The New York Times gave me a tiny shout-out this evening in a piece about the storytelling scene in New York City. I am referred to as “imposing,” which is confusing, but I’ll take it as a compliment. I strongly encourage that you run right out and read the whole thing. Cyndi Freeman gets a mention in there, too, as well as a bunch of other folks that I am honored to consider peers. The mighty Adam Wade gets some serious ink, too.

Here’s an excerpt that I think is the core of the piece, referring to my friend Ophira Eisenberg:

She explores the taboo, but without the persistent relief provided by consistent punch lines. In doing that, she shows how a story can use humor but not be shackled to it, how it can be emotional without pandering, and how difficult ideas can be articulated entertainingly.
What she demonstrates is that storytelling can give a certain kind of comedy a chance to grow.

Storytelling has grown a lot beyond regular Moth slams. The Moth was the Big Bang that coalesced into the sun for this whole thing, but now a bunch of other planets are cooling and growing their own life forms. The following is a list of storytelling shows that I’d recommend checking out in the city. I’ve been in most of these, and am friends with folks that run all of them.

A lot of these shows don’t have a lot in the way of a Web presence. I hate linking to Facebook pages, but that’s the world we live in — crafting stories and running shows takes a lot of energy, and so does running a website. At this point in my life I’d rather have “writer/performer” etched on my tombstone than “blogger”. Anyway, here they go:

Liar Show
Real Characters
Told!
BTK Band
Nights of Our Lives
The Story Collider
Ask Me
How I Learned
The Soundtrack Series
Adam Wade has a BUNCH:

• Tales of the Cosmos
• Whatever Happened to the Nerds
• Adam Wade From New Hampshire
• Super Stories

I can also see how Moth story slams would be intimidating to people that are new to this. They’re huge, with lines around the block and they sell out pretty much every time. There’s also no guarantee that you’ll even get picked. And if you do get picked, you’re pretty much screwed out of a decent score unless you get picked fifth through tenth. By the fifth storyteller the booze kicks in, scores start to loosen up and judges figure out what the hell they’re even doing.

Frankly, these things should be a little intimidating to first-time performers. Anyone who just thinks “what the hell, I’ll just jump on stage for the first time in front of 400 people and be awesome like I always am, every day of my life” is missing a critical component to their personality and is likely going to embarrass everyone in the room except themselves. I’ve seen this happen. A lot.

You should get on stage and do it anyway, but a little fear is a good thing. It means you’re taking it seriously.

None of the following open mics were around when I started going to the Moth. If they had been, I’d have definitely tried my stories out at these first. I’m not saying that there’s a right or wrong way to do any of this stuff. Any door you find is one you can walk through.

But if you happen to want to workshop a story yourself or test it out in a lower-stakes environment — hell, sometimes the crowd is barely even paying attention — you could do a lot worse than to check these out. In order to win a fight you’ve got to spend a lot of time doing pushups and hitting the bag to get ready for five intense minutes. It’s the same principle here.

The following places are where I go to practice:

Phoning it In – Lukas Kaiser runs this open mic Monday-Thursday in somebody else’s apartment in Tribeca. It’s a warm room, supportive, and sometimes a woman walks straight through with a baby in a stroller and disappears in the back.

Kambri Crews’ “What’s Your Story” held monthly at Luca Lounge. You pretty much have to find this on Facebook or go to Luca Lounge and check it out first.

I Like You, Maude

Oh, Hey Guys at UCB East

Like anything else, there’s an etiquette. If you’re brand new to any of this, I’d recommend showing up and checking a show out first, then introducing yourself afterwards. Get to know folks, connect online. Pretty soon the whole thing will blossom and you’ll be tired of all the emails, updates, and Facebook events. And eventually, your brain will hurt from all of it and you’ll have nightmares abut your own show.

Congratulations: you’ve arrived.

In all of this SXSW and engagement excitement, I almost forgot to mention:

It’s time once again to cock-rock the NPR crowd with New York’s first, only, and best comedy storytelling burlesque sideshow at Union Hall on Tuesday, April 3rd.

