Meanwhile, I’m going to write about something that should probably be posted on this blog, which is my other ambitious project that I have been planning for about two years but has yet to “gel”.  The idea with ‘Jackstories’ (which should actually be titled ‘Jackstories part Dieux’ for those who remember the original Jackstories, excerpts of which will re-published in this space mainly because I don’t have to time to consistently post new material) and the idea with my other blog, The Global Thinker, is that since I’m not actually traveling beyond my neighborhood liquor store these days (at least not until this coming August…stay tuned for a bloggy roller coaster!), I can only adequately continue the travel theme by reading various international magazines and commenting on the material found therein.  Let’s call it “News from the Armchair Traveler.”  I should rename this site immediately. 

In fact, as soon as I’m finished with this entry, I’m going to change the blog caption. 

Anyhow.  Check this out.  This is something I read in the Economist the other day while on the train.    Let me say, before I go on, that one can look really cool in a dollars-and-cents kind of way by reading the Economist in public places.  The coolness pierces several public strata; you’re ‘distinguished’ to those who don’t ever read that particular magazine because they think you’re reading about economics–they think you’re financially smart, an intelligent financier (unfortunately, this brand makes you incredibly uncool to hipsters and retro-hippies, for financiers are REALLY not cool no matter how much money they have.  Money isn’t hip…and I won’t now launch into a hipster-money-paradox diatribe.  That’s just too many consecutive tangents).  For people who have read the Economist before, you’re pretty cool in an internationally intriguing kind of way.  And to people who subscribe to the Economist, you’re in the nerd club.  You’re nerd cool.

Having said all of that, the Economist is not the end-all of international news.  But it’s cool because it packs so MUCH of what’s going on globally into such a small space.  Read two issues of the Economist cover to cover and you’ll be current with virtually every major political or social event in the world. 

So back to what I was reading about.  This concerns China and Tibet.  You may or may not know that China is having serious problems with Tibet at the moment; or more accurately, Tibet is having serious problems with China.  I offer this caveat because I’m an International Relations student, and in one of my classes the issue of Tibet came up after things over there had been boiling for more than a week, maybe two.  “What’s going on in Tibet?” I asked.  I think there was a record scratch and the professor just looked at me and kind of raised her eyebrows.  I think I’m definitely going to get a B in that class now. 

But this year, Tibet has been calling for indepenence again, probably…no, definitely because the Olympics are coming up in Beijing and this is their big chance to get global attention focused on their desire to secede from China.  There is a whole ‘right to secession’ discussion that could take place about when a state or province of a country has a legitimate argument for secession.  Most international observers would probably support Tibet’s secession from China.  People wearing those ”Free Tibet” t-shirts would certainly be among them.  But the conversation is hypothetical because China isn’t going to let it happen – President Bush would sooner allow Oregon to secede from the US. 

China asserts that the Dalai Lama, who is now living in exile in India, is behind the Tibetan uprising (so far, the uprising has consisted of riots, which may or may not have been violent, and which may or may not have resulted in as many as 140 Tibetan deaths at the hands of the Chinese police.  We don’t know the specifics because the Chinese police have physically prevented reporters from getting too close.  All the New York Times has to go on, at the moment, is he-said, she-said accounts from Tibetan monks and Chinese police.  This is unbelievable to me considering that journalists have been getting themselves blown up and shot by the dozen to provide accurate coverage in Iraq.  Journalists are relentless, you’d think they’d find a way.  Those Chinese blockades must really be something.)

Reporter:  “Excuse me sir, I need to go down this street to see what is happening over there.”

Chinese cop:  “Forget it.  If you go anywhere near there we’ll shoot you.”

Reporter:  “Can I quote you on that?”

Chinese cop:  “Ok, sure.  Write it down.  I said ’I have to keep you away in order to protect your safety.’”

