Dogs, Boys, And Other Things I've Cried About

When your dog leans in to nuzzle you, are they professing devotion—or searching for a cozy place to throw up? In What the Dogs Have Taught Me, Merrill Markoe argues that dogs are both mirror and medicine: they expose your human foibles with comic precision and teach you—by relentless, slobbery example—how to meet chaos with curiosity, presence, and joy. Markoe contends that if you watch dogs closely (and talk back to them shamelessly), you’ll learn a practical philosophy for surviving modern absurdities—from doomed relationships and self-help scams to Vegas wine goddesses, zombie retail clerks, and glamorous celebrity dinners that end with pasta on your lap.

Across brisk, observational essays that read like the love child of Nora Ephron’s personal candor and David Sedaris’s scene work (with a pack of mutts under the table), Markoe replays daily life at canine eye-level. She stages interviews with her dogs Bob and Stan about why they shadow her every Kleenex run (answer: ball/food), keeps a Dog Diary from the dog’s point of view, and drafts a canine user manual—Daily Routine—that doubles as a field guide to human delusions. Then, with the same toothy grin, she satirizes adult-ed “solutions” (Sexual Secrets of the Orient, Dominatrix 101, How to Make $$ in Internet Porn), deconstructs pretentious dining and nightlife (Beware the salad sand, the upside-down hotel marquee, and the BARRICADE OF WHEATGRASS), and reverse-engineers sales seminars into a buyer’s resistance playbook.

A thesis in dog logic—and human rescue

Markoe’s core claim is deceptively simple: dogs live in ecstatic now-ness; humans make themselves miserable with expectations, performance, and scripts. When a fire crew tells her to evacuate, her dogs celebrate the car-leash combo like it’s opening night. When a friend weeps over a sudden divorce, Puppyboy drapes a deflated soccer ball on his lap, convinced the greatest act of mercy is launching a game—right now. Through such scenes, Markoe shows you how canine ardor cuts through human melodrama. And after loss (her beloved Stan dies from a ham overdose—yes, really), she learns that grief, like adoption, is messy and profoundly random; you don’t replace a dog—you show up for the next one, and let life happen again.

What you’ll take away

You’ll see how to decode dog behavior (motivation is usually snacks or ball), translate it into humane boundaries (no, you don’t need six greetings an hour), and even turn a two-leash sidewalk tangle into a mindfulness exercise (Zen and the Art of Multiple Dog Walking). You’ll also get a survival guide to single-woman life: how to shower with your dog (wear swimwear, deploy chicken skin as bait, then remove the flea shampoo), how to eat alone without shame (parking-lot dinners count), and how to live alone without turning into a caricature (beware the Fish Table Principle: just because you can buy a fish-shaped table doesn’t mean you should live with it).

Why this matters now

The book’s 1990s–2000s time stamp—Y2K dread, rolling blackouts, the rise of cells and spammy Internet porn—makes it feel eerily contemporary. Her rant on cell-phone etiquette could be read at any café today without a single edit. Her “Zombie Clerks” piece anticipates today’s AI-ish service scripts: she teaches you to spot and resist manipulation, whether it’s a “precision model” at a sales seminar or “authentic” coffee-shop chitchat mandated by a corporate binder. And her pop-culture takedowns—Romeo and Juliet as deranged neurotic teens; a romantic dinner with Fabio that ends in dog hair and philosophy—remind you to decline cultural scripts that don’t fit.

How we’ll explore it in this summary

We’ll start by translating canine cognition into human wisdom: motivation, communication, and boundaries (Bob, Stan, Lewis, Winky, Tex, and Puppyboy will lead). Then we’ll unpack Markoe’s toolkit for single women—equal parts domestic realism and comic defiance. We’ll tour her satirical anthropology of self-improvement (sex classes, dominatrix school, private-eye night school, get-rich porn seminars) and her field notes on American spectacle (Vegas wine goddesses, Medieval Times, the Sunset Strip, and Tijuana’s “12,000 SQUARE FEET OF FUN!”). We’ll close with love, marriage, and media—how to live under billboards for your ex, flirt with marriage while avoiding its worst scripts, and practice full-disclosure resistance in a PR age. By the end, you’ll have a practical lens for staying sane: adopt the dog’s radical present, deploy the humorist’s scalpel, and keep tossing the deflated soccer ball—especially when life insists it’s not playtime.

