Meeting Knucklehead

What do you call a malnourished, hyperactive, A.D.D. one-year-old who wriggles around like a worm, crawls under cabinets like a cat, and goes to the bathroom wherever and whenever it pleases?

If it's a beagle, you call it "Knucklehead."

There's an old song by Tom Waits called, "I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You." It goes like this,

"Well, I hope that I don't fall in love with you.
'Cause fallin' in love just makes me blue."

I know, I know-- rhyming "you" with "blue" isn't exactly W. S. Gilbert territory, but it's a great song, about the rough, down-n-out people Tom Waits knows so well, and loves almost against his will. The song's about people, of course, eyeing each other in a bar, drinking and smoking, and missing the chance to connect, and, even though it probably would have ended in disaster, regretting it forever. The song, though, could just as easily have been about setting eyes on a dog. After hearing a brief summary of this beagle on the phone from the adoption agency on Monday, I knew one thing very, very clearly: I should not, under any circumstances, go down and meet it.

Yesterday, I met the dog that I quickly named "Knucklehead." He bounded into the smelly, kennel-filled room as if there were a lit firecracker up its ass. Nose diligently to the ground, in typical beagle posture, it proceeded to vacuum every square inch of the room with its nose, barely acknowledging my presence. Until I said, "Hey, you knucklehead!" His head perked up and he pounced at my knees and immediately fell onto his back and lay there until his belly was appropriately rubbed. His eyes rolled back into his head as his rear legs twitched with delight.

"Well, you two kids have fun," the adoption agent said to me, smiling, as she left the room, closing the door behind her.

"God, I hope this fucking sucker takes that crazy-ass beagle," I'm sure she said to herself.

I didn't know exactly what to do with the dog, who was now standing on its hind legs, trying very hard to get at a fat black cat who was in a locked kennel marked "QUARANTINE."

"Uh... no! You don't want to go in there, Knucklehead," I said as my eyes scanned the room for something to distract it. I found a little tug-of-war knotted rope toy.

"Here!" I cried, "look at this fucking thing!"

Knucklehead turned his distinguished nose and brow in my direction and his eyes lit up like a nuclear winter. I'm 6 foot tall, and I swear to God this little dog leapt right up to my hairline as I jerked the rope-toy up into the air. He proceeded to do another series of Olympian vaults as Quarantine Kitty watched him warily from inside her forced confinement.

"Sonofabitch! You can jump!" I yelled as he latched his jaws onto the toy, his tail fiercely wagging. I looked at Knucklehead, obsessively chewing on the rope-toy and I thought two things, "Uh-oh, is this love?" and "Charles Schulz never set eyes on a fucking real beagle in his life."

"No!" I said and, immediately, is mouth opened. He stared at me and said, "NO? I'M A BEAGLE, MOTHERFUCKER!" This he said by a series of classic beagle howls-- but short, controlled ones. But tenor, nevertheless.

"No, Knucklehead. Sit," I brazenly commanded. And this dog, who, for nine months of his life was left out in some asshole's backyard, almost completely untrained, sat.

"Holy shit," I said, out loud. Then I uttered the more traditional, "Good boy!" and gave him the toy he desired. Then he proceeded to climb into an empty cage and smell it from corner to corner.

The adoption agent came back in.

"Sounds like a party in here," she said.

"He sat for me," I said.

"He knows sit?!" she exclaimed.

She made no bones about this dog. "You're about to meet the worst puppy in the world," she said, but with a smile.

"Are you the worst puppy in the world?" I asked Knucklehead, as he wriggled around in my lap and attacked my face with his tongue.

Didn't seem likely, but how do you know until it's too late? Well, fortunately, with an adoption center, it's never "too late," they'll always take a dog back rather than read in the paper that you smashed its head with a cinder block after it ate all your mortgage papers and throw pillows.

"I can't emphasize the importance of crate-training enough with this guy," she said, "but he will grow out of this teenager stage and he will make an outstanding dog," she said, turning up the sell. I looked around the room.

"Where the hell is he?"

"He's crawled underneath all the cages-- he likes to pretend he's a cat."

The long-and-short of it? He's on hold for us until Friday at 3:00pm. That's the witching hour. I know that bringing Knucklehead into our home and our lives will turn our home and our lives upthefucksidedown. I know that a one year old, un-housebroken beagle will be something like a medium-sized nightmare. I know my wife will flat-out say "no."

