As I mentioned, I saw Marley & Me tonight. No apologies. When I was in college and would return to New Brunswick from my job at New York Press, I would look out at the students walking across campus — so tiny from the vantage of the elevated New Jersey Transit platform as the train crossed the Raritan River — I’d think, if only the world were populated with dogs instead of people. My New Year’s resolution is to spend more time with Kingsley, as I feel awful for what he probably sees as my recent neglect. If you feel as I do and you see the movie, you really ought to walk out 20 minutes before the end or risk losing your shit.

Something else about the movie almost caused me to lose my shit for different reasons. The Owen Wilson character is a journalist. And my Lord does he ever have a charmed career. He walks into the Sun-Sentinel newsroom sight-unseen and emerges with a better job than the one he wanted. His crotchety editor-in-chief is always offering him a better position, more money, more vacation time, more freedom. He leaves that job for a job he likes better, at a bigger paper, in a better city, for more money and a bigger house. And in real life at this real moment the entire fucking industry is collapsing like the South Tower.

A more true-to-life portrayal of the bond between journalist and dog would emerge from a scene where the journalist is walking his dog at 7 a.m. after four or five months of unemployment and is struck by the terror of thinking he might have to find an entirely different way to earn a living for the rest of his life, since the freelance assignments are getting thinner and further-between, only he’s not qualified to do fucking anything else. Later he crawls back into bed and hugs that animal for ballast and anchoring while his life slips further out of control.