​I subscribe to the notion that there is no such thing as a bad dog. There are only dogs that don't behave as we wish, dogs that behave too much like dogs, and dogs that have been let down by their human companions. Gomez may have been a bit of all of this. He wasn't a bad dog, but he was a hard dog. He wasn't, as I often said, a dog for beginners. 
I won't romanticize Gomez. He was profoundly territorial above and beyond the typical dog. I was the only person he would tolerate extended close attention from, and he occasionally and randomly wouldn't tolerate any attention. There is the example of my friend Jennifer, who was petting him without incident one day when suddenly and without any warning whatsoever, he bit her hand. He had bitten Erin several times, on one occasion putting her in the hospital overnight for IV antibiotics after it got infected and leaving her with a small scar. This was the point where we instituted the "nobody can touch Gomez but me" rule. I went through multiple dog sitters over the years, only occasionally finding one that would follow my instructions that he could never be touched and could only be handled via the leash that must stay on him at all times (I want to thank Amanda from Happy Tails for the past four years). With these limitations, his life became rather small. And then Asher arrived and Gomez's life became yet smaller, because the rule was that Asher and Gomez could never be in the same room together, preferably not even on the same level of the house together. As soon as Asher could understand the spoken word I began teaching him three rules, "Repeat after me, Asher: Don't ever touch Gomez, don't ever run at Gomez, don't even talk to Gomez."
A reasonable person could make a very compelling argument that I should have gotten rid of Gomez many years ago (Erin nods her head vigorously). It's not even an argument, it is just a fact that it is insane to keep a dog like this, that it was negligent for me to keep him after Erin's bad bite. But emotional truths are not reasonable things, and it was an emotional truth that Gomez was crucial to me in a way that is beyond any explanation or defense I can give.
I received Gomez as a gift shortly before I started my internal medicine residency. It is a truism that you should never accept a gift that eats, but an American Eskimo puppy is really something to behold and very nearly impossible to refuse. As a breed they are known for behavioral issues, but there weren't any powerful warning signs at first. I tried to socialize him. I took him to dog parks, I took him to behavior courses, had two different "dog whisperers" come to work with him, etc. It just wasn't in him. But it wasn't in me, either. I'll admit: those early years, when I came home from a long day at work (and I wasn't going to interact with another living thing apart from Gomez until I went back to work) and I got out the leash and he was grumpy about it (because he was a dog who hated going for walks), and then he and I are trudging grumpily together down a rainy Portland street and he is growling under his breath at everything that he sees and outright barking at anybody who comes anywhere near us... "Yeah," I thought. "This is my dog."
He had big bright eyes and a great smile when he was happy, and he was astonishingly smart. Erin once made me a bet that I couldn't teach Gomez to turn on the Christmas tree lights by stepping on the switch. I had him trained to do it within 30 minutes. There were these things about him that were just simply great. But at the same time he was unbearably insular, he was intolerant, he loved what he loved (Brandon and food) and he was viciously suspicious of everything else. If he was a human being he would possibly be a Trump voter. He was an incredible amount of work. I lived in constant worry about what he would do and arranged our entire lives around the principle of minimizing that.
But I felt that I owed him something (his life, I suppose), and that he was a responsibility only I could possibly have taken on and had any success with, because who in their right mind would bend over backwards, lose sleep, put their marriage in jeopardy, etc., over a rough and tumble white dog like this, a dog not obviously lovable beyond the surface? Is it reason enough to do something, just because nobody else can? Probably not, but I did it.
Gomez was slowing down. He was getting arthritic. He was emotionally calmer but still unpredictable. He was starting to have some problems with his bowels. But I figured we had a few years left. 
Last night, in classic Gomez fashion, he stole a chicken drumstick off the table and before I could stop him, ate the whole thing bone and all. I immediately had a doomed feeling about it. Within an hour he was obviously very uncomfortable. He couldn't stay still, he was trying to retch, he was whining. He was in pain and it was decision time.
The vet said what I suspected she would say, which is that the bone was almost certainly impacted or possibly had already perforated his stomach or bowel, and while they could do x-rays there was a very high chance that he would need surgery to have any chance. Meanwhile he was getting worse, more and more uncomfortable. My every instinct was to save him, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. He was almost twelve years old, he'd had a good run but now had a very small life indeed from which I was largely absent, and he was an unfortunate danger to my family and it was past time, long, long past time.
At the end we sat together in a way that we hadn't had occasion to do in a long time. The medicine made him comfortable very quickly and he relaxed, and the vet left us alone. Gomez alone with me, which is just exactly how he would have wanted it, how he would have preferred his entire life to be. I had always hoped that he would die quietly in his sleep, and that it wouldn't come down to me making the decision. But it made perfect sense, because it was always me, I was always the one thing for him, the person who cared about him, the person who kept him alive on this earth, the person who lost sleep for him, and so also the person who could finally decide to call it quits. 
Asher was still awake when I came home. He could tell I'd been crying and he asked me why I was sad. I told him that Gomez was dead. Asher, of course, was completely unfazed: in his view, this was just purely good news since the dangerous monster was gone. 
"We can get a new dog, Daddy, a nice dog," he said.
"Maybe someday," I said. He saw I hadn't cheered up, so he thought some more..
"Or...." he said. "We could get another bad dog?"
"No buddy," I said. "No more bad dogs."

