September 24, 2008
Kept waking up during the night thinking of angles and layout ideas and word balloon leaps of imagination for the Top Secret Project. Almost too excited. Need to calm down a bit, but I get rather manic when I'm finishing a project like Mickey Free: The Graphic Novel.

Note to self: "And you wonder why you had two heart attacks?"

Meanwhile, The Not So Secret Top Secret Writer sent me an old issue of Saga magazine (1950) featuring a cover story on the Apache Kid. Very cool:



Actually, a very good likeness of the Kid. And the story inside, by Charles Hewes, is on the whole accurate, although the writer, and I imagine the editors, kept spicing up the narrative with lines like these:

"The Kid gave his squaw a short skirt of tropical bird feathers and often she wore nothing else as they basked in the warm sun."

As I mentioned yesterday, both my dogs are in jail. Quarantined actually.

We have lived out in the boonies for almost 22 years and part of the charm was the ability to have our dogs roam unrestricted. We leave our gates open in the daytime and often get reports from the neighbors, "Peaches and Buddy came down to visit last Saturday."

All of that ended last Saturday when I was returning from a bike ride at around six in the morning and Peaches attacked an older dog out for a walk with a new resident who lives up the hill from us. Of course, being a pack animal, Buddy jumped in on the attack and the dog owner got bit trying to break them up.

As I waded into the fray, I got nipped in the shorts by the woman's dog, missing my family jewels by a micro-meter. All three dogs rolled in the rocks in a tangle of fur and teeth. I finally got my dogs off and hauled them off to a safe distance. The woman was bleeding and had to be taken to ER. One of my neighbors, who actually picked up the woman and her dog, called that night and demanded I put my dogs down and that he, and another neighbor, are tired of my vicious dogs and he expressed concern for the safety of his grandchildren.

Needless to say, this was not a happy day for any of us. Of course, both my dogs were oblivious to any of this. In their feeble minds they were just doing their job, protecting their territory, but I am the responsible one.

Animal Rabies Control showed up at the True West offices yesterday. Sheri came into my office and said, "Your dogs bit someone and a gentleman is here to take them to dog jail." The officer was very polite and wrote me up two tickets and gave me a court date. He said I had an option: he could take the dogs to the pound in Mesa (about 40 miles from here) or I could voluntarily impound them at a local vet. He also said he had been out at the house and he was surprised how nice the dogs were (both licked his hand and wagged their tails).

Sigh.

Buddy jumped right in the truck, but Peaches knew better and cowered on the seat, trembling all the way to the slammer. Both dogs whimpered in the lobby and as they were led away for a 10-day-sentence, I promised to visit every day and then they were gone.

Last night I talked to the husband of the bite victim and he was understandably upset but wanted to know that I was going to muzzle my dogs. I told him, the days of my dogs roaming the neighborhood are over and that anytime I am even in the front yard, my dogs will be on a leash (which is the law by the way even though nobody in my neighborhood abides by it).

But as of last Saturday, I am abiding by that law.

We may give Buddy away. Peaches is about 13 years old and will live out her days inside the yard and on a leash.

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
—Aldous Huxley