Off the Digital Leash

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:

Not our dog. Wheatie is invisible.

NO DOG: Jonathan and I don’t have a dog, but we wish we did. So we did the next best thing.We have an invisible dog, named Wheatie. Wheatie is a Wheaton Terrier: invisible, so constantly adorable and very low maintenance. (We forget to feed her, she doesn’t care.)

Solly and Daisy

PUPPY LOVE: My colleague/producer Mary has real dogs. Crazy, bouncy, hilarious rescue Labs who are an adventure every day. Very high maintenance, but Mary cannot talk about Daisy and Solly without smiling.

POOCH PHILOSOPHY: The dog-person thing is pretty intriguing. What I have learned from Mary is that there’s more to dogs than dogs. And now I am learning it from Matthew Gilbert, too.

BOW WOW.  Matthew Gilbert. Made me laugh every day as TV critic for the Boston Globe. Fearless, opinionated, hilarious and insightful and a beautiful writer, he made our love of TV be like a community. Something we all shared, discussed, cared about—and it was okay. TV was good. And we were grateful.

DOG CHOW: A few months ago, at a dinner party, (after we dissected The Wire and Game of Thrones and The Americans) Matthew told me about his new book. A book? About TV? (That had to be it, I figured.) Nope. He explained it was about how he’d been forced to detach himself from TV—by a dog.

COME!  I latched onto this instantly. We have dog lovers at Jungle Red, I said. We have readers. We have people who love to read about dogs. Come visit! I implored. And he agreed.

GOING TO THE DOGS. So now, Matthew Gilbert, in his new life. How going to the dogs led him to a whole new place.

Off the Digital Leash

   by Matthew Gilbert

    Hi, my name is Matthew, and I am a TV junkie.

    Like many of my friends, I feel like I was raised by TV. I remember watching reruns of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” as a kid and wanting Rob Petrie to be my father. He was a goofy string bean of a man, and I loved him for his stumbles, for his macho-free masculinity, for the rare birds in his life like his co-writers Buddy and Sally.

    You’ve been there, no doubt, fed by the dependable love of the remote-controlled breast. You’ve visited that place of comfortable numbness, where the world is like another TV show. It’s not a bad place. I’ve made a very satisfying career out of it as the TV critic for the Boston Globe. I watch many, many hours of TV a week, and I love it. I love the medium, and watching stories unfold over time, especially now that those stories – like “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” and “Game of Thrones” – are so good.

      But since I’ve been taking my yellow lab Toby to the dog park, I’ve developed a daily ritual of going unplugged for an hour or two, of leaving the digital bubble. It has been a great development, a daily “off.” I’m away from the TV and computer screen when I’m at the park, and I also try not to use my cell phone. It’s a regular intermission from that state of electronic thrall.

    Toby goes off the leash, I go off the digital leash.

    It’s not the only thing I’ve gotten from the dog park. As I describe in my new book, “Off the Leash: A Year at the DogPark,” I’ve learned how to play, how to relax among groups of people. But this daily intermission from the virtual, this spot of sun through the cloud, has been so eye-opening. These screens and devices we obsess over are very high-tech tools with which to make a very primitive kind of flight. They enable emotional distance; you’re in a room or on a street or at a park, and a very beautiful park at that, but only partially there. I knew that state intimately, long before cell phones arrived.

    

Toby’s name has “to be” in it – that had been my idea when my husband Tom and I named him, thinking of a Globe editor who’d killed himself shortly before we got Toby; that friend, so overwhelmed and resigned, had chosen not to be. Time to be, I thought, at least for a few hours a day, while the dogs are wrestling joyfully at my feet. Stay in the moment of the park, at the park.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Ah, Matthew. See what I mean, Reds?  Do you have a dog? Or have you ever? Did your dog—change your life? Are you a "dog person"?

**And pssst. There's still time to enter my fabulous THE WRONG GIRL paperback contest. http://hankphillippiryan.com/newsletters/newsletter-7-14.html  **

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  About Matthew Gilbert and OFF THE LEASH

OFF THE LEASH is a group portrait of dog people, specifically the strange, wonderful, neurotic, and eccentric dog people who gather at Amory Park, overlooking Boston near Fenway Park. And it’s about author Matthew Gilbert’s transformation, after much fear and loathing of dogs and social groups, into one of those dog people with fur on their jackets, squeaky toys in their hands, and biscuits in their pockets.
    


Gilbert, longtime TV critic at The Boston Globe, describes his reluctant trip into the dog park subculture, as the first-time owner of a stubbornly social Yellow Lab puppy named Toby. Like many Americans, he was happily accustomed to the safe distance of TV viewing and cell-phone web surfing, tethered to the digital leash. But the headstrong, play-obsessed Toby pulls him to Amory, and Amory becomes an exhilarating dose of presence for him. The joyous chaos of wrestling dogs and the park’s cast of offbeat dog owners – the “pack of freaks” – gradually draw him into the here and now. At the dog park, the dog owners go off the leash, too.
  

   
Dog-park life can be tense. When dogs fight, their owners – such as the reckless Charlotte – bare their teeth at each other, too. Amid the rollicking dog play, feelings tend to surface faster, unedited. But Gilbert shows how Amory is an idyllic microcosm, too, the home of enduring friendships and, as the droll but vulnerable Hayley knows, romantic crushes. Meeting daily, a gathering of dog owners can be like group therapy, or The Office, or a standup concert.
 

   
As a TV critic, Matthew Gilbert is well-known by his readership for his humorous and wry writing style. A charming narrative that will appeal to anyone who has ever enjoyed watching a puppy scamper through a park, OFF THE LEASH is a paean to dog lovers and their pets everywhere, perfect for fans of Marley & Me and Merle's Door.