This is a dog movie, so a certain percentage of our audience has already decided it's a five milkbone film or whatever without even watching it.

The dog people, you know the ones I mean, the Anubisians.

When I was a kid, dogs roamed around outside doing dog things like shitting everywhere

and licking their peanuts and humping each other and severely biting kids on the leg that were only trying to ride their bikes to the Northway mall and who made the mistake of riding through Mountain View instead of going out to Bar Road, God only knows why. No one held dogs in high esteem. Dogs were just things in the world like crows and garbage

cans and El Caminos and drainage ditches that led to culverts under the street where the light filtered down through the holes in the manhole covers and where you knew better than to light firecrackers because your mom was convinced the sewers were full of methane and you'd blow up the neighborhood.

Dogs weren't important.

They didn't really matter to anyone, they just were.

If your dog got hit by a car, it was sad.

I remember.

My dog, Peachy II II got hit by a car.

Peachy too was named after Peachy the first who died some other way long before my time,

but we were sad about Peachy too. I'm sure we cried. I don't remember how long we cried.

Nobody sent us a card or anything.

Then six months later my mom's boyfriend Bobby found Barney at the Midway swap meet and he gave him to me even though my mom's boyfriend, Bobby, found Barney at the Midway swap meet and he gave him to me,

even though my mom said he was an ugly dog and why didn't Bobby find a nice peach-colored dog?

Barney was my best friend, the best dog a kid could want until Barney ran away.

A girl in my class found him and when she'd heard I'd lost my dog she invited me over to her house to see if it was Barney and sure enough it was.

Except when I called to him he wouldn't come. He'd only been gone a couple of weeks, but he pretended he didn't know me. She was a nice girl and her house was nicer than ours and I bet the food was better.

Anyway, nowadays people really think than ours and I bet the food was better.

Anyway, nowadays people really think highly of dogs.

They really do.

They let them in the house, for one.

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