"Dog Formula Is a Pet Food"/"Confusion Is Not Necessarily Sex."

The new Dog TV show has a different formula, but I've already fathomed out the formula for it and found it to be not-so-great.

In the Guthrie, Oklahoma episode Dog & Beth caught a fugitive up in Colorado. Nice country they have out there. They drove up to his house and arrested him while he was watching cartoons. They always catch life as it happens. The best aspect of this show is the documentary aspect. But it wasn't exactly an exciting bit of sleuthing.

They did the job for a family business down in Oklahoma, as I said. The wife of this family, who had a son of 21 and a daughter of 16, still wore a metal retainer in her mouth. What she really needed was a chin, but you can't get a chin through your dental surgeon. You'd have to go to a plastic surgeon and the cost might well run into the tens of thousands. After all, they'd have to graft the body parts from elsewhere to add it to your chin. Maybe your thigh.

I don't know. This is idle speculation.

That being the case or not, Beth and Dog caught this dangerous man and sent him to the clink without a fuss. So far, boring TV. Then (and: here comes the formula) they drove to Oklahoma to meet the family they'd caught the perp for.

They arrived at the old farmhouse, the old dawdi haus,  at twilight, and it was like a Jimmy Stewart film, all magical and golden and Old American. Everybody shook each others' hands, and the womenfolk pecked each other on the cheeks and exchanged recipes, and the daughter of the house was off out to the prom, so some mildly ribald humour was indulged in at the expense of the father and the boyfriend. Dog grinned a big off-white smile and said he'd put a tracker on the boyfriend's car. "We ain't gonna make it easy for you to fuck this girl on prom night," he laughed lecherously. "We're going to try and ruin your fucking fun! You ain't gonna get to first base without thinking of my leering, salacious face and that's gonna put you right off! I might have put you off sex for life in fact!"

Anyway a terrific time was had by all that evening, and the tears of paralysed elation were soon streaming down everyone's cheeks, and as Dog and Beth turned to leave they chimed that they'd "swing by the office in the morning."

This is the trigger for the next segment of the show.

Dog should have took aside the paterfamilias here and said, in a dark dead baritone, "The nice portion of the show, the gee shucks, Whole Earth catalogue, Allen Ginsberg finger-cymbals mile-high circle-jerk, Hare Krishna, touchy-feely, Kum-By-Yah part of the show, is over as of now.  Tomorrow we'll descend on you like a wall of locusts and Beth will abuse you horribly. She will slit you from tip to taint and use you as a fist puppet. I will be absent-minded and bored and chain-smoking and want to get the filming over. Leland, in his designated role as the 'tech and tactics expert,' will be all 'fingers and thumbs', 'all at sixes and sevens,' a fucking tongue-tied bumbler saying obvious things and things that make no sense and bumping into things and generally fucking up. That dumb bohunk. But most importantly, and I cannot stress this enough, Beth is going to be rude as hell to you and your loved ones. She's gonna all but shit on your shoe. She's gonna take a brutal dump in your kitty litter. She's gonna crap in your hatbox. She's gonna tear this dawdi haus down. I'd say I'm sorry about it, but as you'll see tomorrow my chosen solution to this unpleasant state of affairs is to act all absent-minded and remote and moral relativist. So I'll be no help to you. Sorry but the worst part is about to come. The part when, guaranteed, my wife insults your wife and family and my son makes a horse's nether asshole of hisself –– again."

He should have said that but, perhaps understandably, he didn't.

Next day though it went as predicted. Beth tromped into the family dawdi haus with dirty fucking boots on dragging dirt with her tailbone, wiped them on the best linen, and spit her wad of tobacco bang smack in the center of the family portrait over the hearth. She pissed on the toilet seat "because she could."

Then she berated the wife, who made the rookie error of admitting casually to having "stacks" of unfulfilled bonds.

"Stacks? Stacks? What stacks? How much in a stack?" She sounded like Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Beth had at record speed fixed on something to drub the dumb wife for and she wasn't liable to surrender the chance to be high-handed and didactic.

Next she sought to sow discontent betwixt husband and wife. She told the wife that her husband had made a fundamental misjudgment and that he should be denounced in the village square for a witch. Then she goes, "You must carry the day within these four walls. Do you think my husband is anything but a blue-balled cuckold? To enforce your position, you might withhold sex if you have to."