Show’s at 8, tickets are $10, available here: And I Am Not Lying LIVE at Union Hall

AS always, here’s a fun trailer for the thing:

We’re a “Critic’s Pick” in Time Out NY this week, which is pretty exciting! I don’t know if that’s an endorsement or just a button somebody clicked, but we’ll take it.

This month’s show features:

Comedy by
Andy Ross (Real Characters, The Onion)

Burlesque by
Dangrr Doll (Gotham Burlesque, D20 Burlesque)

Belly Dance by
Madame X (a complete mystery)

As well as storytelling by

Brad Lawrence
Cyndi Freeman
Jeff Simmermon (me)

Hope you guys can join us!

We specifically didn’t mention it online for a while. It’s nice to think that something can be real without the Internet validating it — and without having to turn it into a story for instant mass consumption.

But still, I wanted to share this with you guys. It’s actually really hard to write about. Every time I try to write down what it means the words look so small and dumb, and there’s so much wonderful stuff that gets left out. That’s because there’s so much wonderful stuff here, in this experience, and in this particular woman, that I don’t think I could write it all down if I tried every day for the rest of my life.

The ring is one that my dad bought for my mom in Hong Kong back in the early ’70s, more or less. It’s jade. Maggie speaks fluent Mandarin, and jade means a lot more to her than some dumb diamond that she’s been trained to want by decades of subliminal pressure.

My lady thinks for her DAMN self. Also, her name in Mandarin is pronounced (sort of) “mei-chi” which means “beautiful jade.”

I surprised her on her birthday at the wine bar where we had our first date. We had our first drinks together there, then over to this awesome Japanese restaurant in Williamsburg for dinner. Every booth in the restaurant is its own sort of private room, with a bamboo curtain that the waitstaff pulls up when they deliver each course. I was going to drop this thing over dessert.

And I couldn’t take it.

We’re having wine and cheese, and seated right next to this pair of girls who are having that same “woe is me” dating conversation you always hear that type of girl having in New York. It’s delivered in a nasal uptalky sing-song, and they always say “No, we’re just like, hanging out, I don’t want it to like, be all serious or something. But like, he hasn’t texted me in like six hours after I sent him this one, so like, what do you think that means?”

Maggie’s snickering and cheerfully chirping, happy at the surprise and loving the wine and generally sweeping the room with her massive smile. That’s her default setting: a smile like a beanbag cannon shooting wads of sunshine.

She’s always smiling at me that way, at least.

The girls next to us are just crapping on in that tired cliched vocal pattern, all uptalks and feigned detachment, and my Adam’s apple is thrashing around like there’s an Anthrax show in my esophagus and I am trying so, so hard not to just drink all my wine in one gulp. I’ve got this rhythm going where I smile, nod, sip wine, taste one cheese, then sip wine, then another cheese in an extremely regulated fashion so it goes

smile
sip
taste
sip
smile
sip
taste
sip

and I’m doing pretty good, not spilling the beans or anything, and she says “Are you okay? You’re awful quiet and you’re just tearing through that cheese.”

To which I replied “oh, FUCK THIS, do you want your birthday present? OK, shut your eyes and hold out your hands.”

It just kind of flew out that way.

So I get up and squeeze my enormous frame between the tables and get down on one knee, drop the ring in her hand and say “Oh God, will you please marry me?” when she opens her eyes.

She squeals and opens the ring up and then looks up and says “Yes, yes, of course, yes! I was planning on spending the rest of my life with you whether or not we ever did this part!”

So then we kiss and I sit back down, and the waitress brings over two glasses of champagne, on the house, and she’s only just a little bit less excited than Maggie is.

And when she moves out of the way, we can see that the two girls at the table next to us have the tightest little polite smiles I’ve ever seen. Imagine a cat’s rectum forcing a grin and you’ll about have it.

