A dog's life, or why bother?

This may or may not be of any importance to you or to anyone else in these trying times, but I do wonder why anyone would want to write a biography of Rin Tin Tin.  For those of you who know nothing of the history of American cinema, and I am sure such people must exist somewhere, Rin Tin Tin was the wonder dog who saved Warner Brothers studios back in the 1920’s. Movies featuring the heroic pooch saving the poor, the innocent, and the leading lady from Indians, outlaws, lecherous bankers and other assorted riff-raff were absolute box office gold during the Jazz Age.  Rin Tin Tin was so popular that in 1927 he got the most votes for Best Actor in the balloting for the first Academy Awards, a result the Academy disavowed because they feared no one would take the award seriously if a dog won it. The Academy polled its membership again, this time stipulating that the members could not vote for Rin Tin Tin, no matter how much money the mutt made, and so it came to pass that the German actor Emil Jannings became the first recipient of the Best Actor Oscar, as well as the first winner not to show up to receive his Oscar, which, just to be historically accurate here, was not called Oscar at the time he won it.  Coming in second to a dog must have ground on Jannings’ sensibilities no end, as did knowing that Rin Tin Tin was even more popular in Berlin than he was. Jannings returned to Germany soon after scoring an undisputed second place win, another victim of the sound revolution in films. Neither Jannings nor Rin Tin Tin spoke English very well, but the American public was more willing to overlook the lack of adequate English language skills in a German Shepherd than they were in a German, so Jannings went home to Germany to star in Nazi propaganda films and Rin Tin Tin went back to making money for the Warner Brothers.

All of which is very interesting, of course, but it still does not explain why anyone would write a biography of a dog. A dog’s life, even a dog as celebrated as Rin Tin Tin, is not particularly interesting, and yes, I can hear all of you dog lovers sharpening your knives out there.  Allow me to ask a question: did Rin Tin Tin even know he was a movie star?  Of course he didn’t—he was a dog, remember?  Whether the dog in question is Rin Tin Tin or Ace the Incredible Wonder Dog or that yipping little mutt next door that pisses in my mother’s geraniums every day, they are still dogs. A dog’s life is easy to understand: you eat, you sleep, you evacuate your bowels, you smell other dogs’ backsides, and on occasion your owner shows you how to do something, and if you do it right, you get a treat. Except for that bit about smelling each other backsides, there’s not much difference between Rin Tin Tin and your average Democratic voter. A dog’s life is not an unhappy one, all told, because it’s just the same old same old every day, which might get monotonous for you and me but doesn’t seem to bother dogs one iota.  

Given the monotony of such an existence, why would you want to read a dog’s biography?  If you are interested in Hollywood history and the scandal that often attaches itself to that history, there’s nothing to beat Flipper’s biography, not by a long shot. The dissolute dolphin was apparently an accomplished orgiast and probably a rapist as well, a common trait amongst his species, apparently, and reading about the lengths the studios were prepared to go to in order to cover up the craven cetacean’s wallowing in the moral gutter at Hollywood and Vine does make you marvel at the extent people will collaborate with squalor if they think they can make a profit from it.  Or you could read the biography of Seabiscuit, the darling of the 1930’s racing world, which is such a story of moral uplift and triumph against long odds that it will bring tears to your eyes and you will want to read the book to your children so that they might profit from the great horse’s example. But Rin Tin Tin? Or any other dog? Frankly, I would prefer to read Flipper’s confessions that he scored with his human co-stars than know that Rin Tin Tin barked on cue on Tuesday, August 6^th, 1929, and I think everyone else will probably feel the same way. I could be wrong about that, of course; there’s lots of dog lovers out there, you know.

