Dodger Dog and other points

Listen, I know I walk a tight rope. I don’t have a good paying job. I don’t live in a cool apartment. And really, I’m no Brad Pitt or even a Liam Nesson, for that matter. So when I approach a woman in a bar or the park or at a garage sale, I have to make sure everything I say and do is absolutely spotless. Now the cooler the girl, the easier it is, but when you start quoting Back to the Future Two it’s a real gamble. Odds are, as seen in Knocked Up, girls have no idea who the hell Doc Brown is, let alone Biff Tannen, Jennifer Parker, or the dynamics of the space time continuum (which explains why the film only rated a measly 8.4 out of 10 on IMDB.)

Sports references are okay with the ladies, but don’t start telling a story about Tommy Greene just because the girl is wearing a Phillies shirt. What I noticed is that 8 out of 10 times a guy should NEVER bring up sports, but if a girl shall approach the subject, it’s okay to go with it as long as you don’t debate her on issue’s like Andy Reid’s decision to have Mike Vick run it up in the middle on 4th and 1 with less than two minutes left in the game. Even if you do wind up dating this woman, would you really want your first conversation be an argument?

Obviously having good teams in the city is always a magnificent thing. You can’t walk 90 feet in the city without seeing someone with a Phillies cap. It’s great. But the draw back is that everyone starts to know everything about the team. When the team is the forefront of social activity, things start coming arise. Take for instance, a girl who simply likes sports, but doesn’t watch ESPN or listen to Mike Missanelli every day—a girl who gets into a particular sport for the in-moment excitement and nothing else—she most likely doesn’t give a shit about it outside the minutes within the game. If you were to move your conversation, with said potential lady, to the topic of the Philadelphia Hockey Flyers and you started spitting off random facts about the importance of icing during a 3 on 5 or Canada, you know you could lose the girls interest very easily.

There are certain risk you take when bringing up sports in conversation.

1) The potential girl will lose interest and start to look around for her friends. She’ll find her friends and leave you to watch Sports Center on mute.
2) The potential girl will know more about the sport than you do and you look like an idiot who likes dogs and magic cards.
OR
3) She actually wants to continue speaking with you, but due to lack of knowledge on the newly introduced topic, she now has nothing to offer to the conversation—which makes her feel uncomfortable.

In the latter case, she will search in her mind drastically to make some sort of relevant comment, which will mostly result in, “Dan Carcillo is really hot. That mustache is makes me quiver.” At that point, you now know at least this one thing; Carcillo is now your enemy. You find yourself rooting against him. You drop him from your fantasy team in the fantasy league you previously forgot you were apart of. Remember the Ryan Howard dilemma in my previous blog, Sports and Wine? A woman telling you that she has a crush on the guy you athletically look up to is basically the same thing; you won’t be able to look at him the same way. He will score a goal and you will cheer, but only a great sense of reluctance and jealously.

It is along these lines that over the last few years I have learned to hate Chase Utley for the same reason guys from New York/Jersey secretly hate Derek Jeter. If you ever go to Phillies ballpark you’ll find EVERY SINGLE GIRL is wearing an Utley shirt. The same goes with Jeter at Yankee stadium. If you were to take all of the talent and all of the skill of Jeter or Utley and put it in the body of Paul Giamatti, do you think every girl in the Tri-State/Delaware Valley area would be sporting their numbers? Meh, I think not. It’s kind of similar to hating Brad Pitt or Leonardo Dicaprio—they are both pretty boys who you are instinctually commanded to hate, yet one made Fight Club and the other Inception, which makes it hard to have any revulsion towards them. It’s fun to make fun of a pretty boy if he strikes out or stars in All the Pretty Horses, but once he does something of merit like win the World Series or anchor The Departed it’s hard to preach against him.

When I was living in LA:

I was taking my morning run through South Central near USC. Now you may have heard of South Central, Los Angeles in Dr. Dre songs, but I assure you it is not as bad as the doctor suggest. A friend once said to me that it is earthly impossible to have a dangerous ghetto if palm trees are present. Which is true. The only problem I ever had in South Central was when the taco guy on the corner of Fig and 38th shorted me 35 cents. (Hector, if you are reading this, I will get you. I will get you one day Senor. !Venganza! Venganza, indeed)

Anyway, I was running this one fine morning in the June of 2009, when I saw a raggedy young puppy in the middle of traffic. She had the dirty fur of a Columbus night walker and a fresh collection of real bad ass dread locks—not the kind of dreads rich kids from the suburbs who listen to Phish wear, but actual, Malibu Rum commercial dread locks. She was all alone, nobody calling after her, nobody caring. She ran amongst the cars, slightly evading each one as if it the highway was a game of dodge ball. And I stood there for a moment and watched for second. Then I did what anybody would have done. The most logical thing—what anybody would have done…I continued running. (I was in the fucking zone).