There’s a sort of person that sees relationships as competitive sport, like when you land one you’ve broken the tape and it’s just victory laps for the rest of your life, I suppose. These are people who get mad at other people’s happiness and then dangle their happiness in front of other people like it’s an objective truth rather than one of an infinite number of ways of being.

So yeah, it’s pretty fun to think that one of the coolest moment in our shared life together also made a few jerks pretty mad.

There’s so much more to say, but I can’t think of an original way to say it. So I’ll say this and then bow out of the public sphere on this topic for awhile:

Maggie’s a morning person and I am decidedly not. I’m out testing stories at open mics or going to shows, trying to get my stuff in front of pretty much whoever will sit still long enough to listen to me. I’m trying to get back into winning Moth story slams, too, which is kind of an arduous process. I’m usually home by 12, in bed by 12:30 or 1. And there’s always a soft, warm little hourglass-shaped lump under the covers when I get in. I always smooth her hair away from her face and give her a kiss, and she smiles in her sleep. And the other night, after I came in from a Moth Slam, she says to me from deep beneath a dark sleepy ocean, in a small sleep-drunk voice,

“Did you win?”

“No,” I said.

“That’s okay,” she replies. “Did you kill?”

Last night we went to a milonga, otherwise known as a dance session for her tango classmates. I don’t dance, myself, but I was thrilled to just sit there and watch. She danced so effortlessly around the floor with these older guys, her feet stepping and kicking so perfectly. And every time they turned to where she could see me, she just beamed and beamed. Her teacher is a tiny Turkish man, very dignified, but just a pit bull when he wants to be. He said to her, in her ear as they were dancing,

“Your fiancee, he is watching your feet and your face with a great intensity.”

I was. I was thinking to myself as I watched her heels kick the hem of her dress, making it swirl in patterns around her knees,

“My God, holy crap. I don’t know how exactly it happened, but this gorgeous, curious, brilliant woman wants to spend her life with me as much as I want to be with her. We’re neck and neck on this thing, so different from each other and so happy. This can happen every day or every week if we want. Every minute together is such a gift, and we just get to unwrap them for as long as we want.”

Then the song ended. Maggie’s official partner (not her teacher) is a total flake and didn’t bother to show up, and it wasn’t the kind of thing where I could just get out there and learn on the spot. She came up to me and said “That guy flaked, and I didn’t want to dance with him anyhow. You look hungry and I’m tired. Let’s get in a cab and go get into bed.”

And we did, and we will, for as long as we want and at our own pace. And I couldn’t be happier about it.

The act of telling personal stories about one’s own life takes a certain amount of a certain type of nerve — mostly the “who the hell do you think you are” variety. Seriously: why should anyone give a whoop about my feelings about my feelings?

That feeling gets even weirder when I’m using the Internet as a megaphone to get people to my shows. “Who the fuck do you think you are telling everyone to come see whoever the hell it is you think you are” is pretty much the refrain that runs through my head every time I bathe my face in the cool glow of one rectangle or another.

But screw all that, we’ve been busting our asses to pull together a HELL of a week of shows this week in Brooklyn and Austin, TX for SXSW and I want to pull ‘em all together in one place, then crop-dust the whole Internet with ‘em all damn week.

First: We’re cock-rocking the NPR crowd with And I Am Not Lying – Live, NYC’s only comedy storytelling burlesque sideshow on Tuesday, March 6th at Union Hall in Brooklyn. You’ll see stories by me, Brad Lawrence, and Cyndi Freeman as well as magic by Albert Cadabra, burlesque by Cherry Pitz and Little Brooklyn and comedy by Wil Sylvince.