I don't really a strong interest in actual ghost stories, but you may notice that two of my published pieces have the word "ghost" in their titles, another is ostensibly about a haunted yard, and another is about a guy who thinks he is a ghost. This is because these were all elements of the stalled-out novel that I've been trying to write for over a decade, wherein it was a plot point that the narrator comes into contact with a bunch of "ghost stories" that don't have any actual ghosts in them (spoiler alert). When it became clear that this novel was going nowhere, I broke out all of the these "ghost" bits that could stand on their own, rewrote them as short stories, and started submitting them separately.
So that's why.

Continued from prior...

I wrote a novella, which is not enjoyable to read even in a "so bad it's good" kind of way. I started a novel, and another. I submitted stories. Due to a mix of optimism and profound naivety, I submitted to places like The New Yorker and Harper's. Places where the manuscripts were probably transferred to the recycling bins so fast that they gave unpaid interns paper cuts. After a few years I realized just how ridiculous this strategy was and I broadened my horizons to include publications where a mortal being could conceivably be published. But by that time I'd gone to medical school, and then there was residency, and then there was fellowship, and my energy was fully absorbed into that enterprise. I submitted sparsely and sporadically, and entire years would go by where I didn't have the wherewithal write or submit anything at all. And besides which: who was I? Not a writer, since I had stopped writing.

I'd given up, and I don't mean to say that I was on verve of giving up, or that my resolve was wavering. My spreadsheet had only one outstanding submission still out there in the world, and it was more than a year old and probably the magazine had no intention of responding to it. At some point I annotated the submission with "presumed rejected." I closed the spreadsheet and forgot about writing, and many months went by. Then an e-mail popped up from Minna Proctor, editor of The Literary Review, apologizing for the delay and asking if that piece has still available and if I'd be interested in having them print it. This, of course, was of great interest to me.

For a sustained period of time growing up--including some years where I was old enough to probably know better--I legitimately thought that I was going to be a writer. As in: I was going to write words in exchange for money, and support myself from those proceeds. By the time I started college I had some inkling of the statistics involved and an understanding that "starving artist" wasn't a hyperbolic romantic image but a very possible ultimate outcome. So I majored in engineering and took writing classes on the side, a pragmatic compromise. In these classes there would always be one or two or three honest-to-God legitimate writers, an order of magnitude more skilled, accomplished and dedicated than me. (Or is it "than I?" See, those other students wouldn't have to wonder, they would just know.) These weren't engineering student posers who were just dipping their toes into creative waters. This is what they were going to do. They were going to be writers. And so who was I?

There is the platitude that a writer is anybody who writes. I had a professor expound on this, saying that non-professional writers needed to view their writing like casual tennis players view tennis. Meaning that the vast majority of people who play tennis do so because they simply enjoy the game. They have no expectations that if they just keep at it, they are going to turn into professional tennis players. Maybe they'll enter a local amateur tournament someday. Maybe they won't. But nobody is going to judge them for being mere hobbyist tennis players.

I liked this notion and it felt true, so far as it goes, and that's why I kept writing for many years even though, honestly, I didn't feel like a writer. Sure, a writer is anybody who writes... but still.

The current purpose of this website is to shame me into action. Just as the elliptical machine in my basement will infrequently prompt me to exercise when I am reminded of the sum of money that I spent on it, possibly the monthly fees of maintaining this website and blog will prompt me to, you know. Write something.