Dog tired

If you’ve been keeping up with this blog – and if you have, you really should investigate getting a library card and reading something more worthwhile – you may already know we recently brought home a new addition to the family.

Her name is Lucy. And since she’s obviously not a German Shepherd, it’s pretty apparent I had no choice or say in the matter. The fact is I never saw Lucy until my wife and daughter walked in the door with her.

Let’s talk about what I like to refer to as “the real dog” for a moment. When we got our German Shepherd Max, the world’s greatest dog, we got him at a breeder. He is a pure bred long-haired German Shepherd. And he’s a German German Shepherd. He was actually imported from Germany, and because of that has more frequent flyer miles on Lufthansa than I do. He responds to commands in German. And when people hear us give him a command, they all ask the same question: “Does he speak German?”

It never gets old.

Since my wife and I are both working, we ponied up the money to have Max trained by the breeder before we brought him home. We figured the smart play was to make sure we didn't have a dog that big that we couldn't control. For six weeks, we drove out to the breeder in Corona on the weekends to work with him.

On the seventh weekend, we brought him home.

The reason I'm explaining what we did with Max is because we're not doing it with Lucy. She's a mutt, with some terrier in her blood. My daughter's friend's dog had puppies, and that's where she came from. No fancy kennels. No imports. No breeders. We're training her ourselves.

And while I'm perfectly capable, it is exhausting in a way I haven't felt in a long time.

Puppies like to sleep for a few hours at a time, then run around like Tasmanian devils for short bursts in between naps. And they have to be watched as they're spinning out of control, to make sure they don't hurt themselves or anyone else. Or break something. Or get so excited they have to express it in the only way they know how. Peeing in the house.

Then there's the part about teething. What you don't notice at first glance - because you're so taken by how cute Lucy is -are the three rows of puppy shark teeth. Fortunately, once she bites that fleshy part of your hand between your thumb and index finger, you never forget.

Everything is a game to Lucy. When she's out in the back yard and done doing her business, my idea is to get her back inside. In her mind, the chase is on. She makes sure I have to chase her all over the yard and work up a good sweat before she decides to go back in the house. This is especially pleasant on mornings when I have to get to work.

The good news is now she's better about sleeping in her crate, and at least she doesn't decide to cry like she's being murdered until about five in the morning.

I was spoiled by Max, the world's greatest dog. And I'll be the first to admit I'm not so good or patient with the puppy stuff.

Even though she'll only weigh about a third of what Max does, and be less than half his height when she's fully grown, I'm hoping I'll grow to love her as much as I do my big old German Shepherd.

For right now, my favorite part is when she doesn't do what she's supposed to, and I get to say "Lucy, you got some 'splainin' to do."

Paper trail

My pal Rich Siegel over at Round Seventeen put up a post today that got me thinking, nostalgically, about the non-advertising jobs I’ve had.

It’s a long list.

I won't take you through them all, although delivery boy for Leo's Flowers and driver for Bob Hope's best friend did have their post-worthy moments. Another time.

For today, under the heading of “What were you thinking?!” jobs, one of my first was a paperboy for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. If that name isn't familiar, it's because the Herald doesn't exist anymore and hasn't for a long time. It was a great newspaper, from a bygone time when L.A. was a two paper town.

I’d get the papers tossed off the truck in bundles in front of my house. Then I'd have to fold and rubber band them, put them in the giant canvas bags that hung and swung from the towering handlebars of my Schwinn Stingray, and try not to lose my balance as I went wobbling on wheels down the street delivering them.

The only thing worse than the daily paper was the Sunday Herald. Thick, filled with crappy ads someone wrote (who would want that job?), hard to fold and heavy to throw, I figured out early on why Sunday mornings were a time for prayer.

In all modesty, I have to say I did develop into a pretty good pitcher, chucking those papers dead center on to the Welcome mats of subscribers homes I rode past. If major league baseball had been scouting paperboys, things might've been different.

Back then, the way I got paid was to go and get it. There were no credit payments, PayPal or online payments. At the end of each month, I’d go door-to-door, my receipt book in hand, and try to collect payment for the month of papers my subscribers had already received.

See if you can figure out how many ways this was a bad idea.

Child knocking on doors at dinnertime? Child carrying money on him? Child arguing with adults about getting paid? Adults swearing at child about paying for the paper? Suffice it to say that even though I was making some change, the end of the month was not something I looked forward to.

Like the papers, the job eventually folded (see what I did there?). But I learned a lot about myself, a great lesson on how I felt about starting the day early, working hard and getting the job done.

It's a lesson I remember each and every day. When I get in at 10.

Pillow talk

I hope you people appreciate the risk I'm taking showing you an actual picture of our bed without the wife's knowledge or permission. If by some off chance she was actually okay with it, I'm sure at the very least she'd want it in pristine shape, and made so tight you could bounce a dime off it.