We strongly recommend advance tickets (only $10), which you can get here: And I Am Not Lying at Union Hall, Brooklyn

More info/flyer here, cool trailer here and embedded below:

Second: On Saturday, March 10th, we’ll be offering an entire day’s worth of activities in Palm Park from 11AM – 6PM The Hilton Garden Inn, 18th Floor, Colorado and Red River rooms as a part of SXSW Interactive. We’ll be having a panel discussion entitled “From Basement Burlesque To The Boardroom: What Makes a Good Story,” giving a storytelling crash course/workshop, offering comedy improv lessons, running an open mic for any storytellers, comics, or other raw and rare talents that want to do ten minutes onstage and finally — a two-hour version of the And I Am Not Lying live experience from 4-6 PM featuring the best underground storytelling and comedy that we can find – and some special surprise guests.
UPDATE – 3.9.2012

The tent at Palm Park is flooded out – there’s a whole ecosystem in there underneath the folding chairs. We are moving ALL of the And I Am Not Lying events scheduled for March 10th at SXSW to the Hilton Garden Inn in Downtown Austin – just a few blocks from Palm Park and the convention center. The hotel is at 500 North IH-35/Frontage Road, Austin, TX. Here’s a map.

Our stuff is now going to be on the 18th floor of the Hilton Garden Inn in Downtown Austin in the Colorado and Red River rooms. The content and times will stay exactly the same.

You can get more details, including an hour-by-hour breakdown and performer/presenter credentials here: Schedule of Events for And I Am Not Lying Tent at SXSW Interactive.

We also made a sweet Web graphic that you can pass around on your phone or Twitter or whatever, found here.

For up-to-the-moment news, changes, surprise guest info, you can follow us on Twitter at @andiamnotlying

Third: We’re doing a show at The New Movement Theater in Austin, Texas at 10:30 PM – also on Saturday, March 10th. We’ll have stories, burlesque, comedy and we’ll be just tired, punchy and drunk enough to shoot a pillar of pure fire straight into the sky. Performers include me (Jeff Simmermon), Andy Ross, Seth Lind, Brad Lawrence and Cyndi Freeman and some others that we are trying to nail down now.

Here are the official details, with address, etc: And I Am Not Lying at The New Movement Theater.

You don’t need a SXSW badge for this one, just a few bucks. Probably just ten bucks.

Fourth: I’m MC-ing and hosting the Slip+Lovitt SXSW Day Party on Thursday, March 15th from 11 AM to 6PM at Club 1808 (1808 E. 12th St. at Chicon.) The show features a TON of DC and VA post-punk/screamy hardcoreish math-rock bands like Regents and Beasts of No Nation, but especially includes a reunion of Virginia’s own Sleepytime Trio. Essentially, there are nine bands playing and I’ll be telling a story in between each one. It promises to be a sweaty marathon.

More on that here: Slip+Lovitt SXSW Day Party

If you want, you can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, all that shit. Hope we see you this week — come on up and say hi.

But look, man: if you hated sports a little and frat-culture a lot in the late ’80s and early ’90s, what else were you going to do? Punk and hardcore had a low barrier to entry then – just get yourself a guitar, a garage and couple other guys and add a few metric apeloads of sweat and willpower. You could turn a pizza parlor, VFW hall or urine-soaked living room into a mothership full of people that were just ROCKING THE FUCK OUT with you at the helm.

My musical efforts at that time were stranger and less accessible.

I met almost all of my best, tightest, life-long friends at these shows. We made bands, made tapes, played records, took road trips to the Black Cat in DC and Twister’s in Richmond together, and ate a WHOLE lot of hash browns at truckstops in the middle of the night together. I went to a lot of weddings and I’ll go to a lot of funerals because of the people I met back then. We shepherded each other along the messy, complicated path into adult life, and I plan to return the favors on the way out.

Some of my best friends in college – the kindest, strangest, funniest guys in the world – formed the Sleepytime Trio. And when they played in our tiny living room in Harrisonburg, VA, the energy was Thor banging his hammer on the ground. Lightning bolts connected everybody and people dove off the mantle and jumped out the windows … before opening them.

Everytime they played, something got broken, someone got hurt and everyone in the room took a malt-liquor shower together and we smiled about it real hard, too. Because we all knew that nothing this awesome was happening for hundreds of miles around this tiny little mountain town and we all made it together.

