Little Fish, Big River, Bigger City

Last Saturday, LoLo and I spent a grueling morning at Ikea followed by a non-grueling day of just lolling about with AxL to places like Alta Park which, ironically, is located on Scott St. with stunning views of the bay. Mr. AxL was pretty tired but oh so happy being in the neighborhoods he has loved to visit so much over the past couple of years. He smiled all day long and had a perky little trot as he went from tree to tree and dog butt to dog butt sniffing away to his heart's delight. It was around 10 p.m. and he was going through his little routine of lying outside in the grass then he'd come inside for a bit, then back outside, back in, back out, etc., etc., etc. As many of you know, a door is the thing is a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of. (I think Mark Twain said that.)

At one point, he was lying on the floor next to us when he bolted up as if scared by fireworks yet there was really no noise to be heard. He just stood, well, half stood with legs slightly bent as if he were bracing himself against an earthquake or was riding the deck of a rolling ship. His eyes were kind of wild and the whites were showing a tad around the edges. His right eye moved sideways, back and forth, back and forth, while his left eyebrow twitched up and down, up and down like a nervous tick of some sort. He was panting heavily while acting like he wanted to move but he wasn't moving. He simply looked utterly scared and my first thought was that he had dislocated his hip. His legs were shaking, his eyes kept twitching and all I could think was "no, no, NO I can't watch my dog die right now, I'm not ready yet!" My mind raced over the possibilities from heart attack to muscle cramp to earthquake to stroke. Scary. Just plain and tragically scary stuff.

Thirty to forty seconds passed as LoLo tried to get him to just lie down and relax to no avail. He wouldn't fully stand up either. Eventually, he stood up all the way, kept right on panting, went and got a drink then came back to his spot to lie down as his eyes went back to normal. An enormous knife had plunged deep into my stomach in that moment as I grappled with everything from how to get him to the car and the emergency room to dealing with this possibly being the end of eleven years with this furball after such a perfect day relaxing in the sun and our new apartment.

LoLo was pretty shaken up by the whole thing but I think we both ended up pretending like it was all cool even though my heart sank several feet in that moment. The rascal was normal the rest of the evening and fine all the next day. We went to the vet on Monday first thing and got an appointment later that day for blood tests, etc. The vet said it probably wasn't his hip dislocating as it would've lasted longer and he probably would've been in more pain rather than just scared looking. Additionally, the twitching eyes indicated that it was probably a mild stroke or seizure in his brain of some sort...something neurological.

His blood tests came out perfect, in fact one measurement had improved from two weeks ago as he had a blood test in Seattle to scan for any effects of steroids he's been taking. The drugs have helped his hips that have been on the decline so much that he couldn't lift his leg for marking bushes. The steroids help a ton and he's acted five years younger since he's been on them but he ran out of meds while I was on my bike trip and he needed another blood test before we started up again. So...now he's back on his meds for his hips and I'm on the lookout for any other seizure type episodes which may or may not happen again. In short, he's old for a dog at 12 or 13 years which is about 91 in human years or so. Our "11 year anniversary" of when I found him is coming up on February 6. He could basically be fine for the next five years or he could just drop at any minute if he has a worse seizure so now he's being spoiled rotten for the rest of his unknown but extremely lucky days. Not that he wasn't spoiled rotten already but basically he gets to smell any bush as long as he wants, he can eat whatever he wants, he gets more salmon, chicken and pasta mixed with his food than ever before and he's living like a king.

And he's taking advantage of my soft spot like never before. In fact, he's starting to get a bit out of hand as he seems to have a slight personality change in terms of obedience since the stroke. I stopped by Starbucks on Monday and he pulled his leash free from under a newspaper stand and came into the store, not once but THREE TIMES!!! Normally, I just drop his leash, tell him to stay and he stays. Now he just uproots himself and walks into any business establishment if he feels like it. Additionally, he bit a dog that wanted to play down near the Marina. Talk about uncalled for. Then, yesterday I was buying a lottery ticket so I can win the $85 million and retire in some huge mansion overlooking the Bay. I came out of the store and yet again, he had pulled free from a newspaper stand. This time he was halfway up the block standing on a busy street corner waiting for the light to change before I caught up to him. I mean what is up with that??? He never leaves a place and walks away dragging his leash, let alone half a block to a street corner.

In any event, he's fine except his hips are still slow as he huffs up stairs and I have to lift him up after he's been napping since his hind legs seem to fall asleep on him and take some massaging to get them stable again. He gets nightly massages which he loves, not to mention the treats are flowing like mad...even more than before...however, he seems to turn up his nose at even the most expensive jerky treats he used to find irresistable. I've had to up the ante to cheese filled all beef hot dogs warmed in the microwave. Yea...tell me about it.

All said, he's the same lovable mutt but with a streak of a spoiled little devil dog laced up with some rawhide obedience issues which provides plenty of entertaining events of late. He still stops traffic on the sidewalk as every person feels some innate need to coo over his adorable face despite the fact that I might actually have some place I'm trying to get to. No, I don't mind. There's nothing better than watching this dog spread joy everywhere he goes without doing a thing. Sure, he might chomp some other pooche's ear now and then and yeah, he might mosey into Starbucks to just check out the action but hey, he's AxL and he can pull it all off somehow. In my next life, I hope to come back as a dog just like him so I can take advantage of everything like he does. In the meantime, I'll just enjoy being his roommate in this life because even as his sidekick, his admin, his butler and his chauffeur, life is pretty grand.

