I woke up thinking about my moms dog Romeo this morning. Romeo is kind of her ex-dog because he passed away a couple of months ago. He was featured in one of our episodes here...


My feelings about him were pretty much honestly stated in the episode I shot and wrote. I sort of liked him but never really loved him. He was a really good dog, to be honest so there was no real reason that I was ambivalent about him. He protected my mom and made her feel safe (the reason I pressured her to get him in the first place). And, he wasn't much trouble other than the larger than normal dog excrement you'd only naturally expect from a larger than normal dog.

I used to make jokes with mom about teaching him learning to pick up his larger sized excrement and then neatly drop them into the compost bin as my mom made her foray into the back yard with her hand encased in a plastic bag searching out his doodies. I would say that he likes to eat them sometimes anyway so why not make the leap to just picking them up in his mouth and disposing them for her – when he decided not to chomp down and swallow them. Ha Ha she would say as she looked at me and my ever strange suggestion - then she would go off on the expedition.

I could never see why but she really loved that dog. She wrote poetry about him. I really love Cyndi but I've never written poetry about her... ok well I did write a whole web series. Most people cant see how or why I could ever love Cyndi. Maybe we're a little nuts, our family.

When Romeo died, that night, my brother and his wife went over. My mom called me, very upset. Her voice sounded like the day she called me when she found my dad had passed away, so unique that tone. So much I hated hearing it. But, when my dad passed away my tone joined hers. We both were distraught. This time, I was calm in the face of death. I mean to me Romeo was a just a bland dog who refused to pick up his own excrement and for some reason, I don't know why, I just didn't love him. sue me.

But I love mom. So I went over. My mom was crying – this time I didn’t join her. My brother and his wife were over there too. In hysterics. Just crying like there was no tomorrow over this big lug of a dog. I had never even seen my brother cry - including the day my dad passed away. Not a tear. But they were weeping more – honestly more than my mom was.

I tried to cheer them up by showing them “Techno Chihuahua”. I thought they would laugh and get a kick out of it even though they never really liked my dog Cyndi.


I went to the back fence with my brother as my mom comforted my brother’s wife on the couch. My brother told me he and his wife were going to take Romeo to the vet. “A vet?”, I think to myself. “Isn’t he dead?”

And, out back... Romeo is there. Lifeless. Dead. I pet his head. He really wasn’t so bad of a dog but how could I feel so little for this big dumb animal while my brother and his wife were way past distraught?

I then pat my brother’s back as we walked back to the house telling him it would be alright and that he his did best when he tried CPR and that it would be the best idea to leave poor Romeo in the back yard rather than take him to a vet like his weeping wife was insisting. After all, it was already after 11:30 at night and my mom kept telling her that she didn’t even want them to take her dog to a vet – she tells his wife this as the wife is in deeper and deeper doggie hysterics.

I read this and I look pretty cynical and cold, I realize. But why do we like some things and other things not? How could my brother and his wife be so callus when my dad passed away but go ape shit over a dog they saw maybe six times a year? And why did I feel nothing? And how is it that I love Cyndi so much but most everyone in the world just does not?

When I wrote KILLER CHIHUAHUA! I wanted to accomplish two things. I wanted to dramatize some facets of my relationship with Katy – how we met and our courtship blossomed while my evil dog Cyndi came between things always threatening to screw things up in our beginning.

But even harder still, I wanted to show the world how this little dog wasn’t really evil at all but actually very loveable - this little Chihuahua doggie that everyone, just everyone, seemed to hate and called "KILLER".