#100. Bizzy The Pug and You

Goodbye, sweet gremlin.

Hi everyone,

It’s been a pretty heavy week here, for reasons I’ll get into later. There were definite highlights though: I ate some apple with a little blob of honey on it to celebrate Rosh Hashanah. Performing on the super fun Late Stage Live and Friends standup show was a bright spot during the week for sure. Late Stage Live is a late night-style show that airs on public access and then YouTube. It’s made by a group of young queer Gen Z comedians and is very cool. On the most recent episode, host Ella Yurman interviewed NYC city councilperson Chi Ossé! I am always delighted to get to do shows with young hip comedians, like I am the (or, a) fun uncle of Brooklyn standup.

Also delightful: Maris and I saw our friend Jennifer Mills’s Tiny Play Festival, in which actors (mostly first-time performers) put on a series of very, very short plays that Mills herself wrote. Then I hung out at a live Hey Riddle Riddle podcast show. HRR is a podcast about…solving riddles (as one might expect from the name), and I was on an episode early this year! It was one of the most fun podcasts I’ve ever been a part of and the live show made me laugh a ton.

On Saturday night, we wanted to watch something stupid that would not make us feel any feelings (for reasons I promise I will reveal), so we threw on The Beekeeper, Jason Statham’s recent morality play (action movie) about the evils of defrauding the elderly. The film contains, as my dad would say, “a lot of good beating up” and it doesn’t make a ton of sense, but it doesn’t feel like the movie is calling the audience stupid; it’s more like the movie invites us to be stupid.

When I was a kid, there was a robust tradition of mid-premise movies that were mostly setups for the aforementioned style of beating up. The mob comes to town to turn the recycling plant into a casino, but SORRY, DICKWEEDS, the town’s recycleman is Steven Seagal, and he’s going to beat the shit out of you all one at a time. Or, like, Nicolas Cage in a tank top plays a haberdasher in a remote Polish village whose training as a Navy WALRUS (bigger, more dangerous version of a Navy SEAL) kicks in after a warlord tries to enslave the local elementary school children at his heroin factory. Now we get a bunch of superhero movies, the occasional Fast v. Furious sequel, and the even more occasional movie that WOULD be fun if there wasn’t such a lengthy digression to explore childhood trauma. Statham is all we have left of this tradition. Thank you for your service, you classic bald angel of death.

Also, I think I have the newsletter’s first ad today? I am saying that in case the good people of

Flagrant Mag

give me money for this, but my cool basketball magazine friends are throwing a Finals Watch Party this Sunday (10/13) afternoon in Brooklyn!

Which Finals? Legally I’m not sure I’m allowed to say. But use your noodle, folks! It’s a free, all-ages event, and you can RSVP right here!!! (I, a Beekeeper-watching doofus have theater tickets and won’t be able to make it, which is BREAKING MY HEART!) Even if YOU can’t make it, you should subscribe to the

Flagrant Mag

Substack and buy their print issues and merch and listen to their podcast!!! That part is NOT a paid ad. It’s just something I believe deep down!!!

Tonight I’ll be kicking around at the second ever Frankenstein’s Baby show at Union Hall! And tomorrow Emmy Blotnick and I are co-hosting Trivia For Cheaters at Brooklyn Brewery to benefit 826 Brooklyn!

Sorry to be so New York-centric with these events, but it is where I live! (Go Liberty!)

A FEW WORDS ABOUT BIZZY, OUR BELOVED PUG

Content warning: I am so sad!

R.I.P. Bizzy the Pug (2007-2024)

Here’s the bad news I alluded to earlier.

This afternoon, Maris and I will say goodbye to Bizzy, our pug. She lived a long and wonderful life (she was born during the Bush administration, mere months after top college basketball prospect Cooper Flagg, who is now 6’9”). She was already eight years old when she came to live with us, though the other biographical details from that era of her life are murky on account of the person who gave her to us being a compulsive liar. (I wrote about this in my book.) She’s become increasingly eccentric in her habits and infant-like in her old age, which I wrote about in Luke O’Neil’s excellent newsletter.

Maris and I adopted Bizzy almost immediately after moving in together. It’s been nearly a decade since I’ve slept at home without her snores and mururs firmly within earshot, if not in bed with us. Her regular walks and irregular digestive system dictated the rhythms of our days. Bizzy’s increasing neediness (3am walks, being spoon-fed her wet food) made me love her more with time, not less. We accepted her into our lives, an anxious senior dog. It felt beautiful, just even, to care for her in her even older age. Maris (an angel!) bore more of Bizzy’s wriggly, unwieldy weight than I did, tending to her solo while I traveled a ton for work the past couple of years. We gave Bizzy the best life we could until the vet, not-as-gently-as-I-might-have-preferred, told us a few days ago that there wasn’t really a best life for her anymore.

In her nearly two decades on Earth, Bizzy shared so many apples with Maris and devoured enough slices of deli turkey to comprise dozens of Thanksgiving meals. She received so many compliments from strangers. She accepted so many hugs and squeezes and scratches behind the ears. We saw her learn to deal with the clatter and buzz of living in an apartment building with neighbors she could hear coming and going. She outlasted the set of couches Maris and I had in our first apartment together. She trotted countless times to be barber shop down the block, where her presence delighted the employees (who lavished her with treats) and inconvenienced the patrons. She got up early to keep Maris company while she wrote. She stayed up late to watch basketball with me when I got home from shows. She was a sweet little bunny and a wild little goblin. She was a joyful companion and a perfect little pain in the ass.

