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I was working in the Me Only Room on Sunday when I heard one of the dogs come into the room behind me and settle.

A little shifting of paws and then-

Hey dickhead, Cutter said.

Hmmmm, I said peering at an invoice I was getting ready to send out. (Did I have all the man-hours on that?)

You’re working too much, we never get to see you and Miss Carol is pissed, Cutter hissed at me.

Really?, I murmured, wondering why that material cost just didn’t look right.

Are you listening to me? Cutter barked.

I am, I said, leaning back and closing my eyes and wondering why my dogs have to talk to me.

Actually, what it is, is that we miss you, Cutter whined. We miss basking in the glory that is you, he said.

Honest? I said spinning around in my Me Only Chair.

Cutter glanced over his shoulder and looked back at me and said, Nah, not really, I was just trying to get your attention.

I sat staring.

You’re never home anymore and I’m stuck in this house fourteen hours a day with Tug, he said. Do you have any idea what it’s like to listen to Tug snore and smack his lipless lips all day? he said.

No I don’t, I said.

If this keeps up my little brain is gonna explode, Cutter exclaimed, agitated.

Won’t be much of an explosion, I said, turning back to a sub-contractor’s bill.

I hate you, he said, prancing out and woofing for his brother.

I flipping LOVE books.

I love the carefully designed covers.

I love the smell and the feel and the texture of the pages.

I love that the typeface and paper are chosen by the authors and offered up like gifts.

I love that Miss Carol and me have filled our home with books that plead- read me, no, me, read me.

I love the soft comfort of a good book.

So it was kinda a cold hard slap of reality when I downloaded my first “book”? Miss Carol had given me an iPad and I hadn’t done much with it until I was faced with the boredom of the tractor-trailerin’ school breaks. I had to do something, sitting there all alone, so I “bought” Carl Hiaasen’s Star Island and read it during the classroom breaks.

And ya know what?

It wasn’t too terribly bad. Not the book nor the experience. Reading a book on an iPad is kinda like kissing with a mask on- the intent and want is there and you’re missing out on the lips, but, hey, at least you’re still kissing, right?

So will I become an eBookworm? I don’t know. I’m not sure if I’ll ever download another book or if Star Island will languish all alone and lonely on my iPad bookshelf, digitally forgotten as I caress the pages of a new hardback while it whispers to me-

read me

Like a waffle cone chock-a-block full of melty, runny ice cream there are things you just wanna slip-slidingly hold onto to.

For me, it’s books.

Even with all the shit I chose to bite off and chew on this year (business, work, building A Little House of Horrors, tractor trailerin’ school, blog, book? maybe?), I’ve always, always read- magazines, books, letters, e-mails, but especially novels. I loves me some novels.

And the latest slickly inserted diversion to the things that keep Miss Carol safe from me being a total dickwad is A Dog’s Purpose. And what a great diversion it is. Or was. It’s fun. It’s not great, but I’d read it again if I wasn’t, you know. (business, work, building our Little House of Horrors, blah,blah,blah)

W. Bruce Cameron manages to capture the essence of dogginess (I think) in his book about a dog who keeps re-incarnating until it finally fulfills his purpose. (hence the title? I’m guessing? see how I pick up on this shit?)

So.

Honestly?

It’s good enough that it’ll make you cry like a baby, I don’t care who you are, and I can’t WAIT ’til Miss Carol reads it ’cause I’m thinkin’ it’s gonna be fun to raft down the road on a river of her tears.

A Dog’s Purpose is worth the time.

I know everybody works really hard, that we all crawl home at the end of the day in the gathering darkness, gasping and grasping, and I knew these two months of added work would be tough for me and I knew that something or maybe some somethings would probably slip off my plate and slide onto the floor and slowly gel and be forgotten. But I never thought it’d be my blog- my little oceandoggy.com.

Guess what?

She was the first thing way-sided, the first thing pushed off into the bushes and shuffled past.

So what’s been happening? Quickly?

-I aced a sixth test and finally received my CDL permit (honestly, the tests aren’t that hard EVERYONE should be acing them)

-I bugged out for a hurricane that never really happened (call me Mr. Sissy, or maybe Mr. Pussy)

-I found that spending 30 hours of quality time with Cutter and Tug in a truck isn’t really that much fun

-I finally realized that I’ll never make Miss Carol happy about tractor-trailerin’. Like EVER.

– and that I’d wanted to write a better post, I always do, but I’m blown out so I guess I’ll fill in the empty spaces later on, you know, when it’s less insanely busy.

Dear Mr. Russell Banks,

I’m one of your biggest fans, let me just say that right up front. I love you and I’ve read and commented on several of your books and I know my opinion as a critic counts less than nothing in your big scheme of things, but Mr. Banks?

Rule of the Bone sucked.

When I first started reading it I was blown away with your amazingly energetic first person narrative as a 14-year-old fuck up. But’cha know what? as the pages turned, it began to pale and then it got old. And then when you touched on all the same old, same old shit that your generation seems to feel is the root cause of all the fucked-up-itness (divorce, drugs, shitty step-fathers) it just got older and paler. Deep breath.

So I marshaled on, hoping that you’d somehow save it and me.

But you didn’t. Instead, you plunged me into something so completely nonsensical that I kept reading just for the wow, wait a sec, ain’t no way he’s going THERE, factor. And you did. You pushed the limits of credulity. Not only did you verve into ridiculousness but the ending of Rule of the Bone was a pfffft to the rest of the book. The whole mess was a colorless, washed out, weakly supported relationship between Bone and I-Man that could have been colossally moving if you hadn’t decided that telling the story from the viewpoint of a 14-year-old fucknut meant, in your mind, somehow squandering it.

In your defense, maybe nobody could have pulled it off. But then again, maybe nobody should have tried. Maybe at some point you or your editor should have said enough, this is nonsense skipping down the road to silliness.

Rule of the Bone’s a fairly desultory nonsensical ride to an unsatisfying conclusion that left me wondering- did I miss something? Am I retarded?

But I didn’t and I don’t think I am. Retarded, I mean.

I’m just glad that it reads really quick and didn’t squander too much of my valuable time.

Thanks for nothing.

oceandoggy.

I have a ball cap that reads “Scars Are Tattoos With Better Stories”. I like that hat ’cause I generally believe this to be true since most tattoos are generally the result of something that seemed like a good idea at the time and scars tend to be something else entirely.

But’cha know what? I was walking down one of the main thoroughfares of the hospital last week and I ended up stalled behind a radiologist leading this frail little old lady down the hallway to MRI. Teeny and tiny, she was probably all of 80 lbs. sopping wet.

As I got closer and tried to pass them I noticed that this frail little old granny lady had blurred, bleary, tired old tattoos on her arms and legs. And I was like, wow, that’s weirdly interesting. Then she accidentally dropped her crumpled pack of cigarettes and when she bent over to pick them up, her ill-fitting KISS t-shirt drooped away from her scrawny chest and I saw she had tattoos on her shriveled up old lady boobs too.

Ewww. I WAS SO NOT LOOKING AT HER BOOBS, OK?

But so anyway.

So I passed them by and moved on with my life and presumably they moved on with theirs but it made me wonder- what kinda strange and possibly interesting life had that little old lady led that had resulted in all those now indistinct blue-black blobby tattoos?

Maybe sometimes tattoos can have a good story too, ya know?

I mean, c’mon, who doesn’t wanna know HER story?

Don’t lie.