The Situation

It has been seventeen years since the populace, including, in the interests of full disclosure, your humble correspondent, re-elected Bill Clinton President of this our Great Republic. I bring this up not to say anything negative about Bill Clinton or his administration--at this point, I am sure that neither you nor I have any interest in that--but to point out that it has, in fact, been seventeen years since his re-election, and here in our happy burg the arrival of the seventeenth year means one thing and one thing only: the cicadas have returned. Yes, they have, billions of the ugly little bastards, swarming up out of the ground in never-ending waves and shrieking from sunrise to sunset for sex. That’s all it’s about, kids, just sex morning, noon, and night, a fact brought home forcibly to me when I found two of the loathsome little bugs having at it on my windshield wipers.  I was late for work that day, so I just drove in with them still having at it the whole way in.  They were not there when I went home, so I am assuming that they toddled off after a post-coital cigarette and maybe a cup of coffee. I also assume that the guy involved bragged to all his friends about how he made the earth move for her.  That these damn things are going at it hammer and tongs is fine by me; a species must do what is necessary to preserve itself, after all, but I would prefer that they not use my car for such purposes and I would really prefer that they keep quiet about it, which is not at all what they are doing.  The decibel level of their shrieking varies from place to place, I’ve found, and one of the places the horny little bastards are shrieking the loudest is in the woods around my house.  Because of this, I can’t hear myself think in the morning, thanks to the hormonal jackhammering going on all over the place. It’s like being stuck at the junior prom with the heavy metal freaks for weeks on end.  People tell me that all of this shrieking will end in just a little while, when the cicadas are all done mating or the birds and the squirrels have finished eating their fill of them, which is what they were telling me a month ago and it still hasn't happened. To tell the truth, I can’t wait for them to go away, a trait they share with the former junior Senator from Illinois, although I am already feeling a bit sorry for the last one out of the ground.  He finally makes his way to the surface, climbs a tree, molts his exoskeleton, dries his wings, and then starts shrieking, “Yo yo yo, the situation has arrived, where the babes at,” only to have the katydids and the grasshoppers tell him that the party’s over, dude, and you missed it. That really must suck big time.

And now, for my next trick...

...SCIATICA!!! I apologize for the constant barrage of bad health news, but if I had any good health news I would send it along in a heart beat--okay, there's good health news, my heart is fine! So the pace here is going to be even slower than it usually is, assuming that such a slowdown is even possible, given that I already work at a snail's pace, and a narcoleptic snail at that. Just a font of cheery news today, aren't I?

O CANADA, GET LOST: There’s been a great deal of debate about Arizona’s illegal immigration law in particular and illegal immigrants in general these past few months, and yet I haven’t seen much comment about the Vampire State’s plans for one group of unwanted immigrants, which, I must admit, surprises me no end. I thought the idea would raise a ruckus with the same breathless alacrity that the gaggle of goniffs in the state legislature raise taxes, but no one seems to be complaining much about the idea, except for the usual suspects, and, strangely enough, no one seems to care about their opinion in the matter. I know that odder things have happened here in the Vampire State—odd is something we do well here— but this seems very peculiar to me, yes, it does.

So let me go on the record right now and say that I am all for gassing these lousy little bastards, and before you go calling me a typical, right-wing Rethuglican scumbag, permit to say that my brother, a life-long New Deal Democrat, supports gassing these wretches as well. And to the inevitable charge of racism, I say poppycock; I do not, in any way, shape, or form, advocate physically harming this country’s large population of illegal Mexican immigrants. Mexicans come to this country to find work to support their families, to help their children have better lives, and to earn their share of the American dream. Canadian geese come to this country to crap in my driveway. There is a difference, although it’s difficult to get some people to see that.