"I want a dog, I don't want a project." Well, Knucklehead isn't emotionally damaged or disordered like the charity-case dogs her mother insists on adopting every seven minutes, but emotionally and developmentally, he's probably about half his actual age, which isn't much. But he's affectionate and energetic and re-directable. He's part dog, part project.

This is what I do. This is my nature. I fall in love with cars that are totally impractical-- make absolutely no sense for my needs or my lifestyle and I try to bring them home. The house we bought, we bought mostly with our hearts-- our brains were somewhere around the block, struggling to keep up. Fixer-uppers, not-quite-theres, from the dubious to the out-and-out insane, my heart is a wayward, untameable, nonsensical beast-- rather like Knucklehead himself. I've never been in the position to have to make a dog out of a puppy before-- Finley came to me at five years old-- already a stately gentleman.

And, yes, he's still very much here. So what would he make of Knucklehead? Would Knucklehead give Finley a second puppyhood? Finley's still kind of having his first puppyhood, inspite of the odd goiter here and there. What would these two nutjobs do with, and to, each other? I just don't know.

I've got beagle fur all over my pants. And I miss him already.

Requiem for a Ferret

On November 22nd, 2009, my moustache died.

It lived peacefully, though not altogether unnoticed, beneath the shade of my gigantic, Semitic proboscis since I began growing it in early September, in preparation for its stage debut in "The Pirates of Penzance."

The director had decided that Major-General Stanley ought to have "a long, flowing walrus-style moustache, sweeping down to the jawline."

I looked at her and said, "I'll see what I can do."

"Good," she said, giving my shoulder an affectionate rub, "Oh, and great big mutton-chops, too."

Back in my high school days, I wore a fake moustache in a cataclysmically terrible production of "Kiss Me, Kate." The spirit gum used to epoxy the fur to my face left burns under my nose and, when it came time to remove the moustache, some of my skin invariably got removed, too. Not only that, but, during the show one night, I did an unexpected comedic improvisation on-stage that had the audience howling (I fell off a couch and crashed to the floor with a huge thud) but the conductor, a gigantic lesbian who herself had a moustache, was not amused. Backstage after the show, when I was getting changed, she charged up to me and, while I had my trousers around my ankles and fake, dead fuzz under my nose, she screamed at me and jabbed her conductor's baton into my sternum. And I think it was at that moment when I decided never to improvise during a production and never to wear fake facial hair.

So, when it came time to do "Pirates" I knew I was going to grow it myself. And grow it I did. In the style of Brevet Major-General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Mark Twain, and even Sir W. S. Gilbert himself, I went about my daily life sporting a 'stache any 19th century gent would have been proud to twirl.

I called it "my ferret."

Unfortunately, being Jewish as I am, my ferret never achieved the sweeping, flowing grace I had hoped for and had fantasized about wearing since middle school, when I longed for the day when I could be the epitome of the elegant, handsome chivalric gentleman.

The very model of a modern Major-General.

"Do people ever tell you you look like Groucho Marx?" the chef making my wife penne at IKEA said to me. I frowned.

"Yes," I replied dryly. He was the third person to make that precise remark that week.

The curse of the wiry, kinky Jew hair had struck again. And how.

I know it isn't right to say, but, even though it was Jewy, I liked the moustache. The crazy sideburns I could have done without, and indeed it was the sideburns that attracted the most attention, usually from goth teenagers congregating outside the neighborhood's local supermarkets. I can't tell you the number of sarcastic, sneering, "Nice sideburns!" I was the recipient of from September through November.

Even though I liked the moustache, and even though the sideburns might have been considered cool by hipster waitresses on the lower East Side, I promised my wife and myself that, once "Pirates" was done, I would massacre my facial hair. And, after our curtain calls on closing night, after we schmoozed with the audience, after I hung up my costume for the final time, that's just what I did. What had taken me over two months to cultivate was hacked off, thanks to my trusty Braun nazi shaving machine, in under six minutes. I was surprised the job did not require the services of a wheat thresher.

My wife squealed with delight when she saw me totally clean-shaven for the first time in a long while, and that made me feel good, but I was despondent over the copious amounts of my facial hair that resided in the theatre's bathroom trashcan.