I looked at the chinless wife with an empty thought bubble over her head. That drenched head from her daily application of mid-Eighties hair products, and the retainer athwart her teeth. I looked at her and I thought, "'Withholding sex' isn't going to really turn the screws on the husband. I think the threat of sex might be her best bargaining chip at this point."

"Have You Got Good Religion?"

Dog was looking for some no-account scofflaw and as usual he arrived too late to deal with anybody but the usual: some bumbling, halfwit, crooked uncle or father or stepfather or "gramps" (or "a sort of family friend"). The uncle (father) (gramps), naturally, swore that he didn't know where his nephew (or son) (or grandson) was. Dog respectfully called him a liar to his face and blustered deeper into the building. He hollered imperiously those immortal words, "Leland–– check the crawlspaces and under the bed."

By the way, these meth addicts always keep such messy places. You'd think they had no gumption! They should do a show about it. "Flip This Crack Den."

So Nuncy Grampy was playing his apportioned role (i.e., "too stupid to dissemble") ("too stupid even to fool Dog"), and he said, "I swear I don't know where he is. We don't even talk. Bring me a Bible and I'll swear on it."
Dog turned quickly and retorted tartly, "A meaningless remark! Who here can vouch for your good ties with your diocese? Who here can speak for your personal commitment to the Shavvat? Who shall attest to thy Christianly reception of Election and Grace? Who among ye can tell me if ye bathed in the blood of the Lamb? Have you got good religion?"
He then began to croon "Dem Golden Slippers."

No, none of that happened. The man made the remark about the Bible but Dog didn't even bother to respond.

They found the nephew/grandson/son in due course. I'd like to say they did so by canny sleuthmanship and excellent deduction but would you even believe me if I did?

Perp he had a fat estranged wife (of course) and while she sat blubbing to Dog and Beth hubbins was in the building next door frolicking and doing heroin with some nubile young drug addict a quarter his age. Strange how people live. He had his wife in the palm of his hand! He had his cake and he ate it too! I looked at this drug addict in his crack den with naked envy. As Joe Fagin sagely says, "That's Living Alright!"

When Dog burst into his secret crack-den love-nest, the guy was swooning on his feet. Half-dead on his feet he was withal full of junkie bravado. He rolled his eyes and bragged to Dog, "If you hadn't of surprised me like that I was gonna commit suicide by cop!"

Dog gave that all the credibility it deserved. He said, "I'd been knocking on your door for half an hour you nincompoop."

No –– he didn't. But she should of.

He should of said, "Suicide by cop? Brah, you ain't suicidal and I sure ain't no cop!"

I really ought to write some scripts out for this show. It'd be much better if I did.

Just a suggestion to the good people at Country Music Television.

At the end they had the usual Asterix-like banquet scene where they all dress up with the local bounty-hunter dynasties and they go to  Denny's or a Red Lobster or an Olive Garden and they prate platitudes at each other. Cacofonix in a corner tied up. This time somebody remarked plaintively, "What are our grandchildren's future?"

Never mind the essence and substance of the question, I stared at the TV for a few minutes trying to parse the sentence, see if it could conceivably have made sense.

Never mind I missed the answer to the riddle: that our grandchildrens' future "are" bounty-hunting.

This conclusion was almost as chilling as that episode of Parking Wars where the guy who tows illegally parked cars away in his truck went to his infant son's kindergarten and weirdly talked to his pre-school son through the wire fence. At the end of it he turned with a gruesome leer and said to the cameraman, "When he grows up he's gonna be like his old Dad –– a tow-truck car-remover!"

The child visibly blanched.

"The New Dog (and Pony) Show." Or, "Dogz is Not a Put-On."

Beth and Dog have a new show on the Country Music channel, called Dog and Beth On The Hunt. That's inspired. I only wonder why they didn't call it Dog and Beth Are Bounty Hunters Who Are Married to Each Other and This Is Their Programme in Which They Chase Petty Criminals.

It is sandwiched between episodes of a show called Guntucky. 

I used to say to my wife, "If you ever come in the apartment and I am sitting watching an episode of Psychic Kids, you are hereby granted absolute license to kill me roughly." Seasons passed and I updated this joke to include Sand Masters when that fine show blew onto our screens like a scirocco through the Gobi.

I now say, "If you ever come into the apartment and I am watching Guntucky, please kill me with violent prejudice."

In the "wake of Newtown," I wonder if the Country Music channel will come up with a spin-off called Gunnecticut. It seems like about as good an idea frankly.

Idea for a reality show on the Country Music channel: Kill Your Teacher (Praise Your Preacher) (Sing the Family Hymnal). 

