Dogged Out, Except Not

I don't like getting up early, and not only because of how much better I am at staying up late than I am at getting up early, which is a lot. But on Monday, I got up very early by my standards, and not-really-all-that-early by general Monday standards, so that I could get to Madison Square Garden in time to get myself settled and onto the Garden floor in time for the 8:30am Basset Hound Best In Breed round at the Westminster Kennel Club's 136th Annual All Breed Dog Show. I did not quite make it in time for that -- although I did see some Basset Hounds as they hobbled Basset Houdily from Ring One after their circuit, so I was both close and close enough to see those baleful wonders up close for at least a moment -- but I was in the Garden for eight-plus hours on Monday, in the service of The Classical. My previous post w/r/t workload is my previous post w/r/t workload, but this was an assignment I didn't mind at all. There are only so many opportunities in one's life to spend all day kicking it with Bouviers des Flandres. This was one, and I don't regret it at all.


We'd originally obtained a press pass for the estimable Julie Klausner, but she got another assignment, which led to Bethlehem Shoals overnighting me her credential and me (um) clearing my schedule and setting an earlier-than-usual alarm for Monday. My mandate was her mandate: go there, deal with the allergies and insanity, take some pictures, and generally just do my best to absorb as much goofery as possible. I did my best, throwing up a couple of photo-heavy blog posts during the day -- this here and this slightly longer one here -- and then eating a hilariously expensive sandwich at Manganaro's (it was delicious, but prosciutto + mozzarella + roasted peppers ≠ $14, at least in a functioning sandwich market) and coming home and... not writing much else. Which is fair enough, I guess. My eyes itched. I needed to do laundry. There are only so many things to write about Affenpinschers in such a short period of time.

But eventually I got back into it, and wrote a column today on the WKC that I'm pretty pleased with. It's here, and I hope you'll read it. There are more photos, if that makes it any more enticing, but there's also a posi-core love vibe that has been missing from everything I have written for... well, for a really long time, at least until I happily made my peace with Jeremy Lin at Vice last week and got crushtarded on Bill Raftery at The Classical the week before that. I may be a happy dude yet. Or it might just be that spending this much time around affectionate fuzz-beasts is good for a body. We'll see, I suppose. For now, though, I'm a little sinus-y and a lot happier for the experience of spending all those hours around all those endearingly doggish (if spectacularly fluffed-out) dogs and endearingly dog-positive individuals. Given the choice between a headache and the broader, deeper aches that afflicted me in weeks before that, I'll absolutely take it.

Teach Me How To Birthday

It's my birthday today. I'm 56 years young, and I feel great. Gout's in remission, new LaserDisc of "Ordinary People" arrived in the mail today, and I've got Toto on pump here in the condo. Not too loud, though, since I can't really listen to loud music like I used to!

At any rate: this doesn't really mean as much anymore, all this stuff. I'm a little bit older and a little bit happier than usual, and I guess that's a good thing and augurs well enough. But I think it mostly owes to the video above. That is the attitude I am going to take in the year ahead. Also the life-jacket I am going to wear at all times, just in case.

Important Versus More Important

Where to start? I guess I'll start with the less significant stuff. Which is that what is going on in Egypt is terrifying and inspiring in equal measure. I'm under no illusions about what type of government might replace that of Hosni Mubarak there, but if it's a government chosen by the people who actually live there -- as opposed to one installed and maintained by a brutal and unaccountable military and crass, cynical international elites (like us!) -- it won't be worse than this. The Egyptians deserve better, like everyone deserves better, and I hope they get it. Given what we've seen, and given the craft and bravery and simple and amazing courage of what's going on there, it's hard to see how even the sourest bigot couldn't pull for them. Whatever their religion and whatever they want as a future -- it's safe to assume that the future will be a bit less forward-thinking on one notable non-Arab neighbor -- the Egyptians are working hard for theirs, and whatever they get they will certainly have earned.

Also, it's glib and maybe unfair, but I'll say it -- I would be really interested in seeing how our own brave exurban tricorn aficionados would behave when faced with a tyranny that deserves the name, and which has nastier things in mind than a modest tax hike on people a few brackets above them. Priorities, courage, so on -- it puts itself into perspective, I guess.

More importantly, though, much more importantly -- I wrote a David Foster Wallace parody/riff/homage/whatever for The Awl today, and I really like it and think you should read it. It is called "Brief Interviews With Hideous Football Players," and it includes but is not limited to Mike Singletary discussing his new job coaching a team in Animal Planet's Puppy Bowl and Jeremy Shockey discussing the signature appetizers he created with David Roth The Writer (and American) favorite Guy Fieri at Houlihan's. Again, sort of puts everything into perspective. Let us hope that the Egyptians can do as well as I did?

No, sorry. Can't make that joke, honestly. Pray for them. Click my BS if you've got time. Bless everyone and everything, and goodnight.

Thanks And You're Welcome

I'm back in New York City after four days in the benign sensory deprivation/regression therapy experience that is the ancestral home in New Jersey. Me, the wife, my parents, and the excitable bathmat pictured at left, hanging around a weirdly cold house -- the 64-degree setting on the thermostat was seemingly non-negotiable, with my mother going so far as to offer a sweater to a small/elderly/beloved Thanksgiving guest rather than goosing the temperature a few degrees. Eccentric parents are going to be eccentric parents, though, and I brought sweaters. And that giddy little shag carpeted animal is going to be cute, but it's also going to be fed weird things by my parents -- cheesecake? goose-liver pate? -- and then my parents are going to blame each other for feeding it weird things. And then the dog is going to poop in various places throughout the home, usually on or near one of the half-dozen or so wee-wee pads(tm) that have been scattered about the house in an attempt to both minimize carpet-related damage and define down the definition of "housebroken." This is all normal. I know it doesn't look that way, but it's normal.