You know, the way I make it every day.

At least she'll be happy I cropped the shot so you can't see the rest of the room, which is appropriate given the topic at hand. That topic is pillows. Lots and lots of pillows.

I'm not quite sure when it became au courant to have a ridiculous number of pillows on the bed, but it's been going on for a long while now. At some point, the mere act of hopping into bed turned into a downey, feather filled archeological dig to find the mattress.

In case you can't quite tell, we have nine pillows on the bed. For actual sleeping there are two king size and three medium pillows. For decoration there are two large and two small square pillows. This means every night four pillows have to come off the bed, and every morning they have to go back on.

When I was growing up, I had two small, plain pillows covered in low thread count pillowcases. They were extremely malleable, and I could pretty much scrunch them into any comfortable position I wanted.

What I didn't have was an actual bed. We lived in apartments all my life, which meant even though I was an only child and should've had the big room, I usually had the small one. To make sure I could actually walk between the end of the bed and the wall, most of my formative years I slept on a Riviera Convertible Sofa.

I think a lifetime of lower back problems is a small price to pay for a little more room in a little room.

Anyway, I wish going to bed was just a little easier. Yes I realize that moving a few pillows off the bed isn't exactly lifting rocks. I also know it isn't really a big deal in the larger quilt of life (see what I did there?).

I think the lesson here is next time I think about writing a post about something so trivial, I'll stop and sleep on it. If I can find the bed.

A post to relish

For me, one of the great joys in life, besides air conditioning and Mexican Coke in the large bottles, is having a movie theater hot dog.

Now however bad you think regular hot dogs are - and they are very bad - movie hot dogs are even lower on the hot dog food chain.

If you google what's in a hot dog, you'll see a lot of extremely unappetizing words like beef trimmings, extruding, flavor additives. And my favorite, non-food particles.

None of that matters much when I'm shelling out $4.75 for a movie hot dog. However bad it is, I usually smother it with mustard and relish anyway.

But lately I've noticed a disturbing trend. The big chains like AMC and Edwards have switched from the Heinz brand name condiments to these generic ones, imaginatively named Sweet Relish and Yellow Mustard. This is a bad thing. Mainly because the only thing of quality on a movie hot dog were the condiments.

I understand it's a cost-cutting measure for the theaters. One cost they're not cutting - and I know you'll be as shocked as I am - is the price of the hot dog. For that price, I want the brand name goods to smother the meat batter (another term you'll see) flavor that's waiting in the bun.

I think it's time to start a movement. And not just the one you have after eating a movie hot dog. I think it's time to rise up, not go gently into that good night, well, dark theater, without letting the 16-year old theater manager know that if you're going to pay 400 times what the hot dog cost them, at least you want quality toppings for it.

I was also thinking cardboard would be a step up from the usual movie theater hot dog bun. Don't get me started.

Close to home

I'd much prefer this were one of my usual sarcastic, snarky posts with a snappy end line. We'd all have a good laugh, then get on with our day.

Sadly, not this time out.

Last week, a school friend of my son's committed suicide. He was only four months older. They were in a rock band together for awhile.

This young man had been somewhat of an outsider. He wound up leaving my son's school and going to a performing arts school three and a half years ago for various reasons, one of which is he was an extremely talented musician. Everyone at school, his bandmates as well as several professional musicians respected and envied what he could do on the guitar. His guitar teacher called him the next Jimmi Page or Joe Satriani.

It was a road filled with promise and wide open to him.

When we got the call and told our kids, they were both understandably in shock, as were we. My son said it's the first person he's known who's ever killed himself. I hope he never knows any others. He asked me if I've ever known anyone who's taken their own life. I've known two - a creative director and an actress. But I only knew them in passing, and would never say I was close to them (which of course doesn't make it any less tragic).

My wife and son went to the funeral last week. And while this is the part where normally I'd crack wise about putting the fun back in funeral, there's nothing funny about it. According to my boy, it was extraordinarily sad. Both the funeral and the reception were uncomfortably silent. You couldn't mention what had happened, and you couldn't not, so no one said anything. It was a silence you could feel.

I can only imagine that in the aftermath his parents pain is more than anyone should have to bear. The details don't matter. What's important is a talented young man, who's life had barely gotten started, was in so much pain he thought taking his own life was the only way to make it stop.

I don't have any wisdom or insight here. All I have are the truisms we all recite by rote and take for granted, until something like this happens.

Pay attention. Watch for signs. Love and hug your kids. Let them know the lines of communication are open whenever they want to talk. Make sure they understand no subject is off the table.

And let them know as unfair as it is, they'll have to live with the fact that sometimes there's no answer for why.

