After the 1993 Grand Prix, the best thing I’ve ever seen on TV is a documentary that explained everything to me, made it all clear, told the whole truth: when a dog is finished living his lifetimes as a dog, his next incarnation will be as a man. It was the best thing I’ve ever seen on television, other than the 1993 Grand Prix of Europe, of course, the greatest automobile race of all time in which Ayrton Senna proved himself to be a genius in the rain. A documentary I saw about Mongolia, of all places. I’m sure he would keep me alive as long as he possibly could, my body deteriorating, disintegrating around me, dissolving until there’s nothing left but my brain floating in a glass jar filled with clear liquid, my eyeballs drifting at the surface and all sorts of cables and tubes feeding what remains. I’m not sure if it’s worse than dressing up a dog for Halloween, but it’s close.

I’m sure Denny would get me one of those little wagons I’ve seen on the streets, the ones that cradle the hindquarters so a dog can drag his ass behind him when things start to fail.

Puffy, plasticky packages of Doggie Depends stocked in the pantry. Shot full of pain medication and steroids to reduce the swelling of my joints. And while I’m very capable of getting older, that’s not the way I want to go out. And that’s why I’m here now waiting for Denny to come home-he should be here soon-lying on the cool tiles of the kitchen floor in a puddle of my own urine. I have no words I can rely on because, much to my dismay, my tongue was designed long and flat and loose, and therefore, is a horribly ineffective tool for pushing food around my mouth while chewing, and an even less effective tool for making clever and complicated polysyllabic sounds that can be linked together to form sentences. In order to make my point understood without question. And while I occasionally step over the line and into the world of the melodramatic, it is what I must do in order to communicate clearly and effectively. Gestures are all that I have sometimes they must be grand in nature.

Racing in the rain book