Markoe’s dogs are not props; they’re co-authors with agendas. In A Conversation with My Dogs, she sits her pair—Bob and Stan—down to address a domestic crisis: they accompany her on every Kleenex trip. What follows is a deadpan negotiation in which she alleges food is their hidden motive; they counter with “life experience” (plus a side bet on ball). You watch a human trying to set boundaries with beings who believe every micro-movement could end in dinner. If you’ve ever tried to pee alone while your dog treats the bathroom as a co-working space, this is your Rosetta stone.

Motivation: snacks, ball, and “life experience”

Across pieces like The Dog Diaries and What the Dogs Have Taught Me (Daily Routine), the algorithm is simple: check the lower third for edible matter; treat all unidentified morsels as gum; any movement might lead to food; and ball outranks nearly every ethical principle. Stan invents Double Dog Ball, a continuous two-ball exchange that only pauses for an inning-three bathroom break—ball still in mouth. When asked why they move from dead sleep to door-ready at the phrase “get my purse,” Bob and Stan fight for pole position because purse implies “car,” and car implies “something is happening.”

Communication: stare, relocate object, repeat

The greatest treatise on canine rhetoric is Puppyboy Speaks. A friend arrives in tears over a divorce; Puppyboy repeatedly places a deflated soccer ball on his knee, then thigh, then lap—escalating intimacy—while narrating (in Markoe’s voice) the moral clarity of the ask: throw the big flat wet thing. It’s canine CBT: focus on the solvable action in front of you. To Puppyboy, human self-absorption is a refusal to toss the ball. (Compare to Alexandra Horowitz’s Inside of a Dog, which frames canine attention as smell-first; Markoe stages the performative eye-beam.)

Boundaries: greetings are not infinite

In Greeting Disorder, Markoe convenes Lewis and Tex to declare a policy: no greeting unless she’s been gone two hours. To dogs, time without you dilates into geologic epochs; their rebuttal is a choreography of circling, leaning, hurling, and “circle and hurl” variations—body-blocks powerful enough to force package drops. Here, Markoe shows you how to turn love into a system: define rules (even if they fail hilariously) and keep renegotiating reality. Boundaries, in her universe, are firm ideas delivered with a laugh—and a towel.

Walking as Zen practice

Zen and the Art of Multiple Dog Walking reframes chaos as curriculum. Two leashes spiral around a pole; a street dog postures for a fight; your knees are bleeding; now breathe. Her mantra: the solar system somehow avoids collisions (mostly); this snarl may, too. She treats the sidewalk like a mind: tangle, pause, unloop, proceed. The lesson for you is portable—when conditions yank in opposite directions, stabilize one vector at a time. And celebrate the tiny miracle when “STAY!” works, exactly once, at the last possible second.

Field rules for humans, from dogs

1) Any open car door is an invitation to get in. 2) The best nap is in the driveway, mid-lane. 3) If vaccinated, urinate on the physician. 4) There are only two faces: complete joy and nothing at all.

By anthropomorphizing (and then undermining) every motive, Markoe helps you notice your own: how often your “urgent” movement is as snack-driven as a dog’s. The fix isn’t shame—it’s gentle design. Move the snacks. Adjust the route. Keep a spare ball. And narrate the comedy while you untwist the leash.

Living solo can be bliss—or a personality amplifier. Markoe treats solitude as a lab where you stress-test habits, furniture, and food without witnesses. In Home Alone, she eats freezer hors d’oeuvres for dinner and coins the Fish Table Principle: you can buy a fish-shaped table without opposition, but then you must live with a fish-shaped table. The fix isn’t performative pampering (cosmo-mag “cook for one with the good china”); it’s practical mischief—learning what keeps you sane without sliding into caricature.