Poster child

A couple days ago, my screenwriter friend Cameron Young put up a Facebook post about a great tagline he'd seen for CrossFit training (the line was "It's awful").

Since Cameron writes movies, it got me thinking about the delicate art of movie tag lines. The ones you see on one-sheets that sum up the essence of the picture in a few well-chosen words. Having worked at an entertainment agency where I had to do just that, I appreciate how difficult it really is.

One I wrote that I liked was for the Nic Cage movie Snake Eyes that took place in Atlantic City. The line was "All bets are off." It's not the line they finally went with. What're you gonna do?

Anyway, I know whenever anyone opens the discussion of movie posters, the one for the original Alien showing the egg with the line "In space no one can hear you scream." is always a top contender. No argument here, it's definitely one of the greats. Yet for me, it's the equivalent of hearing a joke, and instead of laughing, nodding my head and saying, "Oh, that's very funny." I appreciate the cleverness and eeriness of it, but it just doesn't get me on a gut level like some others do.

I usually find myself gravitating to the funny, punny and plain stupid. So here are a few lines I had a laugh out loud reaction to (as I did the CrossFit line).

I'd also like to know which movie poster lines you, dear reader, think are funny, clever or just get to you in some way. Leave them in the comments, and I'll do another post with the ones that get the most votes.

For me, funny lines make me feel good. Which makes me feel good about the movie. Then the movie makes me feel good. It's the marketing circle of life.

Compound interest

For reasons unknown, I seem to be a magnet for neighbors that are, shall we say, less than ideal. It wasn't always that way. When we first moved into our house, we had great neighbors - and great relationships with them - on both sides of us.

But time and circumstances change. Over the last sixteen years, the house to our left has sold twice, the house to our right five times.

I know what you're thinking - maybe it's us. Trust me, it's not.

I won't go into the all the gory details, but I'll go into a few of them. The neighbors to the left started their relationship by calling the police on us (when I politely asked one of their workers to take his equipment off my property), had their lawyer send us a letter telling us to stop harassing said workers, then served me to appear in small claims court because they didn't believe the property line was where I said it was, so they paid for a survey to find out.

SPOILER ALERT: It was exactly where I said it was. And they dropped the suit, which they were guaranteed to lose for any number of reasons.

Fast forward. The fence they built on their side of the line is great, and while no one's coming to either house for coffee, we now have a cordial smile-and-wave relationship with them.

The neighbors to the right bought the house, spent a year gutting it and redoing the yard and swimming pool. In the process, they cleared all the growth that had blocked our garage on that side, and built a cement deck and attached it to our garage wall. Which they also painted to match their house.

Needless to say, this didn't go over to well with us. We have since come to an agreement, which they've broken twice at last count. Let's just say nothing good comes of building on and painting someone else's property.

However everyone now agrees on the property line, and, with our tenuous agreement in place, we'll use the strategy of waiting them out.

All of this is to explain why I've become a huge fan of the compound way of living. You know, the Kennedy compound? The Bush compound? I'm all for it.

Sure, to some owning your own six-acre piece of oceanfront property with homes that house only friends and family may seem like a rich indulgence. But if you've lived with the neighbors we have, surrounding yourself with people you know and trust seems like, oh, what's the word, oh yes - heaven.

So I'll continue to invest heavily in stocks, bonds and lotto - mostly lotto - and hope that I hit it big one day. Big enough to either buy and build my own compound, or start snapping up the homes on my block as they go up for sale.

Like I pray every day the one on my right will soon.

The other fugitive

Before Harrison Ford brought his own brand of "I am not Han Solo" to the role of Dr. Richard Kimble in The Fugitive, it had been a long-running, successful television series ("A Quinn Martin production") starring David Janssen.

I was a big fan of Janssen. He was a throwback to a time of leading men and movie stars. Very Humphrey Bogart in his approach, Janssen was the strong, silent, man of few words.

While it's not fair to compare, which I'm going to do, I always felt he was a more believable Richard Kimble than Ford was. What helped was that unlike the movie, the series wasn't burdened by a subplot involving faked samples for a new pharmaceutical drug - a distraction I never felt Kimble would be going after when his life was on the line. Janssen's portrayal was a pure story of a man on the run, trying to find his wife's real killer, and the adventures and experiences he had in the process.

At the time, the final two-part episode was the highest watched television show in history. I like to think part of the reason was because the building that stood in for the courthouse in the final episode was my junior high school auditorium (see the clip).

A few years after The Fugitive, Janssen starred in another successful show, Harry O, playing a private investigator working in San Diego. He brought many of the same character qualities to that part, and even though it didn't have the longevity or mythology of The Fugitive, I enjoyed it too.

Janssen was only 48 when he died of a heart attack in 1980. I'll miss seeing the performances he would've given.