The new Dog show, to return happily to my familiar subject, is rendered conspicuous by the absences of Duane Lee and Baby Lisa, both of whom strayed far from the reservation at the end of the old A&E season. Also Bobby Brown "peeled off" and went wildly AWOL and sued Dog and Beth and A&E. This was off-camera. There's a confusing testimony by him on Youtube though if you're at all interested by this. They should do a reality show about that reality show so we can find out what's actually going on. The Chapman clan do love their Bible-family circle-jerks, their praise-Chrast ring-a-round-a-Rosies, but these people clearly despise each other "off-camera."

That said, I was quite surprised that the spat with Duane Lee was genuine. I had been convinced it was a put-on, a narrative "arc" inserted artificially to drum up some viewership, to try and get some Ryan Seacrest Kardashian points. Apparently it wasn't.

Leland is still on the show, but it's like he's been lobotomized.
(In the voice of GARRY SHANDLING:) Yes, I know what you're saying: "Could you ever even tell if Leland Chapman had been lobotomized?"

This incarnation of the Dog and Beth traveling circus and farmer's museum has the vapid illusion of serving some didactic, pedagogic purpose. They are ostensibly going from state to state advising ailing bailbondsmen on how to pep up their lifestyles and also redeem themselves in the blood of the Lamb. They offer sagacious nuggets of brilliance, like: "You need pepper spray cause what you gonna do if your mace and your tazer fail you?"

Leland said that. He also advised the wearing of gloves because, "You don't want somebody's tooth embedded in your knuckle when you go to punch them in the face."
They went out on a shooting range and Leland basically told them to point their guns at the targets and pull the trigger. "That's correct. Very good."

The sadness and loss felt by Leland was palpable. He told the two trainee bounty-hunter troglodytes, "You go round the back."

The back, the going round of it, that was Duane Lee's old spot, his old routine, and you could see in Leland's sad, wounded eyes the personal pain of losing his brother. He chose the Yankee dollar over loyalty to his brotherman.

He tediously explained the philosophy of sending the man round the back of the house thusly: "We wanna surround the house. So: this is the house..." [Here he traced with his finger a square shape. Then, pointing to the sides of the square...] "We go there, there, there."   

Beth was teaching the new generation of dumb fucking working stiffs too. She said to the stereotypical white-trash/trailer-park glam-rock/cyber-gonk secretary, "You got the bounty-hunter spread-sheet?"
"Nope."
"Gotta get it sistah. Gotta get that spreadsheet brah."

Another time to protractedly demonstrate their resourcefulness they had an interface with a fat bearded guy in spectacles over their computer and he looked up a name and address from his computer database. The trainee bounty-hunters looked on in awe, like the first cavemen to behold a fist hatchet, and Beth simpered smugly and said, "You too can be an ace sleuth like us if you sign up to this guy's list."

The idea is like "Chef Ramsay" coming to a restaurant and pillaging the staff, finding gunk in the freezer and acting like it's still shocking to his superior sensibility. Then the coming up with fatuous solutions.

It's good to see then that the old repartee is still there:

BETH: I'm gonna slap yer.
DOG: Whatever.
BETH: Duane I like. Dog me no likey.

All the old hits, they're back, lovingly revisited for a new "new country" audience.

Incidentally, is the Country Music channel known to be a shit-kicker glue-sniffer redneck ultra-rightist channel? I'm only asking because the tone of this first episode was not in the past tradition of eggshell-walking and fence-building, like when Dog would daub on face-paints to protest the many sufferings of the gay/lesbian/bi/curious/transvestite/transexual community, or when he gingerly went among the African-Americans and blunderingly, urgently attempted to make social reparations for his past gaffes.

In this episode they went fiercely and unrelentingly after the Native Americans with some considerable savagery. I didn't know if I was watching Dog or Hell On Wheels. Is it okay to go after the red man? You naturally wonder if their old A&E editors silently, and wisely, edited out all the awkward and costly Prince Philip-style political blunders the Chapmans made, while the new editors are such corn-pone neo-Nazis they don't bother about it.

Dog's mind seems to be drifting. Never mind that his skin is bright red and his hair bright yellow. I shall say nothing of that except he looks like a traffic light without the green lamp. His mind is almost visibly dwindling, almost as deleteriously as his golden ("bright yellow") locks of hair. Several times he'd be knocking on the door of the perp, gun in hand, banging and hollering and then he'd turn and say, "What's his name again?"
("Who am I? Where am I?")

