How a bad day starts

It was several odd minutes past midnight when a slight grumbling began to escalate in the hallway of Paul's home. This is the same small hallway that leads to his bedroom and more importantly the same side of the bed as Paul. When he sleeps more often than not his head faces in such a way that should his eyes be open he could view the closed door at the other end of it and usually a brown lump of a dog that enjoys sleeping at it's mid point. Under certain circumstances this unremarkable hallway is able to emulate a megaphone that has been placed against Paul's ear and is being utilized by Max

Max is the brown lump in the equidistance of the hall way that Paul prays stays silent through the wee hours of the night.

It starts as a throaty grumble and elevates itself to complicated method of breathing right before Max takes an audible gulp of air to aid in his acoustic master presence that takes no survivors in his relentless bark. He works it up for several minutes alerting the person well in advance so they can focus and truly appreciate the pitches he eventually belts out in a variety of tones and volumes.

Max was asking for two things. He wanted to be heard and more importantly obeyed.

Paul rose from his sleep, climbing over what he now regularly considers to be his good dog who sleeps through most of the night. That is largely in fact because she is old and partly due to her constant rabid snarling that tires her out at night. He walked down the hallway to the now bouncing and barking brown outline of Max.

It's not clear to anyone not even Max what is the exact thing he wants. He will stop bouncing and barking if you let him out, if you feed him, if you get down on the ground to love him and even if you drag him back to the bedroom. Some of those solutions are more temporary than the others.

Paul's journey to the back of the house requires him to walk past the book self where he stores his watch over night. It's the same bookshelf where he takes out his wallet, off his belt and sets them down together with his cell phone, keys and what ever else has been hanging around in his pockets that day.

The kitchen is lit with a decorative wine bottle that has been crammed full of white Christmas lights. It's a real nice effect for night light or an accent light. It is however blinding after several hours of sleep in an otherwise dark house. Paul's watch had on more than one occasion wished that lamp wasn't in the kitchen, since Paul seldom slept in pants.

More agitating than walking Max to the frozen tundra that has become his backyard corral is the random promptness in which he demands that he be returned to the coziness of home. Sometimes it's seconds other times it seems like hours. Always it ends with a frantic pawing on the glass, like a child threatening abuse in a shopping plaza. At this time of night you know the neighbors are listening. So does he.

This ritualistic madness of getting up, taking out, waiting, waiting too long and returning to bed only to get up and let back in wasn't enough for the puppet master Max. He has on more than one occasion doubled his efforts to drive Paul insane by awaking the Bean on his return to the bedroom. She who was once sound asleep now cannot rest without her own trip to the outside world. From that point on they pass the baton in an endless relay race of the imagination that allows Paul no more than forty two minutes sleep in any particular pass, or so calculates his shiny wrist watch who each time is sadly victimized seeing the bare ass and assorted other bits that only one other person was rightfully sentenced to see for the rest of her entire life.