A month ago the dogs got accustomed to lying on the couch every day and watching TV for hours, when M was avidly following the Tour de France, as she does each year. Then the Tour was over, and M stopped watching TV during the day and returned to her regular routine, which mostly consists of propping herself up in bed into the only position she can work in without her neck throbbing and writing. It definitely does not consist of watching reruns of “Seinfeld.”
But the dogs weren’t so keen on returning to their regular routines, which mostly consisted of lying around and watching their respective masters write. We call this “helping us work,” as in, “Come on, Mickey, it’s time to help me work.”
But instead of returning to their day jobs, Mickey – ostensibly M’s dog – and Stevie – ostensibly mine – decided they’d rather just lie around on the living room couch all day. That alone was fine with us. If they preferred the couch to our respective home offices, then so be it.
The only thing is, having gotten used to being on the couch along with a human person and the TV on, they weren’t just satisfied with lying around on the sofa by themselves. Mickey, in particular, and who can be quite demanding, has taken to getting off the couch, walking the few feet to my office door, which is adjacent to the living room, and making short, insistent barking sounds, the clear meaning of which is “Get out of your office and get on the couch with us, and while you’re at it, turn on the TV.”
Stevie is relatively new to all this. He hasn’t really been around long enough to have established a solid routine. He only just immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico last December (he is documented, yes), and only six months before that was he born. So he is a little more go-with-the-flow – “I’m happy just to be here in the lap of luxury compared to my former life scrounging for food and avoiding predators, I’ll do whatever you want, unless it involves cats” — than Mickey, who has strong opinions about the way things should be.
But you have to understand that Mickey has apparently forsaken a good five or six years of steady employment helping M write. He now pretty much refuses even to go upstairs during the day, which is where M works and where he used to tuck himself into a ball at the foot of the bed or up against my pillow and snooze away his life, like all good dogs do, thereby giving meaning to the expression of poignant longing, “It’s a dog’s life.”
Instead, it’s on the couch, period. With or without Stevie, he doesn’t care. Just so long as Stevie isn’t bothering him.
But not, however, without me, if I’m the only human within barking territory. And Mickey can be very willful (a trait he learned from M, who is the most willful person on Earth, and possibly in our solar system – scientists are still investigating and haven’t issued their final conclusions, but it’s looking good for M). He is solid, compact, relatively low to the ground, with a center of gravity much more powerful than his size or weight justifies. You just really can’t get him to go somewhere if he doesn’t want to. Many an afternoon walk has been aborted early by his refusal to budge any further after some nominal sniffing and peeing. “I’m done,” he’s known to insist, and that pretty much means back to the car, back home, and these days … back to the sofa.
Mickey is fine with me joining him on the sofa with my laptop; he has grown accustomed to the sight of a slate gray MacBook as something of an extension of his human “masters.” He’s not particularly gracious about making room on the sofa, however, and with his brother, Stevie, about twice his size in length, typically sprawled out to full extension next to him, this doesn’t ordinarily leave me much room. I am often left having to tuck myself in between the two of them, contorting myself with one leg behind my head, having to type with the weight of at least one dog head fully loaded on a forearm.
If I try to sneak back into my office to sit at my desk and work on my desktop computer, Mickey will just get off the couch, take a few steps, and start over again insisting that I sit on the couch.
And he and Stevie just lie there staring at the TV screen across the room, as if they are saying, “Turn it on,” which is indeed what they are saying.
For some stupid reason, as it happens, I do shell out practically a second monthly mortgage payment to the cable company, so there is an awful lot of programming from which to choose. And if I’m not doing something like writing a story about how my dogs insist I sit with them on the couch and watch TV – which, surprisingly, requires a lot of concentration, a comfortable seating arrangement, and no TV blaring in the background — I am often able to get a fair amount of work done with the TV on.
In fact, the three of us have seen parts of some pretty good movies in recent weeks. It seems like there is a station that plays nothing but “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II” all the time, so the boys are boning up on their Brando imitations. There’s also been a Dustin Hoffman festival on another channel – we’ve seen “All the President’s Men” and “Marathon Man.” We also saw “Napoleon Dynamite” twice; it holds up surprisingly well, in case you were wondering. Dorkdom is apparently timeless.
Mostly, though, the dogs like “Seinfeld.” I never saw “Seinfeld” the first time around. That show must have aired during the decade I stopped watching TV. When they cancelled “Twin Peaks,” I declared a moratorium on broadcast television. The fact that it coincided with the birth of my firstborn child helped clinch that deal. No TV for that child, or for the next one.
As you probably know, and as I’ve only recently learned, “Seinfeld” reruns play more often than those of “The Cosby Show.” So I’ve had a good opportunity to catch up with what I missed over the years. I don’t particularly love the show. But I do love “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” so what I take away from “Seinfeld” is the amazing way that writer/producer/comedian Larry David was able to channel divergent aspects of his personality into the four main characters of “Seinfeld,” although not so much into Jerry Seinfeld himself, who is sort of a blank slate – a wall of white-bread – for the others to play off.
For some reason, the dogs love “Seinfeld.” Maybe it’s because there’s just a lot of chatter, and not as many gunshots and police sirens and barking dogs and screaming and crying humans as they usually hear in the cable TV shows – crime shows, police procedurals, detective dramas — that M and I like to watch at night to calm our jittery, overcaffeinated nerves before drifting off into a nice peaceful sleep.
Come to think of it, Jerry Seinfeld never does anything on his show. He mostly just sits on his couch while people drop by his apartment and talk to him. He kind of lives a dog’s life. Maybe that’s why Mickey and Stevie like “Seinfeld.”