This Week for Happy Hour: Like How Dogs Do It

This week's celebration is really more a memorial than a reason to cheer, depending, I guess, on the morbidity of your sense of humor. Friday, April 15th marks the 99th anniversary of the day the unsinkable Titanic struck an iceberg and sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

"Harold, are those masts?  Not a good sign."

In the aftermath, thousands of the world’s ultra-rich drowned in the icy waters and were subsequently eaten by sea animals. And from that moment on, the wealthy elites have waged war on any ice known to be floating in water.

But that's really neither here nor there. This story is about a dog - a Pomeranian. He was a real dog, but I don’t know his name. Let’s call him Tafferton.

"Ruff!  ...just the way your mother likes it."

This particular Pomeranian was owned by Mrs. Elizabeth Rothschild, wife of the leather magnate Martin Rothschild (seen below) and was aboard the maiden voyage of the Titanic in 1912. In spite of animal boarding policies, Mrs. Rothschild insisted that she be able to tote the little fur ball with her onto the great ship. "It's a show dog," she allegedly said. “It has papers. You can't board it. It gets upset. Its hair falls out."

"I bet you play with the iron or the wheelbarrow.  Sheesh."

And so Martin, Elizabeth, and Tafferton boarded the ship, not knowing that only two of them would ever safely reach New York.

Let's back up a little. Now, it's a well known fact, Sonny Jim, that there's a secret society of the five wealthiest people in the world, known as the Pentavrite, who run everything in the world, including the newspapers, and who meet tri-annually at a secret country mansion in Colorado known as The Meadows. "Who's in this Pentavrite?" your skeptical office mate asks you. The Queen, the Vatican, the Gettys, the Rothschilds, and Colonel Sanders before he went tits up. (That addictive chemical he put in his “chicken” finally got the better of him.)

Well, Martin Rothschild – of the same Rothschild family – for all his wealth and power and expertise in the field of catching and skinning the wily and elusive domesticated cow, could not escape the clutches of the frigid Atlantic on that starlit morning 99 years ago. By the time he realized what had happened, it was too late. He drowned and, ironically, was eventually skinned, albeit underwater and by fish. And not in a cool way, like death-by-piranha. But slowly, like picking paint chips off a park bench in Flint, Michigan. What a way to go.

"Get in my belly!"

But do you know who did survive the Titanic disaster? Tafferton. You knew he would, the spunky little bugger. Apparently, when the crew started yelling, "Women and children first!" Tafferton decided he didn't care much for that order of things, and he and the rich old bag were off to the life boats. To hell with Martin and Leo DiCaprio and all the other suckers who didn't have the good sense and foresight to bail and doggy paddle like mad when their titan ship was heading for the center of the Earth.

Which got me thinking, what a smart, lucky dog. And what can be learned by the story of Tafferton?

Stay with me. Ok, Epicurus, the 3rd century Greek philosopher, said that ambition was at odds with finding pleasure in life. That's not something you hear too often these days, in the nation's capitol no less - that only to the extent that ambition is forsaken, can one discover life's true pleasures. He believed these pleasures included such things as delicious libations, skilled lovers, good jokes and interesting conversations, among other things. (Sound familiar, Happy Hour goers?) He said that institutional ambition (as contrasted with the necessity of occasionally getting up off your lazy rump) was fundamentally a distraction from those pleasurable end goals. I think the general message was like when old people tell you to spend more time with your family and friends, to enjoy the little things in life - stuff like that.

So where does Tafferton fit into all this? Well, he lived on. He lived his little life and got to lick himself a few more times before he went the way of the dodo. He went home, ate some good food, and got cozy in his woman's embrace while Martin sank to the bottom of the ocean to the tune of “Mo Money, Mo Problems,” by the Notorious B.I.G.

"If you don't know, now you know, ninja."

I guess what I'm trying to say is this: we are all a bunch of animals. People, I mean (and dogs, too) are a bunch of animals, plain and simple. Obviously, we aren’t dogs, and dogs aren’t cows, and cows aren’t fish. But we’ve got a few common threads.

Epicurus understood this, to some extent or another. He advocated maximizing the sensory feedback that evolution made possible to facilitate survival. It feels good to eat and drink, so we do it happily and don’t accidentally starve to death. It feels good to diddle, so we do it happily and pass our genes along down the line. It feels good to laugh and think because those of our forefathers who laughed a lot and thought a lot also got to eat and diddle more frequently, and so those genes were passed along too.  Generally speaking.

Nature had a lot of time to develop these solutions ™ for life. And then the industrialized age came along and turned everything on its head. In some places, abundance became perpetual. In many places, the boring and stupid began breeding quite successfully. And for some reason, a whole bunch of us humans started wanting things that evolution didn’t see coming – like riding in gigantic steel mansion-boats across the Atlantic.

So then Martin Rothschild industrializes the leather industry, and uses the profits to buy a ticket on one of those big boats – an opulently industrialized unsinkable cruise liner – and it sinks, and he drowns. What an idiot. Too nearsighted to figure out what his wife’s pet Pomeranian was always too stupid to doubt: that life’s best pleasures are all around us, regardless of whether we’re beneath a chandelier inside a cruise liner in the middle of the Atlantic, or beneath a papier mache rhinoceros bust at your local corner bar. We can spin our wheels striving for something we think we want, or just open our eyes and notice all the sweetness that’s already here.

I’m not advocating laziness, mind you. There are plenty of problems that need fixin’, and anyway, hell if it’s an easy task to live everyday like Kevin Nealon in Happy Gilmore, or Kevin Nealon in Grandma’s Boy (weird). All I’m saying is, maybe the Titanic symbolized a shift in Darwinian thought: the survival of the fittest may now be the survival of the Epicurean. Keep your self-indulgence more natural than industrial, more doggy-paddle (or, -style) than cruise-ship-propeller, and you win. Nobody sinks to the bottom of the ocean. Nobody gets eaten – at least not by fish. And you get to be always happy and live a life of at-will spontaneous pleasure.

Hmm. Just a theory, really. And I doubt if it would do great things for the economy. But all this talk about the Titanic and Epicurus and that incorrigible Pomeranian sure makes me want to celebrate at a reasonably low-tech venue where there is little risk of drowning and great opportunity for enjoyment.

Where, oh, where . . . .

Oh! Almost forgot: half-priced Happy Hour at the Rhino Bar, this Friday from 5-9. Best deal in DC. See you there!

Finnegan