A few months into our year on the road together, Eko and I checked into a well-appointed Houston hotel. As I handed my credit card across the counter, a hard-marching bride led her wedding party through the lobby. When she saw Eko, the bride ordered the company to an abrupt halt.
“Can I pet your dog?” she asked. Read more ›
For our wedding gift, a friend bought us (and the dogs, presumably) a BarkBox subscription. It immediately jumped to the top of our favorite gifts list based solely on one particular toy that has us laughing our heads off every time I give it to the pups.
I like to believe extraterrestrials have a sense of humor. Or at least I hope they do. The fate of the world may depend upon it.
Our relatively uninhabited backwater solar system likely merits only a solitary surveyor from whatever galactic mapmaker adjudicates these matters. Therefore, the first extraplanetary emissary to Earth is probably some hapless cartographer who thought our planet a quiet place to stretch her tentacles before the ride home.
It’s plausible the alien’s home world is covered in beautiful lakes. So out of a sense of nostalgia it’s eminently possible she chooses to set her ship down next to one of our great ones. It’s therefore conceivable that beneath a cool fall sunset, a UFO quietly descends on Montrose Dog Beach in Chicago and my dogs and I are the first earthlings to meet Shirley. (I’m unable to pronounce her xenolanguage title, but I know a Shirley when I see one.) Read more ›
A little over four hundred years after Miguel de Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, I pulled into a small farm outside of Austin, Texas looking for a new story. At the time, I was six months, thousands of miles, and tens of thousands of words into a narrative which felt old and plagiarized.
A man, a dog, an adventure. Travels with Charley. A Boy and His Dog. Where the Red Fern Grows. Lassie. Take your pick. This same story has been told countless times. As I toured with Eko, writing about our time on the road, I worried my journey was a tepid imitation of a familiar tale. Read more ›
If you’ve spent any considerable amount of time with a dog, you have a story. That story. The one you tell at cocktail parties and retell at every family gathering. That story is not the fuzzy warm memory of the first time you held your puppy. Nor is it any of the wonderful moments you share with your dog over the years. Oh no.
That dog story is the one which begins with rueful laugh and the words “Oh God…” It’s a story about the magic of dogs. Not the oft celebrated magic of their love and companionship, but the magic of their ability to cause a seemingly impossible amount of trouble.
It’s been a couple months since I’ve posted a full length video on YouTube, but I kept the camera rolling on our vacation. If you follow us on Instagram you’ve seen the latest, but for all those who don’t use the app, I wanted to share some of the short vignettes from our time away. Read more ›
Residency is no joke, but it certainly helps to have a sense of humor about it
Who are you?
It’s a simple question. It’s also an impossible one. When asked, we answer with a name. But a name is a sound, not an identity. We quickly follow up with a job title. But a job is what we do, not who we are. The distinction is important.
While I won’t be posting here five days a week over the summer, I do plan on making daily updates to our instagram page. I’ll put up our latest adventures along with a few remixed old ones. This week I’ve had fun putting a soundtrack to some past video clips. Read more ›
We have precious few moments on this earth. Why do so many of us choose to spend so many of those moments with “just a dog?”
I suspect we share many of the same answers, while each having our own reasons.
This is my story. What’s yours?