Domestic realism, not shame

Her Merrill Presents Eight Things… list includes dating yourself (move between two chairs and Mace yourself to reduce pressure), shaving the dog and racing for tans, and eating a full three-course dinner in your car in the supermarket parking lot (use the good silver). It’s not nihilism; it’s design for constraints. When she says dye your hair wild colors, then buy a giant hat, she’s teaching iteration: explore, assess, accessorize. (Compare to Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing—both reject productivity scripts in favor of presence, but Markoe keeps slapstick in the kit.)

Pets as training wheels for relationships

In Pets and the Single Girl, dogs supply the friction of a partner without the litigation. You’ll practice guilt (“Are we going? Now? Now?”), co-sleeping ergonomics (dogs are sacks of lawn clippings), and food diplomacy (their Bangladesh-level hunger gaze helps you eat less). Puppies are also trial children: Lewis, raised from six weeks, becomes a whiny, boundary-testing giant with high self-esteem—proof that parenthood might not be your civic calling. The loving verdict: accept your limits and design your household accordingly.

Bathroom solidarity and other humiliations

Showering with Your Dog is a masterclass in logistics: wear swimwear (you’ll know you’re naked, and that’s enough), lure with chicken skin to overcome horror-movie associations, and expect toweling to be futile—he will fling hair-water anyway. Step 6 is a public service announcement: remove flea shampoo bottles before you become a dermatological cautionary tale. This is Markoe’s voice at its best—affectionate, blunt, and bristling with how-to because she’s already made the mistakes for you.

Boundaries with humor (and probation)

Firing My Dog imagines a recession-era PIP (performance improvement plan) with Lewis, who bills for shrub removal, ball (one-hour minimum), and “no barking” at $3/min. When she tries to terminate him, he cites leverage—door whining, neighbor wrath—and wins probation plus an apology. The joke hides the lesson: in any live-in relationship, power is leverage + persistence + who can make more noise. If you can’t out-bark the dog, redesign the system: more exercise, better gates, different expectations.

A world without men (tongue firmly in cheek)

Without men, she posits, there’d be fewer projectile weapons, nitro funny cars, and VCRs (we’d skip to TIVO). In exchange, we’d have superior hair-care products and far fewer ball-centric sports. The point isn’t misandry; it’s noticing default male designs you’ve quietly adopted—and un-choosing where it helps.

Read this section as permission: to invent rituals that look silly from the outside but stabilize your inside; to set boundaries with laughter; and to reach for the dog towel when a self-help list says bubble bath.

Markoe’s greatest civic service may be doing dumb classes so you don’t have to. She audits the 90s marketplace of quick fixes—a preview of today’s algorithmic optimize-yourself grind—and brings back schemas for spotting nonsense. The pattern: a charismatic teacher, ritualized language, and a promise that this time, finally, effort can be outsourced.

Sex, secrets, and the Cunt Coloring Book

In Sexual Secrets of the Orient (taught in a hotel near LAX by R.N. Ginny Dingman), the curriculum is part pelvic floor Kegels, part Ben Wa balls (“doodledy-doodledy-doo”), part overshare. Students get homework (mirror checks, fantasy writing), and a grown man is invited to bounce testicles in hand. It’s an earnest attempt to reclaim pleasure, wrapped in goofball packaging. Markoe plays respectful anthropologist—she asks about adhesive for bell-on-testicles—while quietly clocking the line where empowerment drifts into shtick.

Domme school and the Navy Seal in nylons

At Dominatrix 101 (Hyatt on the Sunset Strip), Ava Taurel in a turquoise suit teaches “wicked imagination” and clear-eye commands. Students practice on a volunteer—an actual Navy Seal who confesses stress relief via women’s underwear—while his glamorous wife demonstrates exemplary leash work. One woman orders him to hump her leg “like the dog that you are;” the class claps; Ava reminds them to avoid the kidneys. The scene is farce with pedagogy: consent, calibration, communication—then knots. (Meanwhile, Markoe mutters about outperformed leash-training at home.)