He was at the door, rocket launcher in hand (I should note that this gigantic Rob Liefeld-esque bazooka only pumps out hot air as far as I'm aware– that or wiffle balls) and a four-year-old child answered the door. Dog bellowed at the child, "Where's MAURICE, you black-skinned crook?"

The perp's actual name was "Marquise Cooper," but Dog would insist on calling him Maurice. "Come out bruddah. Come on Cooper. Come on Maurice."

Later there was a trainee working stiff called LUMUMBA (he actually solved the crime single-handed despite the Chapmans' "help") and Dog insisted on calling him "LUBUMBA" which became "La Bamba."

They were sent to another address and then doubled back to where they were and Dog got confused and hare-brained ("hair-brained") again. "Can you see the house we were just at, Leland?"
("Where am I? Who am I?")

They caught "Maurice" and he wept on Dog's breast and Dog cradled his head and kissed him tenderly above his ear.
"What did  I do, sir?"
"You failed to appear in court."
"NO! IT CAN'T BE TRUE!"
Not having been on television before, Maurice was hellbent on chewing up the scenery with a "bravura debut." His seemed to be a hysterical over-reaction to the bald fact and Dog, always professional, coolly parried it:
"Don't get crazy son. You just missed your court date."

Soon the perp was on the back seat, becalmed and kittenish and on the phone to his fat trash ex-girlfriend. Still chewing scenery but focussed now. When she picked up the phone the camera was there,  and she wanted to be seen on-camera to be taking the initiative and so she shot in first, "I'm done with y'all." Because "Maurice" was on the backseat of Dog and Beth's SUV, he of course was more interested in peaceable solutions and so he crooned some blues about loving her and Chrast and family and flag and the great state of Guntucky too.

They went after another perp on the same show. Quite honestly at any moment I wasn't sure who they were after or why. But they were talking about the aunt of a perp and Dog said, "She's straight, the Auntie?"
His trainee stuffed-shirt goes, "Straightish."
Nice definition of the people on this show.

For this new perp, Dog got all sneaky. He noted, "He's very fast, he's smart, very paranoid so to get close enough to capture him without him noticing us first is going to be the difficult."
So what they did was they all piled into Dog's gigantic black tourbus with his name and a blow-up of his badge on the front, and they "snuck up" on him in that.

Dog refers to the senior bailbondsman, the scatterbrained honcho they're there to assist, as "The Old Man," 'cause he's all red in the face and can't remember shit by now.

These bumbling amateur bounty-hunters they are assisting have to provide on-camera testimonials about how Dog, Beth and Leland are all helping them in finding crime-solving solutions to knotty problems. It's exposition, it's propaganda, it's boring viewing.

I query the point of this episode. So these stiffs had to call in Dog and Beth for this "knotty konundrum"? All they did was ask the perp's "Auntie" and then his fat ex-girlfriend and they sang like canaries and gave him up trussed up like a Christmas goose. Come to that, the guy was driving up and down the one strip in town in a bright red truck with a pair of silver bollocks affixed to the back bumper! Hardly a case for Holmes!

Then again, "The Old Man" (one HANK BAYLESS -- Hank CLUELESS I said) was about as useless as tits on a warthog. He'd say about every stiff, "This guy is a pain in the ass and I have haemorrhoids bunched up like grapes in my asshole." He whined, "He don't wanna get caught." Well who does, bounty man?

Boba Fett you ain't.

Hank Bayless is retiring though. Depressing thought. I paused the DVR and looked at the old defeated codger and thought, "What are you going to do with the rest of your life I wonder, you man?"
Death is depressing. it clearly casts a dreary pall even over life.

Leland broke into the house and said, "We're comin' right for ya now ese brah."
Dog said that the fugitive was "hanging on his coattails."

Dog on the informant: "We don't know his name?"
The trainee-stiff replied, "No, I can't remember his name."
There was a pause and Dog coughed awkwardly and went, "Mmmmm. Okay. Look, next time write his name okay?"

[...]

Then he goes,  "Who we after again?"

I answered the TV at this point, thusly: "I have no idea."

"Kibbles 'N 'Bits 'N 'Shit."

"Adversity is the good man's shining time." EDWARD YOUNG.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

There is a standard spiel, used by Dog and his bounty-mad gang, by which they sentimentally justify their chosen avocation.

