When I told Honey I had posted a video of her carrying that paper across the street, she was like, "Oh, Christ, Dad. What's next, then? Talking about how it seems only yesterday I was this big or carrying around my lost baby teeth to show the neighbors?"

I thumbed the premolar in my pocket. "Of course not!" I said.

The weird part wasn't that Honey, you know ... spoke. It was that she spoke with an English accent. It wasn't exactly a proper, "Received English" kind of English, but it wasn't quite an East End of London, Cockney type of thing, either. It reminded me of the Beatles. She had a sort of nasal thing going on. Like John.

"Is that Scouse?" I asked her.

"'Tis. What of it?"

"Where did you pick that up?"

"It's a long story ..."

Apparently, even though Honey's mom, a Pit Bull, was from North Jersey, her dad, a German Shepherd, Vizsla mix, came over from Liverpool on a cargo ship carrying boxes of Kongs. Honey had spent a few formative weeks with him before he left her and her mom alone under the wood deck of a rairoad house in Queens. Before he left, though, he had taught Honey her ABC's and implanted a bit of Merseyside in her speech.

Honey went on to tell me that she didn't like this trend of mine, posting photos of her. And now videos. She was worried this would all end in some sort of doggy blog.

"I know. I know. You're right. But the strange thing is I don't really care. I just don't get it. I've lost my perspective on this shit. I guess I'm feeling old," I explained. "I mean, listen to this: did you know that the baby on the cover of Nirvana's Nevermind album is now 17 and is close to graduating high school?"

Honey just stared at me blankly.

"Sorry. I'll play it for you sometime. It's a terrible cliché to say this, but the album changed my life. Which probably isn't entirely accurate. It's more likely that my life was changing anyway, and that album just happened to serve as a soundtrack for it. And it's just weird. That baby ... is now a freakin' teenager. Which also makes me realize that Kurt Cobain died 14 years ago. And at some point after that we wound up with Techno. And I'm not sure which of those two things is more tragic."

"Jesus, Dad. Snap out of it, mate. Stop living in the past. Look, here's what I'm saying: You can write about me. Just tell people the real shit, man. You know ... what it's like for me out there on the streets. About my friend Riley who lives across the street and who's a lot of fun to play with and all, but you know—just between you and me—the bloke is a few short of a full bag of goodies, ain't he? Or those Daschunds, Oscar and Woody. Holy crap. Those two take the piss out of me every time we pass them on the street. Their constant name-calling. All I want to do is play and they're all making fun of my ears and asking when I'm going to grow into these feet and shit like that. I think I'll probably eat one of them one day when I'm bigger. Then there's that crazy Italian Greyhound, Lucus, who never says a thing, but looks like he's got all this pent-up sexual frustration, poor thing. You should talk about this shit, Dad. This is real bloody doggy drama, right here in the North Jersey burbs."

"I'll keep it in mind," I said. "You just concentrate on not pulling on your leash, and let me worry about the blog, okay?"

"Whatever," she said, and went back to a rawhide.

Adolescents.

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