What an exhausting week. Everything is exhausting. The news is exhausting. The reaction to the news is exhausting. Good Jeebus what a stinking mess. This man. These people. Those people. That man. Gawd. Look: Nazis are bad. Commies are bad. Those two statements can be uttered in sequence without minimizing everything. Collectivists with a proven record of state-directed mass-murder are antithetical to the American character and must be opposed, but not by trashing the First Amendment. We've been here before. We know how this works. There are no fine people with torches, and there aren't any fine people in black masks. Also, if the President could not tweet out BS stories about Pershing he got from a Bannontbart comment thread that would be great.

He's just so bad at this. It's not hard to be okay at this, and he is just so bad at this.

I took a nap today and it was exhausting. Really: I was playing with Blue Oyster Cult on stage with two busted strings. Then the phone rang.

“Hello, did you find your dog?”

I get these about three to four times a day; it’s usually a suggestion about what I should do. I said I had not.

“What color is its collar? Is it green?”

“It’s brown-black.” But I always think: someone could've taken him, changed the collar, and he got out again. “What does the dog look like?”

“Well it’s eating out of trash can at the SuperAmerica on 35th avenue. It’s big. Black with white spots.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s not him. Thank you, though.” I tell her where to make a sighting report, just in case. Karma.

Then I drove south and put up signs. Here’s a map of where the signs are; it’s not up-to-date, since a lot of the blue and yellow ones have been posted.

Cheryl from The Retrievers dropped off 35 more signs tonight. They have to be refitted with Scout’s info.

Gah

But then you buck up, and stride, purposefully. You may have noticed the art for this week on the main page; it's a screenshot from the fantastic movie, Point Break. Lee Marvin entering a building. I chose it as an image of someone going from one place to another, since I figured that would be the general idea for this week. Moving from one mood to a different one. Whatever it might be.

In the movie, he walks through an airport, heading towards his wife's apartment. She had left him for dead. She's going through the motions of life without any enthusiasm, unaware of what's headed her way, but perhaps resigned to it.

It's an amazing movie. I'm not always a fan of late 60s movies, " but this is a masterpiece.

I keep checking the Humane Society page, and there are some Constant Dogs no one has come to get. This is rather unnerving:

We shall name it . . . Three-Yoo. I don't know if this reminds me of one of my Aunts because she had a dog like this, or she had that expression all the time. Or both. Then there's this guy:

He looks like a drunk the cops have to prop up for his mugshot.

		This . . . this I don't get at all. I don't know who turns in a lost pigeon.

Two weeks gone as of Friday, 8 PM.

Hardly want to make this into the greatest tragedy ever to befall a family, because of course it’s not. It’s sad, but all families and individuals deal with sadnesses of this sort, in one way or the other, and the Tolstoi rule applies. What makes you sad in the second stage is the return of normalcy. It’s what you want, and it’s what you fight because it means this is the new normal.

You still turn around after making a sandwich to give him a little pastrami, because he's been standing there patiently without making a sound, hoping. You don't want to have that instinct fade away.

You don’t want the phone to stop ringing with sightings or clues; you do want to stop wishing all the time that the phone would ring

You don’t want to see the signs you put up; you don’t want to take them down because that means you’re done.

You don’t want to clean our your car, because it’s rescue central - dog dish, smelly meat treats to get his interest, a leash, fliers, staplers to repair signs. (Fixing faded or wet signs is half the work.)

It’s just a gone dog, not a child. I get that; of course. There’s probably some partial built-in anticipation of Daughter going off to college, with Scout being connective tissue between her time here and her time on the other side of things. That’s a deep underlying emotion I tap from time to time like tinfoil on a filling. But Scout was not a child. I’m not one of those fur-children people. It doesn’t help your relationship with a dog to anthropomorphize them, although a little is unavoidable and probably defensible: hanging around humans as long as they have, they must have traits that are echoes and sympathetic vibrations of our own.

But during the day, there's work, sign maintenance, the horrible feeling of momentum evaporating. If a child disappears, well, you know. But dogs revert. They have code for this. If he was struck by a car, the tags would have pointed someone to us - and yes, I've called the road maintenance departments to see if they picked up a dog lately. If he’d been stuck in someone’s yard we'd have heard.

He just vanished from the banks of the Mississippi at twilight. He just evaporated.

For a while I found it hard to go sit in the backyard and sit, write, have a cigar; he should have been there. I took to having my coffee and cigar on the porch, where I might see him walking up the block. I put a sign at the foot of the hill. I don’t mind seeing that all the time. For now.

So that’s how it is after the second week. Here’s the thing: I wrote this last Friday night, after the first.

Because I thought that’s how would be on the second. I was more or less right. Overshot the angst by few inches, but otherwise correct.

UPDATE: while putting this together, we got a sighting from someone on Facebook. Four days old, moving north.

That's where the signs go up next. Back to work.

The logo is up and the lights are on. It's alive! It's alive!

Last October, two floors of this building - nothing but girders - was all that stood on the site.

The penultimate building - the brew pub - is in the middle, and the hotel is now above ground and climbing:

I can't wait to have a beer in that pub. From parking lot to

As noted, I'm going through the entire Gildersleeve series this year. A million custom cues, giving you the feel for 40s vernacular.

It's season 6 - still the peak of the show. This was another gimmick episode, in a way - the return of a character who'd left the show. Lila Ransom, the drawly belle who had strung him along for years.

Women hated this character.

She left the show for a while, and her cousin - also a drawling, flirtatious Suthun Belle - stepped in.

So now Lila's coming back on the train, and the cues - well, take a listen.

		Nightmares. Throbbing heart. What's that towards the end?

		The score is more lush this year. But wait - there's that theme again. Like a telegraph.

		City music - in the fall, perhaps, with swirling leaves.

		The happy theme! But there it is again.

It's a callback to a song, and I know it but I don't.

		AD: 1948. Why, what did they have to worry about? What could possibly keep them up at night?

I bought this one years before I had the means to play it:

		1958. Swank and full of cheery certainties: we're going to the moon, and we'll be dressed for dinner and drinks, too. I met Ed Ames once and thanked him for this.

That'll do - thanks for stopping by this week, trying as it's been. Next week will be better.