puppies, surgery, rock music, and suicide

the office dog, a gigantic 7-(49)-year-old rotweiler girl named "Whisky" just had surgery on her torn ACL in her left knee this week. she's back and wearing one of those huge satellite dishes around her neck to keep her from getting at the stitches, which look more like staples and go the entire length of her leg. it looks awful. anyway, i'm so happy she won't have to limp around anymore, and i'm glad it's more of a sports injury than a getting-old injury. she always hangs out & sleeps under my desk at my feet while i work the day away. i give her rides in my van to the post office every now and then, and sometimes i'll even take her on long trips into town. i don't think there'll be much more of that happening because she sometimes slobbers a bit too much in the heat, causing me to have to do extra work to keep my van clean. anyway, just figured i'd share that.

this sunday i'll be seeing some of my favorite rock bands live, at my first ever warped tour. most exciting is Armor For Sleep, whose CD "what to do when you are dead" just absolutely pulverizes the competition. that's basically the reason i'm going, a lot of the other bands are ridiculous...however i will get a chance to see my hometown heroes AFI (who i never saw when they were kids in the same town as me, in california), also a band called From Autumn To Ashes whose only song i like is a fucking masterpiece titled "Short Stories with Tragic Endings"...and it's an old song, so i hope they are able to do it. there's a lot of symphony instruments in the song. the rest of the mentionable bands' names are Against Me!, Anti-Flag, From First To Last, Less Than Jake, Motion City Soundtrack (whose songs "A-OK" and "Everything Is Alright" and "The Future Freaks Me Out" and "My Favorite Accident" are all actually for the most part pretty a-ok songs), NOFX, Rise Against, Saves The Day, Senses Fail, The Academy Is.., The Casualties, and Thursday.

then some kid i vaguely knew named Billy (that many of my friends knew, and one of my girl friends dated for a long time) committed suicide two nights ago, and that's gay, not only because he had a lot going for him and was good looking, but also because the only people who are supposed to commit suicide are people i've never met before, so i can make the joke about how anything that gets traffic on the freeway going faster, i'm all for it. damn fools. anyway, sorry to have to share this little tidbit but it had to be said. at least i don't know how Billy did it, as opposed to that other cool guy i knew named Ron, who got cancer for the second time (after beating it once thru chemotherapy before) and decided to hang himself about a year ago, but kinda screwed it up and hung there for 16 hours, then died in the hospital sometime not long thereafter. yeah, wow. people will always be people, i guess.