A Night At The Dog Races

(Title courtesy of Mission Control)

I'm pretty sure I don't approve of dog racing. I think it's probably brutal, and certainly there was some pre-race yowling from the dogs as they waited for the mechanical rabbit. Not to mention the dog that pissed on the track as it was being paraded before us. A dog, in point of fact, that I had bet $2 on.

Nevertheless, I've always wanted to go to the dog races. I suspect, unfortunately, that's only because it's kind of an improbable thing to do, and so I could trot it out to fill conversational voids with some kind of fake expertise.

There weren't a lot of people at the dog races. Those that were, were the people I had seen at the beach earlier. Whole clumps of families, buying racing tickets for the little ones, with teenage daughters parading around in short shorts and tall vinyl shoes. I'm making them sound trashy, but they weren't. They were just families out to have a good time; the effect was wholesome. And I don't mean wholesome in a complicated way; I mean wholesome like a butter commercial.

The mechanical rabbit came around the track and the announcer yelled here comes Swifty and the dogs came tearing out of their gates. Some people yelled. Then we bet again and waited. I bought popcorn and a soda. The sky went dark; it seemed darker at night out here. People looked like some complicated art installation under the floodlights.

The taxi driver that picked me up asked if he could smoke. I said sure. He said I could too if I wanted to. I said I had smoked plenty at the track.