All I'm saying is—this guy needs a dog. Read on.

A free parking spot on the honky-tonk boulevard of broken dreams, dead ends, and ne’er-do-wells. An industrial street where icicles from the higher stories crash down on the unsuspecting heads of pedestrians, who have, fortunately, evolved to withstand hard blows. Where the din of speeding, squealing, honking, and burping cars and trucks drowns out the usual sounds of life.

This is his world. A world where a free parking space—almost in front of his basement atelier—is the focal point of his life. The one thing he can still control. More important to him than anything else. More important than his signature silver-fox hair and matching beard combo. More important than his decaying upholstery business.

Why reupholster a chair when it’s cheaper—not to mention easier—to buy new and pay in equal installments over a decade? Upholstery, another dying trade. RIP, along with the shoemaker, the knife sharpener, and anyone born in the last century.

Because it’s all too late for Gus. His life has passed him by like a floating cloud.

Oh, sorry, I didn’t introduce you to him yet.

Meet Gus. He looks like a Gus. A wiry little weasel of a man—no, a monkey. Really, who still douses himself in Aqua Velva? It’s been fifty years since a man was supposed to smell like a man. Now they smell like Fruitopia , whatever that is.

Gus missed the fork in the road for the path not taken. Should’ve read Robert Frost when he was in school—maybe his life wouldn’t have slipped past the event horizon into some black hole. The black hole of the silent majority. 

Once, he had a date with a woman who told him he looked like an old-school movie star whose name she forgot. But Gus never forgot the compliment. It never happened again.

All that remains is a free parking spot on the boulevard of has-beens and never-weres.

His last stand.

Fifteen feet of pavement, maybe ten of which are legal. The other five he claimed, in the no-man’s-land between his landlord’s property and la Ville de Montréal. And, of course, he had zero actual ownership of any of it.

Poor Gus. One of those older guys leading a life of quiet desperation. Maybe he once had some ambition, big ideas. To reupholster the sagging couches of widows dressed in black. But alas, life chipped away at him. Never married, never made any waves.

This parking space—arguably open to anyone—still feels like a win.

A VIP parking space for his 1988 green Jaguar. The "For Sale" sign in the window has been there since the mid-nineties—before rust sank its roots into the fenders.

But back in '88, Gus had a little momentum. Not much, but some. It was his peak. Not too high—more like a lump of skin home to a community of ringworm.

Hahaha—I shouldn’t laugh at the guy, but I do.

Can’t help it. Gus just takes himself so seriously.

Oh geez, I’m gonna laugh some more.

Gus.

Heehee haha hoho.

I laugh as I watch him from across the street, from my store, where I have a front-row seat to the greatest show on earth. Well, at least for me.

So real, so funny, such a study in pathos. I just cannot turn away when he enters the stage.

Maybe I watch Gus because, deep down, I understand how easy it is to tumble down the hole of no return. Maybe that’s why I laugh, it's funny as long as it's not you.

But at least this is real. Something real.

In a world of pixels and lies.

And while I study Gus, take notes, write stories, I think—he desperately needs a dog.

If only he could obsess over a dog, like so many other misguided lost souls do, it might give him a life.

Meet people at the dog park. Say bonjour in the street while a little girl pats the dog. Mark his parking spot the way only a dog can.

A dog doesn’t care about a parking space. A dog doesn’t care about a lost past. A dog just lives.

And Gus needs to live.

So yeah.

Gus needs a dog.