I continued running through the warm California air, admiring how the smog highlighting the Los Angeles sky is oddly handsome, when I came back to see the same dog doing the same exact thing in the middle of the street. And really, in true Los Angeles fashion, though this cute puppy dog was inches away from getting smashed by each passing Prius, nobody gave a shit. So, for the first time in a long time, I picked the girl up and took her home.

That day my roommate and I took her to various veterinarians to see if she had a chip in her that could identify if she was loved or not. She was not. We then went to the LA County SPCA to drop her off to puppy prison. I asked the puppy warden how long they’d keep her before she goes to puppy death row and the man said, because of over crowding, only four days. All of California has this problem; human and dog prisons alike. I then asked if it was a likely chance she might get adopted before the four days. The man sat there in his official brown button down shirt, Smokey the bear hat, and dollar store silver badge, arms crossed, while he shook his head claiming no. It was at that very moment when the dark eyed doggie sitting in my arms looked right into my eyes and with the love of a thousands pounds of kibble, licked my unshaved face. It was over. She was mine and I was hers and there was nothing either of us could do.

At first I thought I could just be a foster parent to her—take care of her, while I looked for a permanent guardian. Who knows? Maybe she could see angels in the outfield during an Angels game like in the movie Angels in the Outfield staring the Inception guy from 3rd Rock from the Sun…But that didn’t wind up happening. However, similar to Angels in the Outfield, I had to learn the lesson that raising a foster child is difficult because the minute you get attached, the child gets adopted by Danny Glover. And exactly what happened, I got attached.

When it was time to move back to Pennsylvania, it was a no brainer to bring the pup back with me. There we were, driving up the 10 out of LA, heads out the window, yelling, “So long, Stink Town!” She and I traveled back east in the summer zephyr, both rejected from the city of Los Angeles and on our way back home.

I named her Dodger. My mom and dad named me Charles. I go by Charlie and Chuck interchangeably. Dodger goes by Dodge sometimes and sometimes I call her Fiffa World Cup or Dodge Caravan or Dodge Stump the Fans or BuBu; all for different reasons which you can ask me about in person.

My little Dodger is one of things I am most proud of, even though she is a pain in the ass sometimes… But aren’t we all? In life, sometimes we shit on the rug and other times we don’t, as long as somebody takes us for a walk every now and we’ll all be cool.

People say to me that I should tell girls the story of Dodger. But how do you bring something like that up at a bar? Whenever I walk my two dogs in the park or down the shore and another dog sniffs my dogs ass, I always know if the dog is a rescue. You know why? Because the pompous prick tells me as soon as he or she gets a chance. “This is Fluffy. I rescued her. I’m telling you this because I want you to think that I am awesome. Did you rescue this one? Are you as good of a person as I am? Because I’m really awesome. I rescue dogs. I also read books and donate to public radio.”

I don’t want to be that guy. Just because you didn’t pay for your dog, doesn’t mean you rescued it. I only have Dodger because she is stupid enough to run through traffic and she is fucking cute. If she were a less cute animal like a squirrel or a giraffe, I would have kept running and thought nothing of it or that the circus is in town. Let’s face it; dogs are cute and friendly as hell. Most of them have true love in their hearts. I guess the point is that I needed Dodger just as much as she needed me. I’m no hero; I’m just a guy without a girlfriend.

Back to the issue at hand:

Finding the right thing to say to a girl is tough, but using stock stories like “rescuing” a dog just sounds cheap. And I feel cheap telling it. It’s kind of cheating. Wouldn’t it be more rewarding to find a girl by thinking quick and with wit.

See, in the amount of time you have to make an impression—the thinking on your feet, making every word count, type of interaction can either make you or break you. Picking up a girl and going to an interview is essentially the same thing; in both cases, you’re trying to receive some sort of “job”. (Don’t think too hard about that pun). But in both cases, don’t make a great deal out of something small. You’ll just feel silly.