My pug gets better mileage than your SUV.

An ode to my pug's paws:

I haven't met a dog fanatic who hasn't expressed joy over their pet's exquisite paws.

My pug's paws are works of art. The black pads, all circular and button-like, get so rough I want to exfoliate my face with them. They feel like the old upholstery buttons on my parent's scratchy couch. 

Whenever we go for long walks, I'm grateful for the pug's durable pads. They can endure sticks and stones and random sharp sidewalk debris. Honestly, the pug's paws are better equipped for outdoor traversing than the shitty flip-flops I wear every day.

Sometimes he will get a thorn stuck between his pads, and rather than howl and whimper with his paw in the air, he will soldier on – 27 pounds of pug marching onward into the neighborhood with a limp so slight passing dogs barely notice he's lost rhythm. 

The paws themselves smell like corn chips. Many dog's paws smell this way. I know it's disgusting and you may think me vile for it, but I love to sniff the pug's paws. Like a kid with a runny nose seeking out his favorite germ-drenched blanket, the pug's paws fill me with a fuzzy warmth that coats my heart in cashmere and aids in the flow of serotonin. 

And the fur! The fur looks like wood grain on a two-by-four leg of lumber cut from an ancient oak tree – so straight and so smooth when you pet with the grain, and so course and so stiff when you pet against the grain. 

But it's the pads that impress me most. It's the pads that I envy when I look at my own fleshy feet. 

When the pug and I camped across the country, he stepped on many a wicked thorn, nosed around in many a pricker bush, popped a squat on many unforgiving cacti, but no pointy plant was too sharp for his dime-sized paw pads. 

His paws shatter toy breed stereotypes. They are as rugged and rigged for outdoor adventure as the paws on a Bernese Mountain Dog. 

If it weren't for my pug's vacuum-sealed face, he'd have soared over sand dunes in Bandon Beach, Ore. with the ease of a heron.  

If it weren't for his asthmatic lungs, I'm certain he would have combed the The Rockies like a mountain lion hunting elk at dusk.

If not for his diesel engine pulmonary system, combusting externally in the North Carolina heat, I'm confident the pug's muscled legs would have carried him up the Blue Ridge Mountains to the top of the Grove Park Inn, where together we would've sipped tea in high-backed Adirondack chairs facing the sunset.

And perhaps if his sausage roll body had been a little less eggplant-shaped, we'd have frolicked the Ozarks like Maria and Captain Von Trapp. 

If the rest of him would keep up, my pug's paws would outperform Firestone Tires. 

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PS. Photo of my courageous pug after he lumbered his way to the top of a red rock formation in Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs. 

PPS. When the pug is not ascending sedimentary beds of sandstone, he slumbers on top of Joe's head in a queen-sized bed in St. Petersburg, Fla.

PPPS. Note: I purposely did not mention the pug's trifling dewclaw. 

Treading dopamine, waiting for my ship to come in.

There are eight men outside my office window sawing down a tree. The noise is sharpening all the Q-tips in my house into tiny white knives.

These clowns have been cutting down trees all week. It's like listening to 100 dentists bore 100 cavities at once.

I'm half inclined to ask them if I can have a few logs for our outdoor fire pit, but I'm sure the City of St. Pete has loftier plans ... what with its stellar reputation for recycling.

It a spectacular day out. Gray. Rainy. Sky the color of a chalkboard. Perfect writing weather. It's not that bad weather inspires me to write, it's that the break in 75-degree monotonous sunshine triggers spirited introspection, which is such an ungrateful thing for a Buffalo girl to say, so my apologies to the folks back home.

Which brings me to my next tangent. Lately I've been fascinated by the human brain, in particular the day-to-day drudgery that is pierced by darts of distraction dipped in dopamine. What triggers these stabs of bliss and ambition? And why must they hit at the most inconvenient times?

Dopamine, just so we're clear, is a neurotransmitter, a chemical produced in our brains that serves as a lifeboat for neurons. When I picture dopamine, I picture ladies in Victorian dresses treading cold blue water in the North Atlantic as the Titanic sinks slowly in the distance. I picture a sea of dopamine carrying yellow lifeboats, and I picture bustle gowns like sensory neurons, billowing out under glacial water, desperate for a lifeboat, stockinged legs paddling dopamine like dendritic cellular projections.

When I picture our brain, I picture the globe. Divided into hemispheres, our brain is not unlike the earth. The frontal lobe is where most of our dopamine-sensitive neurons sit and stew, waiting patiently, hands clasped on their laps like southern belles at the Kentucky Derby, for a dopamine breeze to blow their hats off.

Often when we think of our brain's pleasure molecules, we think of serotonin. But in my not-so-expert opinion, serotonin is fleeting. Like a bite-sized Snickers. Dopamine however, seems more enduring. Like a gallon of chocolate ice cream.

Just the sound of the word dopamine is intoxicating. First discovered in 1952 by a Swedish scientist, (who by the way wasn't awarded his Nobel Prize for this discovery until 2000) dopamine is my enemy and my lover.

I drink dopamine every day in my coffee, and I know I could get it elsewhere if I wanted, but I tell myself to buck up, synthesize it on your own.

Which is why I'm throwing every ounce of literary ambition into a novel. I want to swim laps in a sea of dopamine. The last time I attempted a novel, I was so filled with dopamine it seeped out my eyes. 

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PS. The picture is by Norbert Wu. It is not a Victorian bustle gown but the largest jellyfish in the Antarctic Circle. It was featured in TIME Magazine and published in Wu's 2004 book, Under Antarctic Ice.