Why Whisper When you Can Holler?

Last night, our next door neighbors went out for the evening and in the mad rush (they have five kids) they left their dog out and he was barking incessantly while Catherine and the kids were trying to fall asleep, so I opened the window and yelled "Colby, stop it!" and, unlike my children, he actually listened . . . so I'm thinking I could star in a TV show called The Dog Hollerer (and in addition, an hour later, when he started to yelp again, I opened our bathroom window to use my hollering skills once more, but he shut up at the sound of the window opening so I've definitely got some kind of special power here).

Sometimes You Need To Take Yourself For A Walk

I am browsing through Cesar's Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems, which is written by Cesar Milan-- the "dog whisperer" himself (no relation to the slightly lesser known "dog hollerer") and Cesar believes that walking your dog is the "single most powerful tool" to connect with your dog's mind, as "fish need to swim, birds need to fly . . . and dogs need to walk," and I think this might be true for humans as well, but the difference is that humans don't need to walk in a pack-- obediently following the pack leader-- humans need to walk themselves . . . we occasionally need to be alone and moving with complete autonomy-- I think this taps into our hunter-gatherer roots . . . perhaps it's why women like to go shopping; I certainly walk to relieve stress and my friend Whitney recently reminded me of a perfect example of how well this works: several years ago Whitney and I drove from Virginia to Colorado for a wedding, and we were supposed to get a good night's sleep and start the drive bright and early, but instead we stayed up until three in the morning drinking beer and playing darts, and then we spent twenty-two hung-over hours in the car together, and when we arrived at our destination in Boulder and parked the car, we had a brief argument about the best way to walk downtown-- where we were meeting a friend-- but the argument was more about being in the car too long with each other, and so, without any formal good-bye, we simply parted ways, and I took the high road and Whitney took the low road, and twenty minutes later, we met at the bar (I think Whitney got there first, but we actually didn't speak of our separation or the argument until hours later) and after each of us had our "walk," we were able to tolerate each other again . . . and even cooperate with each other: we bought a wiffle-ball and bat and when we crossed the continental divide, we took turn pitching to each other in a very civilized fashion until Whitney hit one over the edge of the continent: the ball plummeted over a cliff and onto a snowbank and we were quite pleased with ourselves-- but then, to our surprise, some high school kids clambered down the cliff and formed a human chain and "rescued" the ball and returned it to us, so we had to hit it off the divide again.

3/3/2009

Some days you think of something brilliant to write-- such as The Dog Hollerer-- and sometimes you've got to steal someone else's sentence . . . so here's on written by the essayist E.V. Lucas: "I have noticed that people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them."