Your Monday Night Football Open Thread (Pre-season Edition)

Here’s a picture of my dead dog Frankie. He was probably the best friend I ever had.

This photograph is late in his life. He was a rescue dog from an alley in East Los Angeles, and such a gentle creature. He had the sweetest heart ever. He was a glorious goofball.

The picture shows him on his couch, which was in my studio. It was a beat up sofa but it was the only furniture in the house that the dogs were allowed on.

However, since I was seemingly always in trouble with Andrea (and I don’t think I deserved it) I would sleep on the couch with Frankie. And we would have a hysterical competion for real estate on the couch. But we managed to make it work.

One night we were sleeping together on the couch and I farted and it was pretty awful, and it went straight at Frankie’s face. He rose, gave me the dirtiest look ever, and got off the couch and went upstairs.

Brind le boxer breeds usually die like clockwork on their tenth birthday, but Frankie lived to be twelve, but it was increasingly obvious that he was no longer enjoying life. We had to put another dog down a year earlier. It’s extremely unpleasant duty but we knew how to do it.

The night of Frankie’s death, he went out onto the front lawn (where ordinarily he was not allowed to go) and he laid down. He had it, he was done, and we knew it too. He was in pain. I knew we were going to have to put him down that night. But I got down on the lawn and laid with him and gently petted him and told him what an awesome dog and good friend he was to me.

One of the beauties of Los Angeles is that there is everything here, even 24 hour veterinary hospitals that are as good as human hospitals. This all happened at about midnight.

Frankie loved motoring. So for the last acts of his life I said “let’s go for a ride” and he perked up and got off the lawn and got into the back seat of Andrea’s Mercury MX hybrid. I drove and Andrea and Frankie rode together in the back. We lived in Santa Monica California so I drove to the beach road right next to the Pacific Ocean which he loved and could smell. It was the last fun thing he did in his life.

I then drove down Wilshire Boulevard to the veterinary hospital that was on Sepulveda Boulevard. This was not a pleasant trip for me.

Before we got to Sepulveda, Frankie died in the back seat, in Andrea’s arms. He went out like a man.

Frankie died in the back of a nice car built by the Ford Motor Company with a beautiful woman, just like President Kennedy.