Why, Hal, 'tis my vocation, Hal;'tis no sin for a 

                                             man to labour in his vocation.

Lest onlookers think that Dog is a grubbing, mercenary cur, he always reminds the perp and the public and the "studio audience at home" that if he doesn't collect the bounty, he foregoes the amount and that money is stolen directly from his "children's table."

What exactly is this "children's table"? I have sometimes wondered. Do the little kids - Gary Boy and all his tiny uncles and aunts who are actually younger than he is---

"I'm my own Grandpa"

--- all sit at a miniature table that is overlaid with banknotes and coins? Is this the celebrated "children's table" so often mentioned in these speeches?

(While I am on the subject, I might as well admit that I don't have the least understanding of the basics of bounty-hunting. Why is Dog foregoing the money? Does he put the money up in the first instance? Then how does he actually earn any money? At best he would break even; at worst he would be ruined. Can anybody explain bounty-hunting to me?)

(On reflection, don't bother.)

Anyway, in the episode I watched today Beth muffed up the standard spiel. She went:

"They all think they're tough. But you know what? They're none tougher than me when it means they're gonna take the food off my children's table. Because then the lion comes out!"

[Pause. Beth turns and starts to get into her SUV. Stops. Turns and adresses the camera again.]

"The lioness."

Beth when she was saying this was putting on her so-called "street-Hawaiian" voice. She goes, "Sistah."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I was watching an episode of the show recently and they were in a very specific situation, waiting for a perpetrator who was deep in a rural, jungle area of the "Big Island" and they were going to catch him before he fled in the morning. Then some music played and the lyrics were ridiculously apt for their situation. It was like a "nu metal" song that went, more or less:

"I've got to get up early

To escape the shack

To travel through the canebrake

To escape from the bounty hunters

Whose names are Leland and Dog

Youngblood and Beth

Not forgetting Duane Lee"

"They're coming up the back roads in their SUVs

I'm on my moped

I'm an ice addict

Charged with 'paraphernalia possession'

With a history of spousal abuse."

"Bethy In Disguise With Glasses"

Judy in disguise,
Well, what you aiming for,
A circus of horrors, yeah,
Well that's what you are.
You made me a life of ashes,
I guess I'll just take your glasses

On Dog the Bounty Hunter, Dog, Beth and Youngblood are on the "big island" planning a crafty trap. They aim to catch the female perp as she arrives at the airport. Dog goes, "We're going to have Beth sneak up on her in disguise."

You could see the incredulity in Youngblood's eyes. He was patently thinking, "What are you going to do, Dog? Give Beth radical breast reduction surgery before she leaves the house ?" Of course, proper etiquette dictated that he didn't say any such thing; but canny viewers could read the meaning in his facetious smirk.

Then Beth comes in, wearing a straw hat and some sunglasses and goes, "This is my disguise."

She said, "I didn't want to wear something too flamboyant and eye-cathing."

Staring at her colossal "bosom," which is after all Beth's most prominent attribute, Youngblood goes, "With that straw hat on you look like a completely different person!!"

No he didn't actually say that but he should have.

I should write the script for this show.

Of course it isn't scripted I'm just joking with you.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The summarised description for another episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter says:

"Dog hunts a man he knows very little about and does not like."

What else, after all, need you say?

"Da Kine. Da Fuck?"

1) I have a dreadful habit of watching episodes of Dog the Bounty Hunter that I've already seen. 

Usually I'm two thirds of the way through an episode of Dog before I realise, "Oh I seen this one already I know what happens." By which point I think fug it I'll watch it again.

Because life is so long that we can afford to waste time like this can't we?

I was watching this one episode with a female perpetrator who in her mugshot had badly-drawn on eyebrows. It was as if they had been drawn on with a big black magic marker - via the tremulous hands of a blind man. And when I saw her mugshot and those magnificent brows, I thought, "Oh I've seen this episode." But I kept watching, rapt in my sublime forgetfulness, and Dog and Beth and family were nosing about this woman's home - which was really just a dirtshack complex on a remote backlot, but it was full of hidden rooms. Lots of ninja hidey-holes. 

I thought I was watching Shinobi No Mono for a minute!

Heh.

You didn't like that one, all right.

Anyway, the woman was a "meth-head" and (naturally) also a single mother of six, but she in addition stood accused of stealing somebody's dog. Like that episode when that "Bonnie and Clyde" team stole Buddhas from outside a Thai restaurant. And so this time Beth goes, "What the fuck is this about you stealing a dog?"