Here’s the Sleepytime Trio playing at ABC No Rio back in the late ’90s. This looks and sounds a LOT like my living room did when I was in college.

So I’m really, really honored and exceptionally stoked to be MC-ing the Slip/Lovitt Party at SXSW on March 15th — featuring a rare and raw Sleepytime Trio reunion. There are 8 bands, and I’ll be telling stories between all of them. You don’t need a badge or anything, just earplugs. And maybe some extra deodorant.

See, that love/hate thing – it’s not really hate. It’s the natural flipside of a nurturing relationship. You will always resent the thing that makes you just enough to get out on your own. It’s scary out there, and if you didn’t push yourself away, you’d still live in your mom’s attic.

For me, this thing’s like coming home for Christmas. We’re all grown up, and we’re all going to rock this thing as hard as we know how.

For the rest of you, the show ought to be really fun, especially if you like hanging out with dudes in cargo shorts who still buy 7″ records. Hope you can make it.

The Union Hall show is on Tuesday, March 6th, 2012, 8PM. Tickets are ten dollars. We strongly recommend buying advance tickets, which you can get here:

Advance Tickets to And I Am Not Lying at Union Hall.

This month’s is going to be a doozy, friends – we’ve got:

• Comedy from Wil Sylvince
• Burlesque by Little Brooklyn and Cherry Pitz
• Storytelling by Jeff Simmermon (me), Brad Lawrence, Cyndi Freeman
• and MAGIC by Albert Cadabra

I made this flyer for it, too – I thought it was cool, anyway. I’m really into that grindhouse-cinema look.

As always, here is a fun trailer we made to promote the show:

And if you’re coming over from The Hairpin, you may want to check out this video of Cyndi at her tassel-twirling finest:

Hope we see you there!

He was kind enough to let me share this video of his set:

The guy’s good, huh? You can catch him on Twitter at @chethinks, and on Tumblr here.

Thanks to a lot of awesome help from Creaghead and Co., that’s about to change.

Starting February 7th, we’ll be cock-rocking the NPR crowd with the And I Am Not Lying live show at Union Hall on the first Tuesday of every month. Doors are at 8, show’s at 8:30 and tickets ain’t but ten tiny dollars for the finest comedy, storytelling, burlesque sideshow you’re going to get anywhere.

Be honest with yourself: stuff like this is part of the reason you moved here. It’s worth a headache at work on Wednesday.

You can buy tickets here if you’re into that already.

We pulled together this cool trailer about it, too. It may be NSFW, depending on your job:

I wanted to start this show for a very, very good reason. I’m doing this thing so that I don’t go completely numb, and I’m trying to bring as many people back to life as I can right along with us.

I spend a lot of time hunched over a glowing rectangle starting and mediating petty squabbles about nothing, breathing shallowly through my mouth and reading tweets about television. I’ve been doing it for years. When I’m not getting paid to do it I sit around my apartment in my underpants and do it for free, apparently.

Everyone does.

Sometimes I think we’re all using computers to row this numbing boat towards a black wall of depressing distraction. I want to do my part to get as many people into one room and feeling something great together for a little while. And maybe if we get together often enough and pool our collective energies into something funny and weird, we can live a little outside of our bottomless pockets filled with lotus petals.

The entire purpose of life is to get as excited as possible. I’m so, so excited to have a reason to hose the town down with excitement once a month. So it’s like a Mobius strip of recursive excitement for me.

Sometimes storytelling shows can get a little sweater-vesty, comedy shows can be too bitter and detached, and burlesque too much, all in a go. This way we can cross-pollinate the best of the best and no matter what, if you’re not into what you’re seeing you can see something else really soon.

I want this thing to be a rock show without instruments, to just cram an entire aircraft carrier’s worth of fun into the basement of Union Hall. So far, we’ve been doing pretty okay on that front, I think.