Anyway, back to the Dalai Lama.  Get a load of this, I had to read it three times.  Apparently – I’m really going to butcher this now, so please correct me if necessary – if/when the Dalai Lama dies, he will be reincarnated into another human being somewhere on Earth.  I’m assuming it’s usually in Tibet, although I’ll also assume that if he’d rather be re-born somewhere else because, say, Tibet is not such a safe place for a new Dalai Lama, he can be reincarnated elsewhere (I need to research this).  The spiritual leader of the Tibetans exists eternally in this way; every time he dies, he pops up again in a different body.  It’s a beautiful thing, really.  Try as you might with whatever terrible means you may think of, you can’t ever kill the Dalai Lama.  It’s impossible.  This is a familiar religious theme.  The Chinese government has come to realize this, and so now they’re trying a new tactic.  They are quite threatened by the Dalai Lama, as he is a beacon for his followers and a source of strength and inspiration for them.  In addition, he’s internationally respected and has the ear of the U.N. and some major international players, including the U.S.  The Chinese have asserted that the Dalai Lama is behind the latest uprising, leading it from afar – sort of the way a Mafia leader might run operations from within a prison cell.  So here’s the new tactic.  Ready for this?  The Chinese government is going to write up an edict that states that it has the authority to choose who the new reincarnation of the Dalai Lama will be.  Seriously. 

I mean, the Economist has published some bold statements before that seem suspect to me, in a hokey kind of way, but they’re stating a fact here, not an opinion.  We have to assume their facts are legitimate.  And I had to look up from the magazine, while sitting on the train, with my face contorted into a WHAT?, which I saw reflected in the window across from me. 

So let me get this straight.  The government has a problem with the Dalai Lama.  They realize that, even if they could send an assassin into India to expose him to plutonium or whatever, he would just pop up somewhere else and the Tibetans would get their leader right back.  Tibetans, in this way, will never be without a focal point for their religious and social unity.  So, to solve the problem, they’ll just get on the phone to God or Buddha in this case, and say “Um, yes, we’re calling to let you know that we’ll be relieving you of your ability to insert the Dalai Lama’s soul into the next body…yeah, we’ll be taking that over for you…yes, that’s correct…yes, well, you see, we don’t really like the bodies you’ve been choosing lately…we’re going to write up our new power in a formal document and inform the masses…”  They really are going to declare this privelege, and they will legitimately expect Tibetans to believe it and accept it as true.  And then they’ll choose some Chinese government loyalist in a Dalai Lama costume, and that will be the end of the Tibetan uprisings?

And here’s how they’re going to communicate this newfound power: they’ll be sending it to the masses in a text message.  Tibetans have recently been receiving text messages from the government, which is trying to dispell what it claims are false rumors.  I don’t know about you, but if I start getting text messages from the US government I’ll join some militia in Wyoming.  

Look, I know it’s fad to be against the Chinese government.  People have been wearing those “Free Tibet, Man” tee-shirts since I was a kid.  I don’t want to hop that bandwagon, per se.  We’re going to have to learn to get comfortable with China, it’s not going anywhere.  But that article is really something, isn’t it?

The truth is, I haven’t narrowed this thing down, theme-wise, which has left me staring at a lot of blank paper (virtual paper, Microsoft Word ‘paper’). And that presents a theme in itself. The rehabilitation of a writer. This is a theme most people can relate to, because most of us, at some point in our lives, have had some creative skill that we let dry on the vine for some dry economic reason or other, and we’ve thought about picking it back up, abstractly, but when we actually do try it again, we blow through the mouthpiece and a squawk comes out the other end of the horn, and, horrified, we put it down and back away and wonder if we ever really did know how to play it in the first place or if we’d convinced ourselves in the previous life we’re trying to recapture that that squawking noise was actually music. Like our ears have matured or something. Before, in their tender period of growth they innocently possessed a more forgiving interpretation of ‘art’. Self-help books have sold millions of copies encouraging people to pick up creative pursuits of which they are secretly desirous and leading them by the hand toward self-actualization. So maybe this blog is a self-help book in reverse. It’s the awakening of a slumbering artist, except without any steps. I’m a caveman stumbling into the light. If I can do it, you can.

In the name of lacking a theme, today I’ll give you a thought I was thinking on the train during my commute to my current destination, which is Newark, New Jersey. Before I get to the thought, I’ll tell you what I’m doing over here. I’m sitting in the Seton Hall Law Library, which is located in downtown Newark, not because I’m a law student, but because this place is extremely spacious and quiet and, more importantly, is a good distance away from home, where I’ve found I’m more or less incapable of doing anything except cooking, surfing the internet for baseball articles, and watching nature shows or sports on TV (sports and nature shows comprise 90% of what I watch). I can’t even read (anything substantive) at home. For that I have to go to a café, or to the Newark Law Library.