"I didn't steal no dog."

Meanwhile Beth is, you can tell, trying to steal one of the woman's dogs herself. I know I've seen one episode where Beth actually did take the perpetrator's pet dog because she liked it and the perp was going to jail after all. So Beth is in the habit, let us say, of blithely taking other people's pets herself. And she was playing with this puppy on camera for ages. Lots of screen time for this one puppy. Eventually Beth had to reluctantly give the puppy back to the meth-head owner (who dully goes, "Drive safe now"), but you could tell that she had been hard at work angling to get the puppy for free. Like a child in a toyshop does - tries to get his or her parents to buy them something simply because they make such a public show of spontaneous fondness for it that the parents can't legally refuse.

Like my nephew in the Disneyland shop. He ran in there, sensing that the time was ripe to get gifts from the adults around, even when he didn't necessarily want anything. He wanted things in the abstract. He was picking up things willy-nilly and pulling a heart-tugging expression.

Beth was doing that very thing with this puppy, but it didn't work anyway.

And then she has the big brazen magnificent balls to accuse the perp of stealing a dog!

2) So then they have the perp on the backseat, and if you've read my earlier "posts" about the show in question you'll know that the backseat is a scene for a lot of soul-searching and hard questions. As the academics would say, it is a "site of radical cultural mediation and exchange." So as usual Dog and Beth are like Jay Leno, in that the first thing they ask the perp is if she's got any kids, and she goes "I had six, but one died."

And Dog, half-asleep and oblivious, goes, "And how old is she?"

"She WAS one-year-old -- WHEN SHE DIED in a car accident!"

So then, all tact and sensitivity, Dog goes, "Oh, da kine."

The fuck––?

"Da kine" is an old Hawaii word that doesn't have a set meaning and so can be said at virtually any times. Dog's company is even called "Da Kine Bail Bonds." And so when this woman tells him her daughter died aged one, all he can find in his human heart to say is, "Oh. Huh. Da kine."

One for the linguists, methinks!

"All My Sins Forgiven."

Dog.

Bounty Hunter.

What He Says.

Dog had a female mother-of-three "ice-head" on the backseat and was drilling her for her life story. He goes, "Talk story. Shoot."

For his troubles he got the usual crock-pot of gab and guff. Really a load of old rot. Baby Lissa was on the back seat with them rather than Beth, because - as Beth rightly says - Lissa has to learn what bounty hunters do if she's going to do this job. She has to participate in all parts of the job.

That was a really nice idea, Beth - a nice thought or emotion - but it didn't work at all because Lissa just sat on the back seat biting her bottom lip with her big Robin Gibb overbite. Her and her Dad together, they look like the Bee Gees sans Maurice (which is, after all, exactly what the Bee Gees are now). In fact Baby Lissa did on the back seat what baby Lissa does when she is in the bounty-hunting "field": that is to say, fuck all.

If she was a stray niece or a stepdaughter Dog would have kicked her off the team as quicky as he kicked off that weird drug ingester Justin, his wigger nephew; but since she is a flesh-of -his-flesh daughter he keeps her around and lets her slide along while Dog tells himself outrageous untruths about his daughter's mettle and efficacy.

Anyway they're all on the back seat and the ice-head stay-at-home-mom goes, "I was straight for fifteen years." Already at this point this had the awful ring of exhausted familiarity to me. "What started you off again," Dog mutters - scarcely interested himself.

"My father died," she said, and I thought then: "Haven't I heard this ballad before?"

Every time the perpetrators tell Dog how they "fell" there is always some sad story that mitigates the sin. It's like the American Idol auditions on the backseat there. (Did you see, incidentally, the recent round of American Idol auditions? People were seriously trying to wreak pathos from the fact that they had asthma. One girl who was in her late twenties complained to the panel that her parents had got divorced last year. She was a grown adult who lived away from home! Isn't it a statistical probability, by now, that the average American is the child of a "broken home"?) But this dead ur-vater motif... even Dog felt it was hooey, he goes gruffly, "Well, she admitted that she wasn't even close to her old man so it's just so much deflection of existential responsibility."

Then they arrested some worthless hoodlum gangbanger who was hiding in his mother's attic. The mother swore blind that Sonny wasn't there but she and all her swearing could not defeat the paranormal nose of "Youngblood" who says sotto voce to Dog, "I smell a female rat, cap'n, permission to go in?" Dog nodded in assent and sure enough they dragged the son out of the attic and the mother stood there coolly chawing tobacco as they did it. Like she was thinking, "Waal you got to try and beat the rap well innit." I laughed savagely - she had been shown to be a loathsome liar on television but it seems she didn't give a pfennig for the "television audience at home" or what they might think. She answered only to her personal genius of the hearth.

