So Friday swings around and I dutifully go to check the mail. I get a stack of window envelopes and an armload of apparently important bank-related mail for what seems like about four of the dozen or so people who have at one stage in the past decade called my current address home. All the hunting catalogues that lodge in the mailbox for a certain Mr. Henning Schultz indicate to me that he must have enjoyed slaughtering a critter or two with high velocity projectiles. With a name like Henning Schultz that strikes me as being kind of appropriate. It just screams Schützenfest.
Nestled amongst the stack of crap was a magazine. Oversized and glossy, the publication was the premier issue of Wag Magazine: the rag churned out by the same business geniuses whose minds gave birth to the retarded baby that is Wag Hotels. The tone of the magazine and the mindset of the people behind it is made abundantly clear right there on the cover.
It would be impossible to produce a cover that reeks of any more nervous social status desperation and bizarre anthropomorphism. You're into wine because it's what all the well-heeled people at Mummy's and Mummy's new boyfriend's country club are into. Daddy doesn't do wine since Mummy divorced him after she found out that he had been fucking that "cheap whore" in Marketing who's half his age. He just does hard liquor now. But you're into wine and now you're going to project your wants and desires on that pet of yours. That dog really couldn't give a flying fuck about wine, Napa, or anything you're into except the food, but you think a black lab amongst the grape vines looks so cute that you're just going to have to take a photo and plaster it on the cover of your new magazine.And then send it to a person who has two cats.
Each page is a window into a world of massive conspicuous consumption—the sort more often found in LA than in San Francisco. But scrutinise the biographies of the editor and contributors and you're left with the suspicion that those involved in this love letter from bored dilettantes are from the Marina: an outpost of excessive yuppiedom bunkered away on the northwestern side of San Francisco. They're all thirty-something women whose attempts at snagging that doctor or dentist have dragged on for about a decade too long. With the hopes of meeting their parents expectations of success in tatters, they've turned to the only creatures who won't dump them for a younger bit of fluff after the third shag: their dogs. Left with nothing else productive to do in their lives (there's always in vitro fertilisation, ladies) and no way to demonstrate to a world that once expected so much of them that they've actually accomplished something, they've assembled a document that illustrates everything that's wrong with the crass distractions of the obscenely wealthy, or at least those people who aspire to be obscenely wealthy.
Here are a few examples of how everything this magazine represents is wrong. People are being slaughtered in the Sudan but if you want to add a touch of period charm to your apartment situated just off Lombard and you're feeling particularly generous to your pooch today, why not buy her a doggy four poster bed? Fuck it, while you're at it, close that feature article on forced child labour in India, jump into your Benz and head down to Beverly Hills for a spot of doggy yoga and acupuncture. And since you're obviously so flush with dough, plonk down that six spare grand you were going to donate to the hospital for some gaudy white gold dog charm jewellery. And then spend a few hours trying to work out on which crappy, mass-market work of "art" by George Rodrigue you're going to blow a wad of cash.
It fucks with my head to think that there are people in this city, and indeed in this world, who are so self-absorbed that they think their dogs need as much high-maintenance pampering as their sheltered existences are used to. They're fucking dogs. They eat their own vomit and sometimes their own shit. They couldn't give a rat's arse about some San Diego chef who bakes gourmet doggy treats; they'll eat a slab of rancid bacon if you presented it to them. Save yourselves the money. And if you really want to do something useful with that cash that will actually do something that might bring some benefit into this world, donate it to a good charity. There are plenty of them: The Sierra Club, Doctors Without Borders, The Red Fucking Cross. Take your pick! Just stop making up for the spiritual and emotional bankruptcy of your life by trying to turn your dog into a carbon copy of yourself.
And don't send your shithouse magazine to me again. I don't own a fucking dog!