I live in Hoboken, New Jersey. There are a number of reasons why I ended up here (there), which I won’t go into, at least not now, but I wasn’t particularly enthralled with the idea at first. I moved to New York because I had my first taste of city life in Barcelona at age 28 (truly urban city living that is, meaning living in the heart of a bustling city), and it was sort of like taking a drug. By the time that experience was necessarily over, when I’d run out of money and stamina for living illegally, I came back to the US and decided I hadn’t had enough so I saved up some cash and headed to New York. Let’s say Barcelona was a gateway drug and New York was the hard stuff. I was completely enthralled at first—so much activity!—my scattered brain was overloaded. Then I settled in and the hardness of the drug increasingly stood out as the romance faded. Now I was in a relationship. The city and I weren’t having sex everyday anymore, I was growing used to being shoved, I was walking like an Olympic race-walker.

(Note on speed walking in New York: It’s just like driving on a congested highway. There are only two speeds you can go. You can go slow, and crawl along at the pace of the glacial train in front of you, or you can go fast as hell, zipping around the slowpokes. There is no in-between. There is no comfortable pace. This happens because, as you try and get around the slow guy immediately in front of you, you immediately encounter another slow guy, and so you have to speed up a little to get around him, and then you have to speed up even more to avoid getting stuck behind the next guy, until you’re going top speed. So if you don’t want to go top speed, you just have to give it up entirely and go extremely slow. Now, extremely slow is enjoyable in, say, a small town where there’s space to think. Going slow in a cramped line like one of so many emperor penguins, receiving a ‘flat tire’—having the back of your shoe flattened—every ten steps, or going slow in a conga line of automobiles, hyper-aware of the guy who is driving two inches off of your back bumper, is not nearly as enjoyable as speeding. Here is a ridiculous, but true, confession: as I walk in New York, silently to myself, I sometimes pretend I’m a car, and I think about which gear I’m shifting into as I race around a shuffling grandma or couple of skyward-gazing tourists. I mentally stomp on the accelerator. It’s fun. I walk around New York almost perpetually in third gear, although I occasionally ‘open it up’ along an empty stretch of sidewalk…).

Where was I? The big city honeymoon was over, or something like that. It culminated in an episode where a guy punched me in the head with his elbow in the subway. Or was it the time another guy kicked me in the back? These things do happen. They happen when there are just too many people with their own individual agendas in the same small space. These are the pains of people learning to get by in densely packed places. Here’s a Nostradamus comment about the future: we’re going to have to learn this skill, because we’re eventually ALL going to be living in densely packed spaces. To quote Kurt Vonnegut, It’s true, it’s true.

Yet the post-honeymoon City (insert your favorite large city here) is not a bad place, of course. The mass of people in Manhattan are divided between those who live on the island (largely financially well-off folks) and those who commute in, either to work during the day, or to party at night. I’m going to generalize that the kinds of people who would punch you in the head in the Subway are those who get paid too little and whose commute to and fro is long and unpleasant. But the majority of the people who either live in the city proper or are there to party, or to visit, are truly happy to be there. ‘Happy’, particularly in New York, often skews toward ‘Feel Cool,’ which skews toward feelings of being part of the ‘In Crowd’ versus the ‘Out Crowd’ which gets very tedious. But you cut through all of that, you navigate around it.

