A Service Animal for Troubled Times

This is my pal Bear the dog.  He lives across the alley.

I consider Bear to be my Emotional Support Animal.  To the extent that he thinks about me at all he just considers me to be a vaguely familiar face/smell that shows up to see him from time to time.

Bear weighs 127 pounds, which for reference is more than I weighed when I wrestled in high school.  A fair percentage of that weight is his gigantic head, which despite its impressive size seems to be entirely empty.

This makes Bear excellent company in challenging times.  He's content to have me scratch his ears while I stare into the dim, happy emptiness of his eyes.  After a while I start to get dimmer too.  The world no longer contains problems, and it diminishes in size to a warm patch of dirt in the back yard.  If I don't limit my exposure to the simplifying effects of Bear I eventually begin to desire chasing tennis balls and rolling in things with interesting smells.

I'm thinking that's enough on mopey current events for a while.  Various little research projects have been pulled off the back burner in recent days.  Some of them might be half baked and smell like something Bear would like to roll in, but that's how it is in our back yard.