Gone Dogs

It's taken me years, but I've finally written something I believe people will actually want to read and enjoy (and I think we both know it's not this blog).

Not that you don't already love my spellbinding prose about twin-turbo engines in Korean sports sedans. Or my memorable musings about the unparalleled amenities, Nappa leather and 22-way adjustable driver's seat in the top-of-the-line, flagship of the fleet. And I have no doubt you're waiting with bated breath—and who would blame you—for the next installment of a little gem I like to call Exceptional Lease Offers.

I'm just messin' with ya. I don't read 'em either.

What I'm talking about here is the story I've written about the world's greatest German Shepherd—the late, great Max—in the newly released, beautifully produced coffee-table book Gone Dogs.

A project by dog lovers extraordinaire Jim Mitchem and Laurie Smithwick, Gone Dogs is a heart-warming, heart-breaking and ultimately life-affirming collection of stories about the power of love through our relationships with dogs who are no longer with us.

A call went out to parents of all kinds of pups to submit stories of their dearly departed canines, and I was lucky enough to have the one I wrote about Max selected for the inaugural volume.

Since I am in advertising—I'm not proud—I'm going to be shameless about it and just ask for the order. What you need to do right now is go to Amazon and buy several copies for your dog-lovin' friends. And their dog-lovin' friends. In fact, I know it's only August, but why not beat the Christmas rush and stock up on a few copies for the holidays.

I also want to say that I can't thank Jim and Laurie enough for including my story. It means the world to me knowing people will get to see what a magnificent dog Max was, and how much I loved him.

Here's what I'm saying: order yourself a copy today. And when it comes, just sit, stay and enjoy every one of these beautiful, heartfelt stories.

Starting with mine.

Taking license

Over the past few weekends, I’ve spent more hours than I care to think about looking for a used—excuse me, certified pre-owned—car for my son. Or daughter. We’ll see whose room is cleaner when I get home.

What struck me about the whole ordeal is how monumentally unpleasant the experience is. Not a revelation if you’ve ever bought a car, but always a surprise to me. I guess it’s because like surgery or Christmas shopping, I don’t do it often enough to remember the amount of pain involved.

On paper, it should be one of the most exciting, fun experiences you can have. You get to test drive lots of different models, pick one that makes you happy, and drive off into the sunset, preferably up a winding coastal road where you can let your right foot loose and see how many curves your new investment wants to hug.

Well, not so fast there Edsel.

Because of an incident at Keyes Toyota years ago, where the wife and I were virtually held hostage for three hours because they wouldn’t give us back our car keys (they were checking it out for trade in—no we didn’t buy there, yes we finally escaped), I’ve been adamant about laying down a few ground rules when car shopping.

The first is never give them my keys.

Here are the others: I don't go inside the dealership and have a seat if I’m just shopping. Instead, I’ll have the salesperson go inside, get their best price and walk it back out to me. I make two things clear—they only have one shot at it, so the number they give me has to be the final offer the first time. And I won’t wait longer than fifteen minutes.

Which brings me to my next rule: I don’t deal with anyone but the salesperson. No closers, no sales managers, no fleet managers coming out the door with their shark tooth smile and hand ready to shake mine. If the salesperson can’t make the deal, meeting his boss isn’t going to help.

Speaking of the deal, I never take the deal. Any number they give me has profit built into it, otherwise they wouldn't be selling it at that price. So even though I've asked them for their best offer, I have no qualms about being the bad guy and letting them know it isn't good enough. I'll try to knock another ten to fifteen percent off whenever number they give me. If they're willing to negotiate, I know they haven't given me their best price (which they never do). If they're not willing to negotiate, there's always another dealer who is—all you have to do is remind them and they usually change their tune. However if they start whining about how they're not making any money on the deal, or ask me to come up just $200 more on my offer, I'm out of there.

With car salespeople it doesn't take much for my bullshit meter to go into the red.

For the time being I've taken a break from car shopping, although I still peruse online to see what's out there. But my time right now is mostly being spent figuring out how to pay for the upcoming kitchen remodel. Plus for the moment we seem to be managing with the cars we have.

But if anyone has a fairly new model, safe car they'd like to sell, we can always talk about it.

C'mon inside and have a seat.