That's.... mine.

Of course, being half-Israeli, I can grow facial hair simply by grimmacing during an episode of constipation, so I'm not really sweating it. I just miss my moustache. I guess the grass really is greener on the other side. The moustache, fortunately, wasn't green at all. Mostly brown, flecks of red here and there, and, of course, a very, very little gray.

What Is This: The Papparazzi?

As a writer, I feel like one my jobs is to notice trends.

For example, five times a week, I shit three times a day. Hm. Maybe there's a blog post there.

Maybe not.

When my head's not inches away from my own toilet, making keen quality & quantity observations, I do actually notice other things. One of the things I've noticed recently has to do with a rather strange trend I've observed at 20 Something Bloggers, the online blogging community to which I belong, and whose membership I hope does not get revoked after this post.

For those of you who don't know, 20 Something Bloggers is a wonderful place for blogging prowess to both notice and get noticed. I've fattened up my readership from the ranks of the 20 Something Blogger members, and I've certainly hooked my hooknose into the private affairs of others on the site as well. It's mutual exploitation at its finest-- and my father in law instructed his daughter prior to marrying me that this was the basis for ideal relationships.

He should know; he's both married and a psychiatrist.

Anyway, on 20 Something Bloggers, you're able to pick out a little avatar to represent yourself, your own personal graven image, if you will. For both my old and new blog, I have picked pen-and-ink drawings by Sir William Schwenck Gilbert from his "Bab Ballad" days, because I am an anglophile and I am obsessed with all things Gilbert & Sullivan (still no word on that "Pirates" audition-- I'll keep you posted).

Some people pick Japanamation-style self-portraits as their avatars, some pick close-ups of their cleavage (not complaining), some choose Barack Obama, who, I'm sure, is appropriately honored and moved. Delizcious has selected a picture of Miss Piggy with one tit exposed, a'la Janet Jackson, which I hope she cleared with Janet Jackson, Joe Jackson, the Henson estate's lawyers, and Kermit, who is one jealous mothafucka, from what I understand. Most people, though, choose to put up pictures of themselves, or what are purported as being pictures of themselves. Who really knows these days, am I right, peeps?

The trend that I've noticed is the staggering number of pictures of 20 Something Blogger members holding cameras.

What's that about?

On the members page, which features 21 member pics at a time, there are fourteen pictures of actual members (the other pics are either Audrey Hepburn, a string of air-drying laundry or some other weird shit) three members are featured holding cameras. Only one of them, from what I can gather, has some professional reason to have one in her possession.

Next page, 2 members with cameras.

Page 3, none. Fine. Be that way.

Page 4, well, okay-- none for a while-- though, on page 12, there is a picture of a girl holding a gun. I know, that doesn't count. You don't point that at someone and say "Say 'Cheese'" unless you're insane and/or Jack Nicholson.

One on page 19, one on page 27. Okay, I have to stop now. There are 244 pages, by the way.

And these aren't little, dinky "Coolpix" cameras, either. These are big, honkin' black things (no hyperlinked picture to accompany that phrase-- sorry-- even I have limits) and they're either big-time digital cameras, or they're old-fashioned SLR's, the photography industry's answer to the 33 record. I just don't understand

One on page 28. Okay, okay-- sorry. For real, I'm done. See? I closed the window.

I just don't understand what it's trying to communicate.

I like to take pictures? That's good. You and 76 babillion other people.

I'm so retro I have a 1976 Leica CL with a vertically-travelling shutter? Um, okay?

I'm pretending to take a picture of you while you're taking an actual picture of me? Um, okay?

I work for a newspaper? Okay, that I can accept.

I'm a peeping tom? Well, that's fine, but I wouldn't be advertising that on 20 Something Bloggers.

I work for the papparazzi? You're a disgrace. Go fuck yourself. Get away from Octo-Mom and her menagerie.

Look, it's great to want to be different-- we're all struggling with that. I'm pretty confident, though, that I'm the only homobear with some Gilbertian doodle as his avatar. Not that it's a contest of originality, but let's keep creativity and self-expression bouyant and alive. If you want to be different and pose with some sort of object from antiquity, I suggest you try a rotary wall phone or a dictionary-- the camera bit is getting a bit overdone.