Bizzy rarely accepted the obligations of a lap dog. She never kissed or licked people (unless she noticed peanut butter on their fingers). She used to snuggle with us in the morning, and would occasionally hump Maris’s leg after dinner. But those habits faded away years ago. The customary canine affections were replaced by new tendencies. The way she allowed me to scoop her up and carry her outside when her legs were too frail to clamber up and down the steps to and from our second floor apartment. The way she dozed beside Maris after they shared a piece of fruit. Her contented grunfs and grumbles. Her demands for me to hang out NEAR her on the couch in the middle of the night even when she refused to sleep in bed with us. I will miss her anxious specificities despite how many times they left me bleary-eyed in the morning, and how many dog sitters she went through on account of her being an absolute maniac. What shape will my days and nights have without her weirdness filling every empty moment?

She physically fills the place too. Pug-related ephemera juts out of every corner of our apartment. Art bearing Bizzy’s image. The slippers in her likeness that I got Maris as a gift. So many pug oven mitts and dish towels and pairs of socks we’ve received from friends and family. Without the fuzzy little goblin around, it will feel bizarre to have these artifacts on display. But I can’t imagine getting rid of them.

Even when we do, when the potholders get too grimy to keep and the prints we ordered from Etsy are displaced by other art, we will never forget Bizzy. No one who has met her could ever do that. She’s too cute and weird and stubborn and funny.

Over the past few days, a handful of friends have popped in to say goodbye, and Bizzy submitted to pats and squeezes and doting. We visited the barber shop for the last time this morning, Bizzy in her stroller, her legs can’t carry her anymore.

I’ve been crying a lot thinking about all these last times. But then I remember the thousands of walks, the hundreds of naps, the millions of moments of quiet company (and loud frantic company too). How sad it is to lose a tiny old friend. How beautiful it is to carry so much of her with us still.

Okay thanks for indulging me. Back to our regular newsletter format.

PEP TALK FOR A READER

I’ve done just a little futzing around with this request! And I added the nickname!

I work in animal rescue, a field I love but that is incredibly taxing both physically and mentally. I’m in a very “what’s my purpose?” or rather “is there a purpose?” type of spiral even in the midst of working with vulnerable dog populations everyday. I left the film industry after feeling disillusioned and a need to do something that felt more personal and immediately rewarding but now I feel I’ve come to a dead end due to burn out. In the midst of this I’ve also lost touch with all the things I once enjoyed (crocheting, movies, reading, record collecting, etc.). So the entirety of my life is split between work 6 and often 7 days a week and then catching up on Bravo shows. I feel selfish but I’m tired.
- Must I Love Dogs (This Much)?

Hello, MILD (TM). You’ve been really burning the candle, well…not at both ends, exactly, but at one end all the time. That doesn’t seem sustainable! You’re going to run out of candle at some point even if you are burning it on someone else’s behalf and for a very good reason.

I get that you left your previous professional field in search of something that felt impactful, and it seems like the problem isn’t that you’re still searching for a way to make a difference; it’s that doing only that is nearly as stressful as working in an industry that doesn’t offer the same satisfaction at all. Anything’s going to burn you out if you do it 6-7 days a week for years. Rescuing vulnerable dogs. Jumping off a trampoline and dunking basketballs. Hot dog eating contests. It’s good to be mindful of not living a selfish life, but your self deserves a little ish. It’s the only self you have!

Maybe it’s because we’re right in the midst of the High Holidays, or maybe it’s just the symmetry of your questions, but this quote from Rabbi Hillel (the only quote from any rabbi I know by heart, as far as I know) comes to mind: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I?” (The third part of the quote “And if not now, when?” is also a classic, but in this case “a little later” can be the answer too.) Obviously there’s a bigger “how to be a person in the world” thrust to these rhetorical questions. But their magnitude seems to match the immensity of the way you posed your concerns about life and work. If you’d said “should I quit my job?” or “is any job going to feel fulfilling?” I probably would have quoted Office Space or The Big Lebowski and left it at that.

A job will never give you a holistic sense of meaning, even when you’re doing good and important work. And you won’t find out what else is important to you while you are All Job All The Time, like you’re Charli XCX but for going to work instead of dancing and singing about nose drugs. (Not that I recommend a 365 Party Girl lifestyle as an antidote for professional burnout.) But I don’t think cutting out your hobbies and restorative practices will help you find a purpose and especially not your purpose. No offense to Bravo, but there’s only so long you can sustain yourself on Real Housewives franchises alone. You can get back to being the whole you! And maybe even find new you deep down inside!

To paraphrase Rabbi Hillel: “You do so much for those dogs. But what are you doing for you, dog?”

PICK-ME-UP THING OF THE WEEK:
Welcome To Talk Town (which is a podcast!!!)

My friends Alison, Anthony, and Greg started a new podcast. It is fully deranged. The idea is that every episode they talk about some features of a hypothetical town (the titular Talk Town) that would correct the problems with modern society. Sometimes they come up with great ideas (Expert Lines, Erotic Duels) and other times they argue about whether the question Anthony asked was actually a ripoff of a game Greg had made up but hadn’t told anyone about yet.

It is…so stupid, which I mean as a compliment but also an accurate description. I laugh a LOT listening to this goofy show. It’s nonsense. I love it. Check it out!

UPCOMING SHOWS

I’ve got a bunch of NYC dates coming up, and then a few back on the road! See you there?!?!

10/7: Hanging out at Frankenstein’s Baby at Union Hall (Brooklyn)

10/8: Co-hosting Trivia For Cheaters 826 Fundraiser at Brooklyn Brewery

10/12: Climate Fundraiser at Union Hall (Brooklyn — Early show!!!)

10/18: The Muslims are Coming: Swing State Invasion (Reading, PA)

10/21: Co-hosting Frankenstein’s Baby at Union Hall (Brooklyn)

10/24: American Sawdust and then The Gutter (Brooklyn)

11/29-12/8: TED LEO AND AIMEE MANN CHRISTMAS SHOWS (Several Cities)