Lucky Dogs

Recently I was sitting around watching college football with my great friend Mike Lange. Actually, we were sitting around wasting an entire New Year's Eve watching around ten hours of college football. I've never been a big New Year's Eve person so I was happy to do so. Plus, it was during the brief golden age of my college football pool dominance, before it all ended in tears. Anyway, being guys, we were generally talking nonsense. At one point Mike asked me where I would like to spend my time in the Witness Protection Program doing and where would I like to spend it. What a great question, and one that made me hold my questioning manhood cheap (to paraphrase Shakespeare). I'm normally the one who prides himself on asking questions like that, so I was shocked that I didn't think of it. My answer was easy and obvious (at least to anyone who knows me): selling Lucky Dogs in the French Quarter in New Orleans. This has been my retirement goal for some time now. Now, in the end we decided that this was not a good answer to this particular question because too many organized crime types pass through the French Quarter so I would be too easily discovered, and I had to move on to working at a video store in the Dakotas. Still, it didn't change my desire to spend my declining years (which actually began when I was around 27) selling Lucky Dogs. The obvious question is: why? First off, I love New Orleans and the French Quarter. Secondly, I love Lucky Dogs. Thirdly, I am more than a little bit like Ignatius O'Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces. Finally, however, maybe I'm just tired (or it might be better to say, exhausted nye on to death) of making decisions. A life devoid of administrative, faculty and student tomfoolery - and where my biggest challenge in the course of a day related to breaking a $100 bill - sounds better and better. Here's a picture of a Luck Dogs salesman, snapped during the epic journey to Nawlins over last summer with Andy Burkhardt and Steve Wehmeyer. I have seen my future and it is one of bliss.