I can't believe that people would buy these toys.

Amazon.com: Playmobil Police Checkpoint

Hey kids! Pretend like the 4th amendment never existed with this super-cool play-pretend police check point! And for more fun, check out this TSA Airport Security check point play set!

Can you say "Step to the side ma'am, while I pat you down" or "I'm gonna have to ask you to step out of the car"?

Aimless writing.

Ok.

Clearly, I was a little high on January warm weather and that killer Bloody Mary in New Orleans. I fully own up to not being in a normal state of mind during my visit to my temporary--but truly beloved--home town. Yes. I was out of it. But I had an insight I couldn't wait to put into words!

And I'm damn proud of my break with whatever IT is that has been stifling my freestyle writing. Writing isn't hard; feeling like you are writing about stuff people actually want to read and doing it because there really are people that want to read is VERY hard.

When I lived in the middle of nowhere and had some time on my hands as a business owner, writing was my fun hobby. Now that I work all the time, I can't force sitting in front of the computer after I've done it all day for somebody else.

I bought a poetry book at Border's last week; I forgot how I appreciate poetry, and how my own attempts are really not bad (unlike my fiction). But only really close friends get to see that. Poetry is like singing. By that that I mean...you are sharing your insides with people with a poem, as you are with a song. It's not easy if you over-analyze doing either, or if you are a shy person. Both are deeply intimate creations.

I think maybe keeping an online dairy is somewhat in that vein. However, I do get to choose how much of the inside me I share here. Those who know me know what I write here is a much watered-down version of me.

I am desperate for warmer weather so I can go on a walk in the sun and not hate the outdoors. It's so unlike me to hate the outdoors. Perhaps that's what sparked my crazed post regarding dogs...just being outside and enjoying life, enjoying myself. I can't say that's been very easy here--certainly not over the winter months.

I need to plan more visits to New Orleans.

Dog thoughts.

Hello all who follow.

I've been busy in Louisvile (wow--Freudian typo--I mean Louisville) leading up to the holidays, and I now find myself happily relaxed in the loving arms of my old home place in New Orleans. I've been on walks through all the old neighborhoods I came to know and love so well during our brief tenure in this ancient port city. New Year's Day in New Orleans is sublime. I drank a Bloody Mary at The Bulldog on Magazine Street. I smelled roses bloom today--roses! **sigh**

It was during one of these excursions that I came to a startling understanding of what a walk with your dog can mean.

Here is my brilliant deduction: dogs need walks because the walk to a dog is what television is to us humans. The walk is their very own reality show, their one precious form of rudimentary entertainment that engages all of their super-special senses, like smell, hearing, and just being able to "feel the human"--by that I mean what humans as dog owners do and respond to in their environment.

Dogs need entertainment just as much as people do. I know, I know, it's a radical thought. But witness the dog that gets into trash, chews up shoes and plants, or barks insanely at the window when a car or the UPS guy goes by...this is a dog with little to no outside stimulation, and no real understanding of what a realistic and suitable response would be to stresses in the real world--the environment that going on a walk around the neighborhood can provide. The walk provides the owner with exercise, but it provides the dog with something else much more important: the daily installment of their favorite story about the neighborhood and its smells...being with you in the world and how you respond to it, and how you respond to other people, other animals, and traffic.

See, the dog needs to know how you are, and not just in the "den/house" when no one else is around. This is how a dog builds respect and trust for you--knowing that you are a calm, confident participant in the stuff out there in the real world. And as an added benefit, the dog is usually relaxed enough after exercising that the destructive behavior goes away.

The bottom line is...dogs need entertainment. They don't "get" TV because it doesn't really have a scent. You need to make sure that as a dog owner you provide your dog with the best entertainment available: You. That's really all they want anyway--more of you, unfiltered. And the walk gives them that.