Private eye cosplay and pornpreneur math

At the Nick Harris Detective Academy, Milo Speriglio lectures under three different founding years (“Since 1911/1907/1906”) and plays Marilyn Monroe tapes with a magic pen recorder. Students ask whether glue can erase fingerprints and if galoshes remove footprints; one is suspiciously murder-curious. The porn class—How to Make $$ in the Adult Entertainment Business on the Net—features Phillip LeMarque touting “Mydickhorny dot com,” one-and-a-half-minute clips for “instant gratification,” and the Ultimate Masturbating Machine. The startup budget metastasizes from $5,000 to $6,700 by the Q&A.

Sales seminars and the resistance playbook

At SUCCESS 2000 with Peter Lowe, she learns the Precision Model (“People never say what they mean”), the RMA fed by RPEs, and rapport via mirroring voice, tempo, and body. She promptly writes Obstinacy 2000 for customers: adopt the Leave Me Alone Face, weaponize universals (“Everyone!”), behave erratically to break mirroring, and pivot to selling your watch to the salesperson. It’s the book’s central muscle: learn the trick, then reverse it for autonomy. (Cf. Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational—Markoe’s version comes with slapstick warranty.)

Test for hustles

If a class promises identity (“be a dominatrix/PI/porn mogul”) before skills, and the math expands mid-sentence, you’re not learning—you’re being onboarded as a revenue stream.

Her verdict isn’t cynicism. It’s calibration. Keep the real bits (Kegels, consent, self-knowledge). Decline the upsells. And when someone mirrors your speech to sell you a giganto TV, ask them to help you diagnose your septicemia from the Merck Manual; then sell them your watch.

Markoe maps America’s funhouse—places that promise enchantment and deliver theater, markup, and sand on your salad. Her field guide teaches you to read the signs (literally) so you don’t spend dinner under a tiki hut breath-misted by Milli Vanilli with spray bottles.

Las Vegas: gaudy joy, 36-hour cap

Tip #1: stay at the gaudiest you can afford (Caesars). Tip #2: see at least one spectacularly dumb show (Nudes on Ice; skaters bored enough to need a smoke break between twirls). Tip #3: win $1,200 at roulette—dramatically increases Vegas satisfactions. Tip #4: dine in The Bacchanal Room, where “wine goddesses” will eye-massage your date, while Julius Caesar and Cleopatra gong through to ask about your entrées. Markoe’s counsel, equal parts delight and boundary: savor the spectacle; threaten the wine goddesses with your Swiss Army knife, metaphorically; and leave before the joy flips to existential dread.

Medieval Times and Tijuana tourism

At Medieval Times, your manservant Rick asks, “Does the soup not please m’lady?” while knights crash and a hooded monk appears in smoke. The patrons cheer goblet-lifting; Markoe longs for fewer greetings from staff monitoring her bites. In Tijuana, every window offers “pre-Columbian art” for $9.95, switchblades for $2.99 (great stocking stuffers), and storefront signs promising 12,000 SQUARE FEET OF FUN. She declines a lobby marriage proposal (“Let’s get married”). Field rule: enjoy the absurdity; keep your wallet in the zip pocket.

Hip, pretentious L.A.: Beverly Hills, Sunset, Silverlake

Beverly Hills trains you to find clear nail polish on male cuticles appetite-suppressing. The Standard greets you with a human-size aquarium (man in boxer shorts wearing inflatable dinosaur hands) and a troughlike BARRICADE OF WHEATGRASS at Sky Bar. At the latter, Markoe mistakes the cigar sand tureen for artisanal pepper and eats a sandy salad out of mortification. Silverlake’s Good Luck Bar is unlabeled and loud; the drinks have names you can’t order without blushing; the seating is subterranean. You’re always—somewhere—too mainstream, too alienated, or too tidy. Her solution: laugh, then go home to the dogs.

