An Old Dog

On a ride home recently, I saw an old dog, a rottweiler to be exact. He was standing in his yard and looking the other way. He didn't even notice me. I dinged my bell to get his attention. He slowly turned his head and looked my way, but outside of that, he didn't move a muscle. That got me to thinking and drawing parallels between:

- Dogs and Doods
- Bikes and Babes

A young dog will chase a bike with every fiber of his being. It doesn't matter if he's chased a hundred bikes before and failed to catch any of them, when bike number one hundred and one passes, he will chase it with every fiber of his being. It's not logical. It doesn't make any sense. He looks absolutely ridiculous in the process. Everyone knows that he ain't gonna catch that bike. It's a futile waste of time and energy. Yet none of this logic matters to a young dog. In fact, none of these things even cross a young dog's mind. When a bike passes, a young dog thinks of only one thing - chasing it.

An old dog, on the other hand, barely even pays a passing bike any mind. There's no way he's gonna waste any energy chasing after it. I don't think that an old dog's failure to chase has anything to do with a lack of interest or desire. Nor would I attribute it to a lack of energy. I think an old dog has lived long enough to come to the simple realization that it just ain't worth it. That's not to say that if a bike ventured close enough, the old dog wouldn't chance a bite, but it would have to be within a step or two, cause he ain't likely to expend much more energy than that.