Unlike Mexican immigrants, who work hard for their money, Canadian geese lead entirely parasitic lives once they get across the 49th parallel. They contribute nothing to the economic life of the nation, they refuse to pay taxes, they are a burden on the community, they are an ongoing environmental disaster, and they spend an inordinate amount of time relieving themselves in my driveway. Supporters of this ongoing avian assault on this our Great Republic and my increasingly noisome driveway (they crap there in the bucket loads, just in case I haven’t mentioned it already) excuse such behavior by saying that, unlike Mexicans, most of whom intend to stay in the United States, Canadian geese are migratory by nature and will leave our country and my driveway sooner rather than later and that all we Americans need to do is display a little patience with them. I can sympathize with this point of view and those who hold it, though I also understand that in order to reach this conclusion geese supporters must weave intellectual loop-de-loops so intricate that they would take the breath away from anyone even reasonably irrational and leave the completely rational completely agog and looking for a drink, but my sympathy fades when I look out my window in the morning and see the objects of their intellectual desire parked in my driveway crapping away like they had nothing else to do with their time. I don’t like having to park my car in the middle of my lawn, folks, I just don’t, and then my toleration for this weak-minded rubbish flies out the window, often with some choice words following after it.

For the supporters of these geese to call these birds migratory is to take the dictionary meaning of the word, lay it upon the Procrustean rack, and stretch the word beyond its lexicographical breaking point. There are birds that migrate thousands, if not tens of thousands of miles every year, looking for food and a place to breed, preferably somewhere with much lower school taxes than I am about to get hit with. Those Canadian bastards parked out in my driveway couldn’t migrate back to Canada if their lives depended on it. There is not one of them that doesn’t look like they’ve spent their entire time in the United States chowing down on everything on the supersize menu at McDonald’s five times a day and twice more on Sunday, and then washing their Big Macs down with vanilla shakes served in fifty gallon drums. If this particular set of Canada’s ornithological pride and joy tried to migrate to the driveway across the street, 75% of them would drop dead from heart attacks before they’d managed to get to the other side, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to learn that the 25% that did arrive in my neighbor’s driveway were all diabetics. In short, the only way these fat, crapulous bastards are flying back to Canada is if the immigration people buys them all tickets and ships them home on American Airlines, preferably in economy class.

The foreign policy mavens will insist that I do nothing to these geese, that I should wait for the wise solons who govern my native state to decide whether or not they should use poison gas on these birds before I do something rash and permanently damage US—Canadian diplomatic relations. Again, to this I say poppycock, and if you don’t like poppycock, then there are balderdash, codswallop, twaddle, and baloney, attorneys at law, for you to select from. The fact is that the state government will never gas those geese—they will either find a way not to do it or they will try to kick the decision up the Federal level or they will try to run the geese for the state assembly on the Democratic Party line, where the geese will immediately become incumbents and thus a not terribly endangered species protected from the thousand natural shotguns that gooseflesh is heir to. So the geese are here to stay, which means I will have to do something about them, whether or not my doing something causes an international incident. Remember, I did not invite these geese to use my driveway as their personal rest room; they invited themselves, so clearly the onus is on the birds and not on me, although I suspect that more than one of those birds has tried to drop more than an onus on me these past few weeks. If the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs objects to the forcible methods I intend to use to remove their citizens from my driveway, let me just say that if the Canadian government would be better off trying to find ways of gainfully employing these geese in Canada rather than looking the other way when these birds decide to come across the border to crap in my driveway. If Canadian—American diplomatic relations suffer because of this, tough, that’s not my problem. In any case, that’s all I have to say about this. Really, it is—I’m not kidding.

WILDLIFE: Squirrels, I think we can all agree, are cheerful little rodents, despite their somewhat untoward personal habits, such as associating with a moronic moose, eating through power lines during the World Series, and dropping dead in inconvenient places. They do not, it seems, time their collective demises to cause the maximum amount of hullabaloo, unlike, for example, the three toed sloth, a species known for rousing itself vigorously from its usual torpor when in extremis, the better to crash elegant dinner parties, where the afflicted sloth will expire in a loud and grotesque manner on the dining room floor between the soup and the main course. So common, and so incredibly annoying, is this slothful behavior that many caterers in South American countries employ platoons of heavily armed guards and deploy them around the mansions of the local elites with orders to shoot any terminal sloth in the neighborhood on sight in order to keep the beast from upsetting the guests. Squirrels, being, in the main, a fairly polite species as rodents go, would just as soon not annoy anyone with their passing. However, this deep modesty on their parts has the unfortunate effect of making squirrels cringe at the very thought of going to a doctor when they are not feeling well and leads them to delay medical assistance until there is nothing veterinary science can do for them. This leads inexorably to squirrels dropping dead in the most unexpected places at the most equally unexpected times.

