Dog Ear
August 21, 2025
as talking to a friend the other night about storytelling and literature and anime and everything, and a thought hit me. What sort of villain do you prefer? Essentially, there are two types. The Mad Dog: This is the villain you love to hate. His first trait is that he usually offs an underling (often for being the bearer of bad news, but sometimes simply as a character establishment (and what the hell do the other underlings think about this?). Usually he’s charismatic and fun to watch, but he’s made to hate. He boasts and brags, he kicks the dog, […]
August 7, 2025
e was a good friend. We knew each other for decades. But in the final few years of our friendship, he got… difficult. He’d call and talk AT me for hours. In person, he was loud. At restaurants, he’d talk politics in a booming voice, gathering angry stares. It got to where I’d flinch when I saw his name pop up on my phone — there would go another hour. A friend and I tried to stage an intervention but he turned us down – he had other little things to do. And then at a mutual event where I was supposed […]
July 31, 2025
y dad was an only child with older parents, and I think that might have caused his anger issues. Limited social interactions, you know? So, to me, my dad was a gruff Navy captain. We got along well enough – we both loved trains. But no, you didn’t want to get him angry. He’d go volcanic. So that’s my excuse (which really isn’t an excuse) – learned behavior. My anger has cost me three jobs in the past. Someone in authority would order up a big plate of stupid. We’d argue. I’d lose my temper. And there’s the door. As […]
July 24, 2025
mid the rolling green hills with their scattering of humans, the vast giants meet in council. So the setup here is my model train club (Orlando N-Trak, or ONT). We’ve been doing this all my adult life, since 1987. I’ve helped build it, I help run it, I help promote it. And tonight, I had to set up the waybills so engineers know where their freight cars are going. With six mainline freights and seven local trains, we’re moving something like fifty to seventy cars. We need to doublecheck to ensure they all start where they are papered to start, […]
July 17, 2025
‘ve always had a grimace in my heart for the word Lifestyles. Your life, your one time through this passage of existence, is really what you make of it. We all have different opportunists and situations. A person born of majority race and wealth has a bit of a leg up over a poor minority child saddled with leukemia (especially in times when tax cuts for the wealthy and open beatings for the downtrodden are a popularity political stance (fucking fascists)). It’s what it is. You play your hand as best you can. Which is why I dislike the idea […]
July 10, 2025
t’s a societal/sexual thing – we all really want some Japanese semi-dominatrix like Marie Kondo to force us to get rid of all our stuff. “No, mistress, please! Not my exorcise stuff in the garage!” “All of it! To the curb, worm!” Really, in a way, she is right. We tend to keep too much shit. And if the first use of the internet is porn, the second is consumerism. No longer do we have to walk to the market, buy something impractical, and carry it all the way back to our farm. Now it’s one simple click. Across our culture, […]
July 3, 2025
o you may not have noticed (or cared) that I have not been writing up any DOG EAR pieces for the last few weeks. I’ve been very busy with three distinct crises. One of them was termites; we had evidence that they’d swarmed in our garage and so we had to get barriers (i.e. poisons) injected into all our baseboards. This meant that all furniture along the walls had to be moved. And we have a lot of books. Shelves and stacks of them. For this, we’d ordered a pod placed out on our driveway to put all the books […]
June 12, 2025
ound out that our 1949 bungalow has termites. Not bad, but worrying. We’re not going to just tent and gas (that only is good for a few years). Rather, we’re going to treat, which means injecting shit into the baseboards to keep them at bay. Also, they’ll climb under the house and put poison barriers around all the supports. Fine and good, right? However, to get AT the baseboards, they need to get TO the baseboards. The problem there is that we read a lot of books and have bought a lot of DVDs (yes, I know, old school, right?). […]
June 5, 2025
never understood tattoos for years. I finally got a bit of insight following a Becky Chamber’s book (I don’t remember the title) where one of the characters is a tattoo artist. It was noted (and I’m going from memory here) that tattoos shouldn’t just be a cute picture or a Japanese letter you know nothing about; a tattoo should be something of meaning from your past, or something that guides you into the future. And that’s the thing I’d missed; meaning. While I don’t have a tattoo, I do have my own things like that. I keep items that have […]
May 29, 2025
We don’t need no education! -Pink Floyd (The Wall) Yes you do; you just used a double-negative! -Moss (The IT Crowd) here seems to be a discouraging trend in modern America, the idea that college and education is overrated, that plumbers own boats and liberal arts students own debt, that native intelligence is more than enough to get through life happy, wealthy and successful. I don’t know if this is a drive on some dark cabal of anti-intellectuals to dumb down the voting citizenry. After all, we recently elected the biggest idiot on the block and his base is cheering […]