When I first started out as a newspaper columnist, I read a piece by a "serious" (i.e., humorless) news columnist that shoved my editorial career in a direction I had never wanted. This guy complained that sportswriters only wrote about grown adults playing children’s games, while humor columnists just wrote about their dogs, and that somehow made us lesser writers.
How joyless can you be? So what if we write about our dogs? Dogs bring us joy and happiness, and it’s only natural we would want to write about them. It’s not our fault that you’ll never know the unconditional love of an animal who sees you as their own world, and who gets so excited that you came home that they spend the next ten minutes shaking their butts at you. I’ve never known a happy news columnist, and this guy was the unhappiest of them all.
Back then, I was so bothered by what this guy said that I’ve avoided writing about dogs for the last 30 years as a result. His stupid take on humor writers made me afraid to write about my own dogs because I didn’t want to feed into this pseudo-intellectual’s theory about humor writers. Instead, I never wanted to be thought of as some scribbler whose career consisted of retelling old dad jokes and making fart jokes on the Internet, so I avoided writing about my dogs altogether.
I should have ignored this guy, though. My friend, Dick Wolfsie, had a whole career as a TV reporter on WISH-TV in Indianapolis, and he built his entire career by having his beagle, Barney, appear on screen with him. It didn’t seem to do him any harm, and Dick once got body-slammed by professional wrestler Dick the Bruiser, which is the pinnacle of cool. Any kid who grew up in Indiana in the 1970s can tell you how that awesome that is.
On the other hand, I’ve never written about my dogs, and I’ve never been body-slammed by a professional wrestler, so you tell me who made the right career move.
But no matter how hard I try to remember, I couldn’t tell you who that particular writer was, which means I won. He wasn’t famous, he wasn’t widely read, and he’s certainly not remembered today. Plus, he was probably a cat person. His only contribution to the literary world was to keep me from writing about dogs for 30 years.
But not anymore. I’m tired of letting this guy’s idiotic opinions live in my head any longer.
It starts when one of them "hears" the sound of a masked ninja chainsaw murderer closing their car door five houses away — I think they’re faking it — so they all leap into action, yipping and screaming as they race around the living room floor.
"To me, my Avengers!" they shriek. "Defeat the masked ninja chainsaw murderers!"
Which sounds like them going "Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip!" for 30 seconds, or at least until any hope of my catching a quick nap has vanished, and I promise to never, ever try it again for as long as I live.
Our dogs may be tiny, but they make up for it in volume, ferocity, and general stupidity. They remind me of tech bros with an overdeveloped Napoleon complex.
I’ll never need a burglar alarm because our dogs will alert me to the slightest disturbance of air currents, an errant feather in our yard, or when the air molecules change their configuration within 30 yards of the house.
It doesn’t matter what time of day it is or who happens to be asleep. A few nights ago, my wife and I had gone to bed. I got up to go to the bathroom, and when I came out, they started snarling and screaming at the top of their tiny lungs.
"It’s me, you a-holes!" I half-shouted. They stopped barking, not because they realized it was me, but only because I wasn’t actually the masked ninja chainsaw murderer they had been expecting. When they realized who it was, they went back to sleep as if nothing had happened.
Infants may struggle with object permanence, but my dogs make them look like geniuses. My dogs have such short attention spans, a goldish could earn a PhD with the amount of long-term memory they have compared to these boneheads.
Maybe the goldfish will remember who that news columnist was from 30 years ago. It’s what he deserves.
My new humor novel, Mackinac Island Nation, is finished and available from 4 Horsemen Publications. You can get the ebook and print versions here.