Back to New Jersey, and we’re getting closer to my thought—or more accurately my sensation—on the train to Newark. So I moved off of the Island for various reasons, most of them financial, and found myself on the other side of the Hudson River in Hoboken. The best way I can sum up how New Yorkers feel about New Jersey is a moment I had with my parents (one of my two sets of parents), while we were walking around in lower Manhattan after an anti-war protest. There was this great column of black smoke billowing up from the New Jersey side of the river, I mean a really ominous column of smoke. The kind of smoke that would signify something dramatically wrong. Dad was curious to know what was going on so he asked a police officer if he’d heard anything. The officer looked over his shoulder at the smoke across the river, shrugged, and said “Who knows (or was it ‘who cares’), it’s New Jersey.” I didn’t feel this way when I moved here, obviously, because I was willing to live here after all. But I did feel, just a smidge, that I was settling for something lost in a bet. I don’t feel that way now. Before I go on to mention Newark, I should say to those that don’t already know, Hoboken is not like a lot of the industrial lowlands of New Jersey that bleed away from New York (although it used to be in some ways). Hoboken is an antique, extremely well-preserved, classic immigrant neighborhood. Truthfully, it shares many of the same historic traits of Brooklyn and Queens, only in microcosm (Brooklyn and Queens are enormous—Brooklyn alone is larger than Boston—whereas Hoboken is only a mile square).

Anyway, the thought, or rather the sensation I had on the train ride from Hoboken to Newark today, was that I liked the trip. More accurately, I like the trip, generally, every time I take it. This is a surprising realization, that has implications, because the trip from Hoboken to Newark—or any trip from anywhere to Newark—is, on paper, an ugly trip. Especially today, when it was gray and wet and February-bleak. You look out the window and all you see are miles of raw industry. Semi-trailer yards. Barbed-wire fences. Junkyards. Warehouses. Structures of oxidizing, corrugated metal, piles of rusted steel, stretches of train track and windswept post-industrial scratch. Half-hearted graffiti. Dank tunnels. It looks like what I always thought Siberia might look like, growing up during the Cold War. And the weird thing is, probably because I usually take this trip during the weekends, there’s hardly a soul to be seen along this plain. And I like this trip, deeply. It’s not that I look forward to it, I don’t even think about it until I’m on the train and viewing this lonely, seemingly somehow forgotten place through the train window. But I surprised myself and recognized today, for maybe the first time, that there’s some kind of deep, lonely peace I feel when I’m out there. And I pondered for the entire ride why that might be. Here’s a little bit of what I came up with: because it’s completely real. There’s absolutely no surface level, none of that Manhattan sheen, no attempt to impress or pretend or convince. It is what it is. It doesn’t apologize. But that’s not it entirely. For it is depressing, there’s no denying that. And I’m not saying that if I could somehow oversee a massive cleanup and constructive rejuvenation of the area I would hesitate for a second. There’s this voice in my head, this down-on-his-luck character who lives out here saying “Yeah, you like it so much? Come on down and live here, see how you like it then.” No, I don’t think I could live here.

I’m just saying that in its hardness, there’s a silent survival instinct here. A kind of solitude. No wasted words.

In addition to an inexplicable hiatus from writing, I also took an even more inexplicable vacation from music.  I’ve gone through, almost literally, a year and a half of silence. Back in high school, standing on the accelerator of my ’83 Honda, with my Weird Al Yankovic curls blowing in the wind, I drove around town with a large plastic shopping bag bursting with cassette tapes in the passenger seat. Rush, The Cult, Primus, Metallica, The Talking Heads, Suicidal Tendencies, Queensryche (among dozens of unmentionables. Ahem, Ratt, cough). Then I became an amateur audiophile in college. They’ve labeled my generation the “X generation.” More accurately, we were/are undoubtedly the “mix tape” generation. After college I went through a more civilized classical music phase, during which I had the good fortune to schmooze with dozens of incredibly talented and paranoid orchestra musicians. For those few years, I was able to stand in my father’s living room, stroke my beard, and rub musical elbows with my classical music-loving father. Then I went to live in Spain and took a completely unexpected foray into electronic music, long after Raves had become popular and then more or less died out in the US. I went that route because at that time (2002), in the Barcelona night scene, that’s all there was. You either liked it, or you didn’t dance with girls. I became a big fan, of course. Then I came back to the US and moved to New York at the exact moment that something unbelievable happened. The iPod was born…

If I was an amateur audiophile before that, something exploded between my ears, and my life truly began to rotate around music. My daily goal was to get my hands on anything I hadn’t heard before. Punk, Jazz, Classic Rock, Metal, Opera, I didn’t care. Anything. Everything. Hundreds of dollars later, I had nearly filled a 40 gig iPod. They say you can push ‘play’ on a 40 gig iPod, walk away from it, and provided it’s plugged into the wall, it won’t stop for a month without repeating a song. I was ready.