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.

On the street

I have a few loves in my life. One of them is roller coasters.

After all, what’s not to love about being strapped in the front car of a coaster by an indifferent, minimum-wage earning attendant, whiplashed up a 10-story hill by a rickety chain, then hurtling downhill at a face-flattening 75 degree angle with the ground coming at you at 65 mph.

I know, right?

Another one is Las Vegas. I love that town because everything you've ever heard about it, good or bad, is true. Name one other place like that. I already hear you tsk tsk-ing. But you know what your problem is? You’re just not focused on the right things.

Color me romantic, but I can’t get enough of daylight depravation, cigarette smoke permeating my clothing from walking through the casino, cocktail waitresses serving watered down mixed drinks 24/7, the feel of dice in my hands, crap table bets I know nothing about but make anyway, parents with 8 month-old babies slung over their shoulders walking through the casino at 3 in the morning, a one-third scale Statue of Liberty and Eiffel Tower right there in the desert where they belong, the intoxicating smell of desperation and bankruptcy.

The real question is what’s not to love?

So when my friend Janice (more about her in a minute) presented me with the idea of participating in the perfect mix of both those worlds – the stock market – I jumped on it.

After all, what could possibly go wrong?

It’s not like I haven’t dabbled in the market before. Years ago, a month before Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out, my friend Ned told me to buy Columbia Pictures stock. I did. The movie came out, made a ton of money and the stock took off faster than the mother ship. I held on to it for about two weeks then sold it for a tidy return on my investment.

I remember thinking, “I could get used to this."

My next dive into the investment pool was off a recommendation from my Taco Bell client at the time, Bob McKay. Bob started Taco Bell with Glenn Bell, and as you might imagine, had more money than God. Two things were true about Bob: he was an architect who actually designed the original mission-style Taco Bell restaurants, and became a multi-millionaire selling cheap tacos and burritos to the masses. And, he became a gazillionaire when Pepsi bought Taco Bell. Overnight he was one of the biggest Pepsi stockholders in history.

He seemed to be doing well. Why wouldn't I take a stock tip from him.

The tip was a company called Birdview Satellites. Seems they had this futuristic idea of satellites broadcasting television signals down to 18-inch satellite dishes they’d build and sell. You’d be able to mount these dishes on the patio, the roof, the backyard, wherever. Bob made a convincing case, and the idea sounded good to me. I bought a hundred shares at $20 each (I’ll save you the trouble - $2000).

It turned out as good as their idea was, it was just too ahead of its time. People - and by people I mean banks, investors, networks and the general public - thought getting crystal clear TV signals from space on small, inexpensive satellite dishes was just crazy talk. One telltale sign it was going south was when I got the statement from Paine Webber listing the stock value as “worthless.”

I remember thinking, "who needs this?"

About seven or eight years ago, I bought some shares of Apple at $52. The very next day, Apple had a press conference saying they’d overestimated earnings, and the stock value was sliced in half to $26. Yeah, I was feeling pretty street savvy right about then. The decision was whether to cut my losses or hang on to the Apple stock. I hung on to it figuring at the very least IBM would buy Apple and buy back the stock for something closer to what I paid for it.

Needless to say, I’m glad iHung on to it.

Fast forward to yesterday. I was iChatting with my aforementioned friend Janice, an awesome author, blogger and artist in her own right. As I discovered, I need to add “investor” to the list. Come to find out Janice is an E-Trade preferred customer. She’s online every day checking the stocks, buying and selling, and, as we like to say, building the empire.

I hadn’t thought about stocks in a long time, but after a little convincing from her about how much fun and rewarding buying and selling online was, it was all I was thinking about.

Today I logged into my dormant Schwab account and saw I had around 4 large sitting in a cash account. So I bought 10 shares of one stock, and 12 of another. Not many, but they were expensive shares.

I’d like to think otherwise, but I know Monday I’ll be online first thing seeing how the stocks are doing. And Tuesday. And Wednesday. You see where I’m going here. It may already be too late, but I really am going to try not to become too obsessed with it.

There are two things I know for sure. First, since I'm back in the market I'll probably be too nervous to see the sequel to Wall Street anytime soon.

And second, if these stocks tank, I’ll be having another chat with Janice.