This seems the sign of the age - more people are appearing on television every day and they care less and less what the viewing audience at home thinks. This is not, as the anthropologists would say, a shame culture. Like: there are shows about overweight people where the contestants go through all manner of degradation violation and exposure and you wonder, "Do these people not have work-colleagues or schoolmates who will tease them to the point of suicide for this?" Maybe I grew up in a crueller time and place but we got teased for the smallest flaws in Sonning Common in the 1980s, I'll tell you. The averge schoolchild was both a sadist and a pedant, which is a critical hybrid indeed. And in that day there was no panel, with Randy, Simon and Posh Spice, there to sympathise because you had asthma or a weight problem.

You were simply given "grundies" and henceforth dispatched promptly with "bundles down the dip."

Anyway, I saw that and I thought, "My mum would have shopped me to the bountyhunter in a heartbeat and I am a better man for it." Mothers, don't commit perjury on television!

So they arrested the son, and there he was on the backseat and Dog is lecturing him against his anti-social affectation of carrying a loaded gun everywhere he would go. Then with that boring drivel out of the way Dog leans over and says, "What do your tattoos say?"

(I have seen this line used on the L train out of Bedford Avenue, only it was delivered on that occasion by a salivating old man leaning over a female hipster. Amazingly the girl was all too willing to describe at tedious length what her tattoos meant. I think this eventually, by dint of sheer boringness, fairly killed the lecherous old man's ardour and he abruptly returned to his introspective activity of "pocket billiards.")

Meanwhile the crook says to Dog that his biggest tattoo says, "All My Sins Will Be Forgiven" and he next tells Dog that he used to be "a dancer at church." Dog is suitably impressed by this. You could tell this by the way his eyebrows shot up. I was only thinking, "Since when do they have dancers at church?"

The mind boggles. What would the Reverend Cotton Mather say to hear this to-day?

And meanwhile Dog was all shocked, after all these years, still shocked that somebody who goes to church could at the same time be a gun-toting criminal.

This in America yet!

"Dog the Bounty Hunter: A Novel."

Since 1993 I have had the irresistible compulsion to write a novel, but when it comes down to it I only rouse idle trivial thoughts and bop them around dully like a kitten playing cup and ball - fetid leaves swept up from the flagstones which flare for a spell, flicker and duly settle again in a different corner.

Banana leaves -- sycamore leaves -- my leaves are autumnal and broke - - -

I am a truthful man from the land of the palm trees / And before dying, I want to share these poems of my soul / My poems are soft green / My poems are also flaming crimson /My poems are like a wounded fawn seeking refuge in the forest.

This is another clump of the self-same dry leaves. A pot-pourri for the maw of Tophet, if you will allow the flourish. (If you will not, disregard the last sentence.)

I thought: there is a Faulknerian dynastic novel lurking within the seemingly banal and berserk goings-on of the bounty-hunting Chapman family.

Dog the Bounty Hunter is aired on TV in a muddle of repeats from different years in which we are tumbled back and forth through the time-space continuum willy-nilly in the company of the Chapman family. It is an anti-chronological negative-zone whirlpool in which even an experienced time-traveller could get confused. Even so, the current season of Dog the Bounty Hunter is easily recognisable from among the others.

In the new episodes, Beth looks pronouncedly younger and Dog looks conspicuously older.

Dog has lost weight and his lower eyelids have accordingly sunk eight inches as a result and he now looks gaunt and noble -- thwarted and impotent, like a Biblical patriarch. When he stares dolefully into the mist (mistily into the dole queue), as his family skirmishes around him, mace cans in their hands, I get to idly daydreaming about writing a thinly-veiled novel about Dog the Bounty Hunter and his family. The inevitable ageing and the doomed onset of wisdom would be my subject. Arms and the man would be my subject. My conjectures would be followed to their logical endpoints for a rip-roaring legend for all the family.

(Here everything disintegrates into sketchy notes written in a fever.)

Dog: firstly he is older. Obviously so. You can see his mind is no longer on the job.

His vacant expression at inapt times.

