“The safest way to heaven is to be eaten by beautiful dogs.”

— Kamchatka proverb

My family had a pair of little dogs like on the Black and White scotch whiskey label: a black Scottish Terrier and a West Highland White Terrier. My folks got the Scottish Terrier first, when I was in fourth grade. Being English teachers, they thought it was hilarious to name her Macduff, after the character who kills Macbeth in “the Scottish Play.” Four years later we gave Dad the white Westie for Christmas. He named the dog Budger. Dad died that summer.

Three years passed. It was the summer after eleventh grade. My brother and I ate some LSD after Mom and our sister left the house for the day. This was my first acid trip. We walked to the ice cream shop until we started feeling weird. Returning home we flopped down on the living room carpet and let the dogs come to us. We lay there laughing while Macduff and Budger licked our faces and wagged their tails and sniffed in our ears. I had what felt like a genetic memory of people playing with their dogs back down through the stone age and into deep time. The black and the white dog symbolized more than themselves, and I did too.

Imagine waking up in the middle of the night to discover a pillow is being pushed down over your face. Just like in the movies. How would you react?

Well, perhaps you can learn from me. I recently woke up to find myself being smothered, and I survived. How I escaped is less interesting than what went through my head in the first three seconds.

The human brain can perform quickly in these situations. It can sort through dozens of scenarios instantly. This is partly because our thoughts can be morbid at times, leading us to plan ahead for how to respond to things that are very unlikely to happen. We are also influenced by movies, television, books and other forms of storytelling that warn us there really are people who, randomly or premeditatedly, are stabbed, shot, strangled or otherwise rubbed out. If it happened to them, it can happen to you, right?

Being suffocated by someone pushing a pillow into your face should rank pretty low on the list of ways you might think you could be killed, even though it’s something that frequently happens on TV. It just seems so stupid. Why would someone planning a murder choose such a potentially flawed option? And why would anyone acting impulsively choose a pillow as the best available murder weapon? Are there really no blunt objects in the room? Is it really possible in the United States of America to enter a bedroom without passing a gun rack or a kitchen with a vast array of knives? Or is the murderer really limited to seeking out an extra pillow, decorative and fluffy, near the one under the head of the victim?

When I’m out walking and I see a plastic bag stuck in a tree, I always point it out to anyone who might be around and say, “Hey look, a West Duluth owl.” It’s a stupid joke that doesn’t get much of a reaction, but hey, so am I.

Making cheesy remarks might be the best action in that situation. There’s a clump of ugly garbage stuck in a beautiful tree, and my options for how to deal with it are to climb the tree or use a long device of some kind to somehow remove the bag, ignore the situation altogether, or pretend like I wanted that bag to be there all along to support the comedy of life.

I have similar statements I repeat all the time. If my childhood friend is telling me about her cancer diagnosis, for example, I’ll say, “I told you not to go swimming downstream of the steel plant.”

The tragedy behind the comedy boils down to something pretty simple: I want a clean environment, but I know that’s unrealistic. It’s also confusing, because a clean environment contains a lot of dirt. And seriously, a clean planet and a polluted planet are made up of the same things; the difference is how those things are arranged.

Goob, Fozz, and I hiked down around another switchback in the trail. We saw a family that passed us higher up on the mountain. A dad, his three kids, and a dog. I saw the dad standing there, blocking the trail. His son sat on a rock with his two sisters standing beside him.

As we got closer Dad said, “He’s not doing so good.” I assumed he meant his son.

I walked up and then saw the dog. Their golden retriever was lying on its side in the trail and panting. I thought: We’re part of this now.

Dad said, “His stomach is super hard, too.” I reached down and felt the dog’s stomach which had swollen up bigger than his ribcage. It was firm.

The Dad explained that the dog chased something and got all riled up. I can’t remember if he said it was a squirrel or another dog. But it was after the dog’s frantic chase and barking that he started to swell up.

“I think his stomach has flipped over,” I said.