It's actually not at all normal, I know. But the ways in which my annual Thanksgiving trips to the happy, underheated, secretly weird home have become normal -- the unconscious rapprochement I've realized with my family and hometown and past, and which you probably have, too -- has been much on my mind of late. In part, this is because -- belatedly, so incredibly freaking belatedly -- my novel is finished, and in the hands of my estimable agent, and because my novel is (subtextually, I guess) mostly about that topic. I write what I know, just like anyone else, and while I don't necessarily know what to make of the passage of time's effect on my family and myself, or on that cluttering, chilly homestead, I am at least aware that it is happening, and that the fact that it is happening makes me feel something.


The easiest label for that "something" would, I guess, be nostalgia or regret. This is because a sort of vague melancholy is my default mood/mode, but also because that's a pretty normal response to the passage of time and the inexorability of change and all that. We, or at least I, tend to struggle for a sense of control and equilibrium all of our days, but the accretion of all that time is something we can't control, no matter how on point we are about calling people back on time, getting up when the alarm goes off, et cetera. I battled myself to get the novel finished, while all around me my life rose in great teetering piles, and it has been a strange sensation, facing all that accumulation and wondering what to do with/about it, what to do next. And if I hadn't been alternately anxious and busy, if I hadn't spent all this time knee-deep in lame-brand scotch and inertia, the same accumulation would've happened. I'm not totally sure what I'm writing about, here, but I think I could write a lot more about it if given the opportunity.

I was given such an opportunity by my good friends at The Awl before Thanksgiving, as part of their Real American Thanksgiving Cookbook project -- a sort of compendium of essay-fied recipes by Awl staffers and commenters and adjunct semi-regular humperinos such as myself. I'm pretty happy with what I wrote, which was an essay about my parents' house and Thanksgiving -- still and probably always my favorite holiday -- wrapped around my second grade teacher's recipe for cranberry-orange relish.

Kate revealed to me, after the essay went up, that she has always found the recipe a little too tart. We made a half-recipe this year, and made it a little sweeter -- the guest list was smaller, and 20 percent of said guest list bashfully/finally went on record with her it's-just-too-cranny sentiments. I complain about my parents' house and weirdness because I worry about them getting old, I guess, and because I'm noticing myself getting older. But, as the Awl essay points out, it's a hopeful and happy thing that all this weirdness has proven so enduring, and so adaptable.

Practice Makes Adorable

SPECIAL FATHER'S DAY WORLD EXCLUSIVE: First footage from the upcoming documentary, "Cleo and Dad: Journey Beyond Schnuzzling."

The struggle:



And the ecstacy of success (spoiler alert):



Basically every day is Father's Day, now. Hats off to two of my two favorite mammals.

Dawg Blawging: Fetch Lives

More excellence from The Lady Miss Cleo, here, and her radically transgressive understanding of how "Fetch" is played.



Really, Kate is kind of the star of this one, just in terms of hustle and scrappiness and max-effort persistence. She's like David Eckstein, but all foxy:



Yes, I have noticed that my father is wearing an apron in basically every photograph I have of him. But thanks for pointing that out.

Dawg Blawging For The True (Tennis Ball String) Heads

I know these videos are annoyingly small, but that's how it's going to have to be, since I'm not going to be putting them on YouTube. This is because I don't want the monsters that live in YouTube's comments sections to call my dad (or my dad's dog?) a "fag" or whatever. Not that Cleo couldn't handle her biz on some Ginger Kid response-vid shit, but... yeah, let's just keep the giggling dad and the frantic puppy away from the subhumans for now.

Oh, Hello

Relax, everyone.

I am listening. I have heard the people of the Internet -- the entire Internet, even YouTube commenters, who are not actually people, strictly speaking -- crying out for a one-stop venue for all things related to words that I type about stuff. These words are currently scattered all over the Internet, a blanket of self-indulgent parentheticals and mildly unexpected adjectives coating the information superhighway like so many cast-off, mushed-up cigarette butts. There are blog posts and features and blog posts the length of longish features. There's a lot.

There are anguished musings about Gary Matthews Jr. (at Can't Stop The Bleeding) and there are less-anguished musings about, like, Friendster (at Slate). And there's also me on New Hampshire Public Radio talking about Friendster. No one has ever asked me how I feel about Gary Matthews Jr., blessedly, but you're getting the idea: there are several years of my professional life that are just out there, diffuse and dispersed and lurking down in The Google Search beneath results about Diamond Dave and David Roth the Coin Magician Who Compulsively Says 'Thank You' After Everything and David Roth the Folk Singer and so on. It's a lot of ground to cover, what with all the anguish and the musings and the aforementioned parentheticals and adjectives and such.

I'm going to try to do some of that covering, here. I'm under no illusions about there being a legion of Roth Completists demanding access to the blog I set up for my old Athlon football previews -- although -- or the scab-picking but sadly prescient fake Obamacare satire blog I briefly attempted. But that stuff does exist, and it's silly if I don't do my best to put it all together. Over coming days I'm going to try to round up most of my clips and get them all in line. At which point I will have a sort of living, breathing resume for all to read! Or something.

Also, I'll finally have a place to host videos of my father playing with his new puppy. You basically can't be barefoot in my parents' kitchen anymore because it's so full of things the dog likes. Whenever I go home to visit I'm constantly stepping on giant dinosaurian pork-roast bones and sticks the dog brought in from outside. As if the dog remembers that stick, and would be upset if that stick wasn't right there on the floor, causing me to turn my ankle.



In future posts, I will perhaps go into my jealousy of the dog, because it is cuter than me and allowed to bring sticks into the house.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Watch this space, I'm going to do more soon/eventually.