Reinstating his nephew Justin was clearly a poor choice and a clear sign that Dog had lost his tactical edge. Justin was and always will be a lovable fuck-up. Everybody knows this but Dog doggedly insisted on giving this dog another day. They brought Justin back to the pack and this proves to have been a fatal right poor decision later on in the novel.

Important: Leland has an affair with Beth. This was my first spark of inspiration, I must admit. As Dog gets older and Beth seemingly gets younger, she starts to look at the son in a way she never used to. She is a tough woman with a hide like a rhinocerous and a heart like an elephant. She needs constant warming-up and upkeep.

They carry on outrageously to the disgust of everybody except Dog who doesn't (or doesn't seem to) notice it. If he does notice it, he doesn't apparently care. Also Baby-Lissa (nearly wrote Amy-Liisa there) is so stunned by TV fame that she follows Beth around uncritically, narcissistically.

We, the readers, will have the inside knowledge that Dog does know about it; and he freely lets Beth and Leland "run around" together because Dog feels a dreadful guilt - no, not guilt - regret that he can no longer sexually satisfy Beth in the way to which she is accustomed.

Important to insert a quote here from "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town."

Duane Lee, however, knows of the disgusting incestuous affair and he at least shan't stand for the outrage of his father's good name and virtue. This is the set-up for the ancient mythological ur-tale of The Two Warring Brothers. Cain and Abel -- Duane Lee and Leland.

Duane Lee, in this season, has been filmed "working out in the gym" - assisting the one-legged Justin and helping him build his muscles up "so he can be tough like me." This is something of a strange character development for us viewers, who are used to seeing Duane Lee as a bit of a goof-off second-rater, a fat coward and a sneak. Dog always sends Duane Lee "round the back" of a perp's shack - where nothing ever happens. Dog places more responsibility in the lap of Baby-Lissa than the ample lap of Duane Lee for goodness' sake!

Anyway so there is this laughable idea that Duane Lee has been out in the wilderness building himself up into a Tough Guy, like Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo - training, as I say, with that dependable misfit One-Legged Justin. Training for his bout with Leland.

Meanwhile Beth has had various surgical procedures to make herself thinner and younger-looking. She also spends more time - too much time it is whispered - with her personal assistants, who woo and wow her with ideas from New York and Los Angeles -- Paris, Milan and London. Even some ideas from Luxembourg.

Beth becomes more urban and "cool" just as Dog is become more rural and foggy and fazed-out. Beth is also ever more cruel and bloodthirsty on bounties. She is taking out her stress on the perps, just as Dog is becoming more humane and philosophical and magnanimous with them. Obvious rifts emerge, both in matters of bounty-hunting technique and in the vagueries of the boudoir.

Maybe it all comes to a head when Beth violently murders a perp who after all only has one measly misdemeanour for "alleged illegal custodianship of a propelled vehicle". Dog is shocked and wants Beth to turn herself in to the "County Sheriff" or the "Federal Marshall" [?] but she won't - worse, she makes Dog collude with her, forcing him at gunpoint and in tears to bury the corpse.

"Now you're implicated, Big Daddy!" she drawls through a curled lip - and sniggers.

Dog sobs, leaning on his spade. The scene resembles Millet's Angelus.

Dog becomes more and more abstracted as the novel goes on. Falls in love with a horse.

Duane Lee becomes crazier and crazier, under the absurd illusion that he is a tough guy.

Youngblood - you wonder about Youngblood. Where is he? I wonder this too. Youngblood, I decided, is craftily exiled from the gang by Beth's "Macchiavelian machinations"; she manipulates events so that Youngblood and Dog have a final falling-out over a seemingly trivial thing. (Cigarettes, say - - or the Samoan secretary.)

This could be connected cleverly to the real-life allegations that Youngblood was caught jerking off in his car a few years ago.

Anyway I'd have it end so that Youngblood comes through finally to redeem Dog's shame, his cuckolded humiliation, but at a horrific cost. Leland kills Justin and Duane Lee with consummate ease (he has, I should perhaps have mentioned, become a diabolical, monosyllabic ninja killer by this point; finds himself in the sinister, dazed, doomed thrall of Beth). Even so Youngblood kills Leland with nunchuks and then, in a heroic fury, Beth.

Dog enters the room hazy from an afternoon catnap to find Youngblood standing over the corpses and he goes, "Whu-- Tim-- bra! -- you killed Bethy!" He and Youngblood tazer eachother and that's how it ends - with the two men tragically locked in each other's tazers, electricity pulsing through them.

Incidentally, has a novel ever ended with a tazer duel before?