I took my iPod on a six month voyage outside of the US. I was going to learn who I really was, or something ambiguous like that, but in addition I was going to learn how various cultures party (yep) and listen to a lot of music. I was going to give a thoughtful listen to each and every one of ten thousand songs. It was going to be great. Until the iPod died, of course. I still remember standing there in this cinder-block apartment I was staying in, staring at the little machine. This was in Mexico, in July. How can I describe July in Mexico? They say the fallout from a nuclear war would be cold. Nuclear winter, they call it. Well, if it was hot, then I imagine it would feel like July in Mexico. Put it this way: it was so hot I would erupt into spontaneous laughter. I was laughing at how hot it was. My iPod, however, just heaved for a second, and then died. I see an image of a tiny librarian running to retrieve the album I wanted to listen to in a building that looks like the Library of Congress, in post-apocalyptic heat. It was too much. I don’t really blame the iPod at all.

I listened to whatever I could for the rest of the trip. And then I returned to the US again, found myself at the end of another loop, made the fateful decision to study the world and how it works and unintentionally shelved music and writing.

Well, here we are again. I’m hanging out with Writing again. And I’m playing a Spoon album as I write this. And after a year and a half of silence, I can’t tell you how amazing it sounds. You want to really appreciate how great something is? Go for a year and a half without it. Except don’t really do that (just pretend you did).

(A quick Google search with the terms “cow foot soup, health benefits” reveals that pig’s foot soup—not what I asked for, but…okay I’m listening—is healthy “because the gelatin that slowly cooks out of the feet and into the broth is believed to prevent deterioration of the knee ligaments”). There you go.

But none of that is important. What is important is that the cow’s foot soup got me thinking of an unsolved mystery that surfaced a few years ago. A zoological phenomenon concerning cows was explained to me by a guide in Ecuador, and I still don’t know whether to believe it. Here’s a journal entry from August, 2005 to get you up to speed:

A man with four horses arrived, we mounted them, and we headed into the hills. That horse ride was one of the more remarkable experiences I’ve had. We climbed a path until we reached the summit of a mountain that overlooked a cloud forest, some of the most beautiful Andean country there is. Our guide was a native of the area and showed us a variety of medicinal plants that his ancestors had been using for centuries. At one point we dismounted and walked through the forest to a small waterfall, noting rare tree species along the way. I left the path for a moment to do a little business behind a tree, and while I was back there I noticed a number of large animal droppings that strongly resembled cow patties.

“What are those droppings?” I asked the guide when I returned.

“Which droppings?”

I described what I’d seen.

“Those are wild cow droppings,” he said.

I’m famous for being gullible and I’m also a gringo tourist, so it’s entirely possible that what the guide proceeded to explain is false. In fact, it’s likely that he’s full of manure, but I have to give him credit for explaining the entire thing with the soberest of expressions. If he was pulling one over on me, it was the best performance I’ve seen, and he persisted in the face of my refusal to believe it. I’ve been made the ass of a joke so many times in my life that I hardly believe anything anymore.

For example: There’s a sculpture on the Lower East Side (the capital letters here are highly important to New Yorkers) of New York that is basically an enormous, iron cube balanced on one of its corners. A friend of mine told me one night, shortly after I’d moved there, that it swivels, that you can move it if you push on it hard enough.

“Go ahead and give it a try,” he said. No way was I going to push that thing until my face turned red while he and his friends doubled over in the background. But you know what? It really does move.

It is in light of the phenomenon of the iron cube somewhere near the Bowery in New York (check it out for yourself) that I’ll bother relaying the guide’s explanation for the cow patties I encountered in a cloud forest in the Andean highlands of Ecuador: They belong to Jungle Cows. That’s right, Jungle Cows. Gary Larson, get your pen. It follows the same concept of how Mustangs came to exist—that domesticated animals escaped captivity, survived in the wilderness long enough to reproduce, and over a generation or two or three, became wild again. According to the guide, Wild Jungle Cows are dangerous animals. He related stories of locals being treed by them. I can’t imagine how a cow could ever be dangerous, wild or not—what would they do, chew you to death? Keep laughing; apparently they have horns and will charge you, gore you, and trample you like a Pamplona bull. Go ahead and try to run. Forget it, you can’t outrun them, just like you can’t outrun Grizzlies and Elephants (I’ve never wanted to believe this). Here is the punch line that keeps me from truly believing (though I’m fascinated how anyone could say such a ludicrous thing with a straight face. Jerry Seinfeld could never quite do it): the cows, after chasing some poor guy up a tree, will sit down at the base of the tree and wait until he comes down, even if it takes a day or two.