D.Billy and I collaborated on this cool poster (I think it’s cool, anyway) to announce the residency:

You’ll note that the show on February 7th features:

Comedy from Ophira Eisenberg
Burlesque by The World Famous *BOB*
Nerdcore Rap by Schaffer the Darklord

in addition to burlesque from Cyndi Freeman
and storytelling by Brad Lawrence, Cyndi Freeman and Jeff Simmermon (me.)
**UPDATE**
We have just added bullwhip and lasso artist Chris McDaniel to the show!

Brad and I will co-host as always, and tickets are ten bucks — again, you can get them here.

psychedelic stand‐up show … a visceral experience from the downtown comedy underground. Accomplished thinkers, authors, poets, and artists join Barris and his band to become one seamless, improvised comedy freak show.”

I caught the sold-out show at Union Hall last Saturday. What I could see of it was really, really awesome, when I could see around a pillar. Everything sounded great, though.

Reggie Watts dropped in at the last minute and did a hilarious set, improvising all kinds of hilarious music and completely surreal standup that made perfect sense and told right-on truths as long as you didn’t listen too closely. If you did, you’d realize he was riffing on the kind of played-out onstage cliches you hear from most hip-hop and rock ‘n roll stage banter.

Here’s a pretty sweet clip. In it, Reggie Watts covers Maroon 5′s “Moves Like Jagger,” freestyles and improvises, and raps like the lead singer of a Cookie Monster death metal band:

Reggie Watts – Touching Songs Improv – Heart Of Darkness – 1.7.12 from Karmalize Productions on Vimeo.

In this clip, Reggie, Greg Barris and the Forgiveness improve a long jam about slack friends, vampires, teen smoking and more:

Reggie Watts & The Forgiveness – Improv Jam – Heart Of Darkness – 1.7.12 from Karmalize Productions on Vimeo.

Both clips were shot and edited by Alex Gaylon of Karmalize Productions.

We had to have her put to sleep today. She was sixteen or seventeen – when you get a dog from the pound, their age is always sort of vague. She had rheumatoid arthritis in her back legs and a dense, growing mass in the bone of her right front leg. Her right front paw has touched the ground about fifteen times since Thanksgiving. She was deaf and starting to lose her eyesight, and my parents have had to give her morphine to keep the pain back for the last week or so. It was time.

That doesn’t mean this doesn’t completely suck, though.

When we got her from the pound, they told us that she had likely been abused in her previous home, but she didn’t have any behavior problems that they could see. She just cringed when she heard people yelling and got a little weird about dinnertime. When we took her into the isolation pen to sort of test her out or whatever, she climbed into my lap and whimpered and licked my hand. How can you ignore something like that?

Her name on her cage at the pound was Sandy, which is also my mom’s first name. We asked my mom if she wanted us to change the dog’s name, and she knelt to pet her and rub her ears for a minute, looking into her huge brown eyes. Then she stood up and said “you know, I really think she’s been through enough. And if you all talk to me in the same tone of voice you’d talk to a dog, and I can’t tell the difference, we have at least two other problems that are much more important.”

Every single time I entered my parents’ house after that, Sandy exploded all over me like a furry avalanche, thumping her tail and emitting this high-pitched whiny squeal. Her tail would bang into the banister and hit the floor hard enough to hurt, but it never seemed to bother her when I came home. I took her running in the field by my folks’ house, and she kept up with me on the sprints for many years, her face split in a massive dog grin. When we got home she’d drink her entire water bowl, maybe knock back an inch or two of toilet water and then pass out in front of the air conditioner.

Then at night, when I’d finally go to bed, I’d find her lying on whatever bed I was supposed to be staying on. She slept next to me every chance she got. Here she is, last Christmas. She slipped away while Maggie and I were hanging out with my parents by the tree, and helped herself to the end of my bed on the floor of my sister’s old room:

My dad’s eyesight has faded a lot in the last several years, and he can’t drive anymore. He’s in good shape around the house, but outside of that, it can be touch-and-go. Over the last several years, when my mom’s been out running errands, taking care of my grandmother, going to church or whatever else, my dad’s largely been at home in a darkened room.