How the time flies when you're having fun. After packing up my things into a UHaul which was after making four trips to UHaul for a trailer which never worked which then forced me to upgrade to a truck with an auto-transport for "Sarge" my trusty '92 Pathfinder, my friend Jason McMahon and I set out for the deep south of Northern California. Well, not quite because after two more trips back to UHaul none of the lights on the auto-transports worked either so around 2:30 a.m. on a Friday we hit the road with the pedal to the metal.

Jason is a madman on the basketball court. He's also a furious driver. I considered myself speedy but I'm "JV" compared to "Mario McMahon" who unfortunately picked up a hefty speeding ticket at 80 mph due to the fact that Oregon considered the UHaul to be a "truck" enforceable under the "truck speed limit" laws. Part of the reason I had trouble keeping up with Mr. Turbo-Charged is because after riding a bike for nearly two months at breakneck speeds of 10 mph with occaissional downhill bursts to 30+mph, anything over 40 has me gripping the wheel with white knuckles as if I'm flying a jetfighter and pushing the envelope. We arrived at 10:30 p.m. without further incident and made our way into the city to meet my friends who had been patiently drinking the night away pending our arrival. Life was good catching up with people for a couple hours and then the long drive took its toll and it was time for bed. I checked Jason into a local motel that was anything but posh while I slept in Sarge in the parking lot of the Berkeley Marina where the parking places were large enough to easily park a Uhaul.

The next morning was breakfast with LoLo at Cafe Union, one of my favorite places to eat on a Sunday. Our group then split up with Jason going "el tourist" to the downtown area while LoLo, AxL and I set out on the great apartment search. By simply going online to Craigslist.com and punching in a price range with a "dog qualifier" about 20 places popped up and within fifteen minutes or so, I was walking through what sounded like the best one from the list. It seemed just right in just about every way so I took an application for 3167A Sacramento St.

We drove and visited and called about 20 other places for the rest of the afternoon and the next day only to end up actually taking that first one. The moral of the story? Sometimes it's okay to take the first thing you see. Oh, and if anyone ever tells you that finding a place in San Francisco that is affordable and will accept dogs is impossible, just tell them "poppycock" and then go to Craigslist.com, keep a positive attitude about the whole thing and you should be good to go.

The place I now live, aka "The AxL Garden Park Hotel" is a two bedroom (two closet, actually) basement apartment in probably one of the greatest locations in the city. My things just fit, but I have yet to buy furniture such as a couch, a bed and a dresser. There is a huge, sunny backyard, an enormous porch and the whole place is fairly bright during the day. It was moldy and filthy since it had been vacant for seven months. Had I known the length of the vacancy, I would've bargained a lot harder instead of just taking it at the price offered which is confidential but a significant savings over our former Seattle residence, "AxL Snaks Wurld Headquarters." After spending most of the week just unloading box after box after box of unkown items, LoLo, AxL and I hit Ikea. If you're a bachelor on a budget and don't care that your place looks like an Ikea catalog which is everything the movie "Fight Club" eschewed, then Ikea is your place. Since I've spent the last twelve or so years living off of hand me overs and freebie furniture I figured it was time to at least make a stab at having things which don't make me look like I'm living in the middle of a four-family garage sale.

A word of advice though: before you go in too deep at the store, ask an employee if they are having any sales. I had racked up about $1,000 worth of furnishings when the check out girl told me that the next day everything I bought would be 25% off. Despite pleading with the manager I was unable to convince her to just make it easy on all of us so yep...I wheeled three carts of things straight from the check-out line to the return desk while they were checked off one by one to be restocked by the unfortunate employees working that evening. The next morning, bright and early we were back sans dog so there would be room for everything in Sarge and even though we made a great gameplan, it was still an hour and a half in the store to go back through and collect each item one more time.

Now the fun part...assembly. I actually marvel at Ikea furniture. It goes together fairly easily, looks pretty darn good for coming out of a box, is one-tenth the price of similar stuff and here's the part that floors me - when you open each box, all the pieces for whatever it is you're building fit perfectly inside that box. After spending the last two months packing and repacking camping gear and clothing into a couple of dry bags, you really come to appreciate the engineering behind not just making something any idiot can assemble, but you make it so that it packs up perfectly into standardized boxes by the thousands. I figure they've got German engineers with doctorates in quantitative space analysis wearing wire rimmed glasses and sipping out of little espresso cups as they feverishly work late into the night to get everything sized just right. If it were done by Americans, you'd have boxes the size of Isuzu's emblazoned with branding you ignore sealed up in that God-awful clear plastic crap that we package screwdrivers and what not in. You'd open up the box and then all kinds of static-cling foam peanuts would leap out at you and the directions would be four pages of stuff that doesn't make sense followed up with eighteen pages of warnings and disclaimers so you can't sue the company in the event you set your table lamp in a steaming bathtub before you climb in and turn it on.

That said, it's now time for me to roll, but please tune in again soon as our next episode is more gripping than you can imagine: AxL has a stroke! (for real - no joke - but before you panic, he's fine now and acting like nothing ever happened.)