“That’s it, enough. Enough!” I said.

“It’s true. It happens,” said the guide.

It deserves research, just in case, but I’d never tell the guy I was trying to verify it. For the sake of argument, I was the only one of the four of us gringos who didn’t believe him. I kept checking the faces of the others for signs of laughter, but they all bought it, which makes way for another possibility: while I was behind the tree doing my business the guide got them together in a huddle and explained the joke. Lorenzo, if you’re out there, it’s been long enough, I found you out, come clean.

Back to the present. Every time I’m hanging out with certain of my friends and I say anything with dubious credibility they now say, “Oh, I guess it’s like the Jungle Cows.” Screw you guys. You know what? I’ve decided to do the research I said I would back in 2005. Tomorrow, I’m going to get an international calling card and I’m going to find someone from the Quilotoa region of Ecuador (where that cloud forest was) and I’m going to call them up and verify this once and for all. But I’m not going to stop there. I’m also going to find a zoologist at Columbia University or some such esteemed institution and get his/her opinion on the matter. After I’ve been vindicated and ‘probable’ existence of Jungle Cows has been confirmed, I’m going to contact the people who are making the “Planet Earth” series over at the Discovery channel and see if they’d be interested in getting some footage. Stay tuned.

One of the ways he’s dysfunctional is that he squirms quite a bit when he’s the least bit annoyed. You’ll try and pick him up, because that’s what you do with little dogs, and he’ll flop around like a fish, most closely mimicking the fish’s violent back-and-forth head motion when removed from water. You have to clamp down with your elbow and squash his ribs a bit, and if you don’t get him just right, he’ll wiggle right out of your grasp. Even Jared, the owner of the dog school, who is so highly trained in all-things-dog that I think he might actually be a dog in a human suit, couldn’t hold onto him a few days ago when Spike was doing his fish routine and flipped or flopped out of Jared’s clutches and fell on the top of an open cage door (this is the Time Out Cage, which I could explain, but “time out” is a pretty universal concept and let’s just say Spike spends a decent amount of time in there). The cage door had a small piece of metal protruding upwards which I assume was the latch (I constructed all of this in my mind as Jared described it over the phone) and Spike tore himself up pretty good. He earned a nice long gash on his stomach, that little area inside his leg that I’d probably call the “leg pit” if you want me to be specific. The gash was worthy of a half-dozen stitches and a “drainage tube.”

(The drainage tube is bizarre to me, mainly because I’m not a veterinarian. The idea is to allow for all of the foul substances that accumulate in a wound to drain out of it, which makes sense, except that the tube is open to the air. It’s an open little tunnel that leads right up into the center of the wound! How does this work?)

This all happened on Monday evening, while I was in class over at the school for humans, which meant that Natalie had to go over to the dog hospital and pick up Spike by herself. Spike wasn’t doing his fish routine when she picked him up because he’d had a fair amount of downers pumped into him for the stitching procedure. Imagine if they hadn’t done that, drugged him up I mean. Spike surely would have gotten a stitch in his ear and one in his tail.

But he snapped out of his grogginess upon arriving home and perked up enough to be in a lot of pain and give Natalie a hell of time as she tried to clamp him with her elbow and get him to swallow a pill of some kind. (By the way, haven’t they come up with some other way to get antibiotics or whatever else into a dog besides a large pill? How the heck is anyone supposed to get a dog to swallow a bad-tasting pill? I suppose you could lube it with Vaseline and then poke it into the back of his throat, but come on, even if you’re the dog’s owner and you’ve established you’re on the Alpha end of your hierarchical relationship, you don’t really want to go poking your hand into a mouth full of sharp teeth do you? And try and cram a bad-tasting pill down there, while the dog gags and his eyes water? I mean, if he decided he didn’t want to do that as much as I didn’t want to take cough syrup when I was a kid he could easily give me three or four puncture wounds. He could effectively make sure I NEVER tried that again. And we’re in the twenty-first century now, and we’re listening to huge libraries of music stored on devices the size of credit cards with no moving parts, I mean, couldn’t they come up with a gel or a liquid with a little bit of bacon grease in it? How about an antibiotics-infused milk bone? Anyone who wants to market this, you can have that idea for free).

