So I was just hanging out, watching B make me dinner (I know!) and drinking a Mojo IPA (which is magically delicious). I’m missing Nuggets games and trying to give a crap about two teams from Texas playing each other, which isn’t working. That leaves plenty of room for my mind to wander. And here’s what happened.

I was thinking about the Amazing Race, which is one of my favorite TV shows of all time (my favorite TV show is the First 48, which I guess is kind of a stupid show to have as a favorite, but whatever — I also really liked that show about the bounty hunter from Sacramento who was the awesomest bounty hunter ever and wore a ring shaped like a horseshoe and I secretly want to be a bounty hunter one day but that’s another story). I watch way too much TV, although I will never admit this in person, apparently because I like to try to seem cooler than I am, which is lame.

I’ve also been thinking about dogs a lot lately. In an effort to make our puppy turn out normal and not like Coltrane who is totally awesome except if you try to take him anywhere in which case he is Satan-with-a-capital-S, we’ve been taking her to class. This came as a total surprise to us, but it turns out she’s smart. Really smart! Every week, we go to class and everybody compliments us on practicing so much with her and we didn’t really practice with her much at all. It’s like when you’re in law school and you didn’t actually read the case but you get called on and just blurt out something totally brilliant and everybody freaks out and secretly hates you. She’s so smart you can’t tell we totally suck and don’t really do much but sit on our asses all the time. This made me realize that, holy crap, if we actually did practice with her, well, eventually we’d be able to take over the universe. That’s kind of cool. So I’ve been practicing. I even signed us up for the level-2 class, where we learn some fancy dog stuff and start to get into agility. Although, to be honest, “stay” is really hard. She’s usually too excited to stay. She wants to lick your face and jump up and down and do normal, spazzy min pin stuff.

I’ve needed a hobby for a long time. I don’t really have any hobbies. Maybe going to the gym counts as a hobby, but that’s kind of lame — it’s something I do because I do it, but not because it’s, like, amazing fun. It does take up a lot of my free time, though. But even if you count that as a sort-of hobby, I kind of still need something else. Something really fun.

If you combine my need for a hobby with my smarty-pants dog, it becomes obvious that we should probably get into dog agility. I’m going to check out a meet in a couple months and start figuring out how to do dog agility stuff. Do I have to get ugly shoes? I don’t know. I hope not.

It seems like I’m going off on a total tangent here and I am, but there’s a point I’ll reach, eventually. And that is: What if there was a show like the Amazing Race, but with dogs? Wouldn’t that be the shit? Like, you travel around with your dog and you and your dog both have to complete tasks to get your next clue. Maybe your dog has to get a treat out of a ferret toy or run an agility course or, I don’t know, wear brandy around her neck and rescue someone who was buried by an avalanche in the Swiss Alps or whatever. Of course this is a good idea for me, because I love the Amazing Race but am too wussy to do all the shit they make you do. I couldn’t eat cow brains or drink a gigantic glass of milk after taking 1,000 trains in a foreign country. And I have a really smart little dog who can, like, carry my dead weight and win us a bunch of cash. It could be called The Amazing Dog or something stupid, but I think it would be really cool. It would be a bonus if you could participate without having to fly, because I’m like John Madden in that respect, which would make me a terrible contestant for the actual Amazing Race. But maybe in the dog version, you could just drive around the country in a Subaru. I could do that.

That would be cool. And I bet more people would watch that than some of the shit that’s on TV.