By choice, but still. Sandy always stayed with him and kept him company, and they got really, really close.

He’s taking this pretty hard.

My dad and I watch a lot of movies together when I’m home. It’s all strictly classic badass canon: Eastwood Westerns, certain Coen Brothers movies like True Grit and No Country for Old Men. Sometimes we would just watch the part in “Witness” where Harrison Ford is dressed like an Amish guy and whips some bullying tourist ass over and over again.

You know the drill. Sandy always joined us. Here’s a photo of a couple of old dogs watching rough frontier justice in what I believe was “The Outlaw Josey Wales”:

Apart from greeting me at the door, hanging out with my Dad and going for walks with my parents, one of Sandy’s other favorite things was to eat fresh corn on the cob:

When I came home for Christmas this year, she still managed to leap up and speed-hobble to the door, whining and thwacking her tail around. She nearly slipped and fell on her face, but she squealed and whined and for a minute there, I thought her legs weren’t so bad. “That’s the fastest she’s moved in months,” my mom said. “She always does this for you, though.”

Sandy never forgot to call us back, forgot anyone’s birthday or showed up half-drunk to a party and perpetrated some bullshit drama she should have outgrown back in college. We never had to make excuses for her, never got disappointed by her, never had to put up with her stupid boyfriends or low self-esteem or periodic flakeouts. She was never late to anything important and never found a cooler group of friends to go hang out with instead of us lame-os who had always been around.

All Sandy asked for was regular exercise, regular food, a chew-bone in the morning and regular patting and belly scratches. And in exchange she gave us her whole life, a tremendous amount of love, loyalty and affection that never diminished and never even flickered for a second. Everything she did, she did consistently, with the same amount of feeling. She gave me that same greeting every time I walked in the door whether I’d been gone for one day or nine months. She never held anything against me. And she couldn’t even tell when I was leaving.

Whenever I left my parents’ place I’d gather my luggage by the front door and get my coat handy before going to the airport. Then I’d find her and get down on the floor to give her a long hug and kiss her just behind her ears. I’ll never forget that scent, or the feeling of that soft angel-white hair against my nose, upper lip and chin.

I’d stroke her ears and beard and say goodbye, and she never had any idea. Not the first time I left, and not the last time I left, right after Christmas, even though I laid there with her for half an hour, until I could finally stop sobbing. I knew this was close for her, and I knew that was it. We don’t always get to say goodbye to the people or animals we love the most.

But that doesn’t make it suck any less when we get a chance to do it, either.

Friends kind of drift as you get older. A lot of my best friends have small kids now, and they’re (understandably) not available like they used to be. Other friends carry their own baggage that gets increasingly more difficult to tolerate. And as time passes, you start to realize that all you have in common with some people is a shared past, and have very, very different ideas of what a good future looks like.

Today, my family did the right thing by the most solid family friend we’ve got – my parents steeled themselves and ended Sandy’s severe suffering. But we lost someone who loved us all for the greatest reasons of all: because we were good to her, and we were simply there and available to receive her considerable love.

Whenever I remember Sandy, I’ll always remember all of this, and one more thing. When she was younger, she used to love to go out into the yard in the evening and look out at the neighborhood. She’d stand on her back legs and balance on her elbows, lifting her nose to smell the delicate scents of the night waking up.

The air would be full of honeysuckle and moonflowers, and she’d catch notes of opossums, neighbor dogs, atoms of who knows what else swirling through the air. Her tail would quiver and she’d just drink in this huge, swirling invisible tapestry, and sometimes let out a few barks just to let that coming darkness know she was there, and she wasn’t scared of anything.

I’ll always remember that about her — curious and alive, standing up against the night. She was fearless and in love with the smells of whatever was coming, and totally at peace with the advancing darkness settling all around her.