We’re cooking with gas now, aren’t we? Are you still wondering what the hell happened to me this morning? It’s really not even that big a deal now, you’re going to get to the end of the story scratching your head. But it’s funny to me, so here it is. What happened was, Natalie went to take the dog down to Jared who was waiting downstairs, not in the dog bus, but in his own car. Jared showed up to chauffeur Spike personally to the dog school—not so Spike could play with the other kids, obviously, not with that sewed-up gash on his stomach. For not only would Spike be in danger of opening the gash again, but the other kids would certainly make fun of him if not be entirely freaked out by him. That’s because Spike is now wearing a lampshade. I’m sure you’ve seen this before—although they’re commonplace I still can’t get over how absurd lampshade-wearing animals look—but Spike’s rig is not just a typical lampshade. The problem was that he was wiggling out of the lampshade; we couldn’t keep it on his head. So we tried this inflatable inner-tube looking collar (picture a circular life preserver around his neck), which would have been fine except that it didn’t work at all and he chewed his stitches clean off and we had to take him back to the dog hospital. Seriously. Finally Jared innovated a combination inner-tube lampshade, first the inner-tube, then the lampshade, which fits into the tube, so that together they form what looks to me like a bicycle horn. One of those things clowns are always honking at the circus. Spike’s head is in the bell of the horn, of course. Dog lampshades are absurd, but this contraption is so ridiculous I feel humiliated just looking at him. And even this getup almost doesn’t work. When he reaches around to chew his stitches he can nearly reach them, he can probably even taste them if he extends his tongue enough. But it does the job. And so Natalie was carrying a dog’s body with a clown horn where his head should be downstairs to the waiting Jared and his dog limousine this morning at around 7:00 am.

It’s important to mention that it was particularly cold this morning. With global warming, the perpetual el Niño, we don’t have as many cold days as we used to. I don’t mean chilly days, I mean crack-your-teeth cold days. Seems like we just get a handful of them. Well this was one of them. It was make-your-eyes water cold. When the wind blew, you felt your skin tightening and maybe crinkling as if it were being vacuum sealed.

Natalie learned this first, with the horn-headed dog in her arms. She was still wearing her pajamas, she didn’t even put on a robe. She was dressed like that because (A) she didn’t know it was freezing before she went downstairs, (B) she thought she’d just pop outside really quick and hand the dog off to Jared, and (C) she’s ever so slightly lazy when it comes to small things like this. (She’s a tiny fraction as lazy as I am, it’s true, it’s true, but when it comes to the labor of something like getting bundled up for a brief trip outside she would never ever do it. Natalie doesn’t do chores under any other circumstances than when she absolutely has to, which is more than a small reason why I love her). At any rate, put yourself in her slippers and imagine how she felt when she rang the bell to be let back into the building—huff, huff, *breath steaming* it’s cold out here, huff, huff, *pressing buzzer* what’s taking him so long? *pressing buzzer again*—and no one let her in. I didn’t buzz her in because I was standing under a piping hot shower, contemplating something deep like my toe hair. Man, a good hot shower first thing on a winter morning sure feels good doesn’t it? I mean, is there anything better? It brings the blood to the surface of your skin, gets your circulation going and opens your eyes a bit and that hot massage on the back of your neck… It truly is one of the best things in life. This morning I lingered in the shower for an extra while, I just didn’t want to get out. When I finally did I heard this unwavering, high-pitched ring that I thought might be the smoke alarm. Or was it the buzzer of the timer on the stove, which you will accidentally set if you bump it with the coffee pot.

It took me a while to realize it was Natalie outside in her PJ’s with her forefinger frozen to the buzzer.

This is how things go around here.