus's house which he allows Charly and I to share. I then tried go away, scram, beat it and get lost in three languages, English, Spanish and Profaneish, but nothing worked. Finally, I locked Gus indoors so he could watch me whup my wife at Scrabble with the hope that while I did so, the pup would get as bored as anyone reading this and would leave, depart, go home. Wrongo again Eukenuba! The pup not only stayed he took the wlecome mat literally and made it his doggie bed. We couldn't open the door without waking him. To make a long story a headache, as a friend of mine used to say and probably still does, as the day wore on and I did all those fascinating other things I've mentioned above, I couldn't forget the haunted looking eyes of the little indian kids in their rundown abode from whence the pup had come. What if he couldn't find his way back? Afterall, we're not talking Lassie here, were talking a dog named Whoknowswhat, which in indian is ...who knows what? So I picked up the mutt and tossed him in the back of The Beast and drove him home. I can't say the kids were thrilled to see him as they just stared at me as before with blank, expressionless eyes. The pup, however, seemed happy to be back and bopped excitedly over to them. I waved at futily at the zombie children and then drove away.

(The joke I want to use here is that I've driven a few dogs home in the past but this was the first one with four legs, but I won't because it's kind of sexist.)

And so ends the dog walking part of my day. Do you want to hear the rest? Me neither.

Did I mention I beat my wife at Scrabble?