I bring this bit of squirrel-like (my apologies for not looking up a suitably Latinate word for squirrelly behavior; it has been a long day) trivia to your attention because for the past few days I and everyone else who labors in the egregious mold pit have had to endure an olfactory assault of almost unprecedented ferocity, said assault led by a squirrel who chose to become an ex-squirrel somewhere near this mycological breeding grounds’ heating and air conditioning units, causing all who enter this place to stop for a moment as they pass through the front door and say, “What the hell is that disgusting stench?!” Given that I have just survived attempts by my respiratory and digestive (unless the gall bladder is in some other system, preferably in a star system far, far away annoying Darth Vader instead of me) systems to kill me, the last thing I need at this point is to spend all day long smelling a damn squirrel that ran face first into the fate I somehow managed to avoid. I’m still feeling a bit under the weather, but the prognosis is excellent, thank you very much. On the other hand, Christmas, and with it the relatives, is coming; things will be getting worse before they start getting any better. You can bet the ranch on that one, boys and girls.

In any case, and here we are about to do a major zig along with a minor zag with a permission slip from its parents subject wise—I really don’t feel like complaining about the squirrel now; just thinking about it is hurting my still sore nasal passages—and talk about deer, which stink even worse than squirrels do when deceased but have the good sense not to drop dead on this dump’s roof. The Vampire State, which, as you may know, is a longtime protection racket prevalent in the northeastern section of this our Great Republic, has somehow managed to count the entire population of deer residing within the state borders. Some 840,000 deer live here, which is more deer than I believe there are people in Montana, penguins in Monaco, or Hasidic porn stars in Manhattan Beach. Indeed, there are so many deer here that if the state legislature, as wise and distinguished a mob of two bit peculating malfeasant goniffs who ever got caught with both hands grabbing away in the public till, chose to extend the franchise to them, this state would rate another vote in the Electoral College.

I do not think we have to worry about the legislature pandering for the ungulate vote as yet, but if Caligula could make his horse a senator then there’s no telling what those clowns would do if they thought no one was watching. The deer vote should be fairly easy to come by, I think—as far as I can tell, the only thing that deer want from this state’s political classes is the right to eat my mother’s shrubbery at all hours of the day and night and to crap all over my lawn whenever they feel like it. I appreciate—don’t think for a second that I don’t—the fact that I haven’t had to put store-bought fertilizer on my lawn for I don’t know how many years now, but I would like to walk from one end of my driveway to the other without having to think long and hard about the driveway’s extreme lack of traction.

Still, what really intrigues me here is the number itself: 840,000. I know that round numbers are, in and of themselves, inherently unbelievable, but the idea that the Vampire State could even semi-accurately count the number of deer resident here when it doesn’t know how much money it has (allegedly) stashed in the state treasury strains, and strains well past credulity, the psychic breaking point of all but the most moronic of the citizenry. If this is the state’s number, then in all likelihood the real population is anywhere between three and five times higher than this. You will, no doubt, scoff at this and ask how this could be so, and if I lived someplace else, I might agree with you. But I don’t live somewhere else: I live here. I don’t know how they missed the extra deer—maybe the deer disguised themselves as illegal immigrants, aspiring actors, or suicidal hedge fund managers—but I know the state missed them. That’s just the way things work here. To believe otherwise would call my sanity into question, I think, and lead to other unpleasant repercussions, like becoming a hog caller or an insurance salesman, a thought that sends chills down my spine and a prospect I am sure you find frightening as well.