I was just bitten by a dog.

Truthfully, not 20 minutes ago when I went to pick up a piece of gear at somebody’s house.

When I pulled into the driveway, an unholy spawn of a late night dalliance between Benji and the Geico gecko waddled over to me, growled, then bit me on the f***ing ankle.

I screamed like a five year old, which somehow triggered the garage door to open and spew a teenage girl carrying the gear I was there for.

“This yours?” she piped. “Your dog just bit me on the f***ing ankle,” I squeaked. “”Really? Sorry…” She froze with a look on her face that indicated she was now invisible and I should leave wondering where’d that girl go?

Needing more satisfaction I called the owner of the house.

“Hello?”

“Your dog just bit me on the f***ing ankle.”

“That dog’s 13 years old, he’s never bitten anyone.”

“Oh. Cool. Never mind then.”

“You sure?”

“Hang on a tic, let me make sure my portable morphine drip isn’t on high. Nope, machine’s good… the f***er definitely bit me”

The vicious dog attack left me sulking about the hound’s total lack of fear and respect for me. Then I got mad at myself for sulking about not being feared by an arthritic Chihuahua. Skillfully, I managed to cram in a 30-minute session of bi-polar self-loathing and admonishment in the time it took to drive from the scene of the assault to our bus.

A small, clarifying sidebar: Against my will, I’ve been educated about the straightforward hierarchy that exists in dog-dom by a friend who bites his new puppies. He favors the short snout breeds like Rottweillers. In order to school a puppy about who’s the “Alpha” in the hutch, he rolls the thing on it’s back and bites it on the neck.

Having come upon the disturbing scene of him hunched over, clamped to a dog and growling… I’ve gotta say it’s not something that prompts a salient comment right away.

Judging by the expression on the puppy’s face, I’m pretty sure he had some questions too. The relevant point is that once one animal bites another, dominance is established and then both go about their business.

As usual, I digress. Let’s reel this back in and connect pocket poodles with artfully deployed line arrays. The truth of the matter is a canine chomping me on the ankle merely represents a random act of nature, nothing more. It just happened to occur during a personal period of significant disillusionment with the human race.

It had suddenly occurred to me, as I stared down at the dog sticking out of my jeans, that this was a fitting coda to the four-week tour de absurd that I and the rest of my crew had just endured. During the preceding month, 90 percent of the production vendors we had met had attempted to convince us they alone were not bound by the fundamental rules of reality.

To prove this point, they had taken our advance phone calls, listened carefully to our requests, sagely reassured us all would be well… then rolled us over and tried to bite us on the neck when we showed up. Same deal as the dog. They looked us up and down and figured they could take us.

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