How to not get ripped off at dinner

Look Before You Eat is a doctrine: beware “Ye Olde” signage, cartoon animals in sailor suits, visible décor motifs (netted glass balls) within 100 miles of a city center, non-chair seating (battery-acid drums), excessive 45-degree wood, and “our world-famous” menus. Avoid zesty-word inflation, incoherent cuisine pairings (“CUBAN FOOD AND MANDARIN CHINESE”), and any place that makes you participate in history on the placemat. It’s a schema you’ll use forever.

Zombie clerks and phone etiquette

When friendliness is corporate-scripted (the coffee binder says “connect within 30 seconds”), you are being mirrored, not met. Markoe prefers grumpy authenticity to Stepford warmth and proposes a humane social contract for phones: no calls at restaurant tables, theaters, bathrooms, elevators, supermarkets, while dancing (sex included, with narrow exceptions), or in nature.

If you live in a city or travel for joy/work, this is prevention medicine. Learn the tells. Cap the exposure window. And carry literal or metaphorical Mace—for goddesses, clerks, and anyone who insists your salad’s gritty texture is a feature.

Markoe approaches romance the way she approaches dog training: with affection, skepticism, and a strong leash. In Just Say “I Do,” she tweaks conservative arguments against same-sex marriage, proposing that straight people let gay couples “refurbish” the institution like a neglected neighborhood and then hand it back. The deeper confession: as a certified straight person with long-term, even good relationships, she’s never wanted to marry—except, perhaps, if forbidden by constitutional amendment. Desire blooms when banned.

Hair, image, and cross-genre couples

Diary of a New Relationship is a valentine to a musician boyfriend whose aesthetic is “more hair” (aim: Nikki Sixx). Markoe, raised in the Joni Mitchell sleek-and-wounded tradition, tests volumizers with Viagra-like half-life and worries she’s morphing into “Madeleine Albright in a party dress.” It’s a miniature treatise on cross-tribe dating: musicians preen, writers skulk; both must compromise. Her solution is pragmatic romance: buy the product, keep your voice, and wait for his eyesight to fade.

Fame is a billboard of your ex

In Ed Is Coming to Town!, a breakout ex saturates her city with billboards and radio ads. She can’t escape: the magazine on the Stair-Master, TV teasers (“The Girlfriends of Ed!”) built around her old clips, and a concert shout-out (“Anyone see Ed last night?”). The piece captures modern parasociality before it went social: being drafted into someone else’s narrative without consent. The survival skill is perspective; the punch line is restraint. Sometimes you just go to the show and bite your tongue.

Dinner with Fabio (and other cultural scripts)

TV Guide sends her to Geoffrey’s in Malibu to dine with Fabio, who arrives—miracle—in a shirt. He praises Great Danes, accepts her leftover pasta, and offers aphorisms (“Life is very easy. People complicates their life.”). He also mentions a “super super” model-actress he’s not rushing to consummation with. Markoe pokes at the romance novel persona and the real man who would eat pasta off your lap. You leave with a rule of thumb: cherish the myth lightly; date the person you actually meet.

Full-disclosure candidacy (and other modern confessions)

Her mock stump speech—“A Full-Disclosure Candidacy”—predicts the politics we now swim in: inoculation disclosures about armpit fart-detention, magic mushrooms, three-ways, and body lice, followed by pledges to stop speeding yellow lights and cheap seasonal gifts. “I have been happily married to my lovely wife… for eleven of the fourteen years we have been together, and faithful to her for almost three.” It’s not nihilism; it’s a defense against PR manipulation: once the absurd truth is on the table, the spin loses oxygen.

Romeo & Juliet, re-read

Her Valentine’s essay reframes Shakespeare’s lovers as deranged love mutants: he shifts obsessions from Rosaline to a 13-year-old in a night; she fakes death to avoid an arranged marriage days later. Fast-forward the marriage and Romeo is dodging 911 calls about a chocolate Easter bunny. Moral: stop patterning your love life on theatrical pathology.

Take from this cluster: decline inherited scripts (marriage deadlines, hair mandates, tragic romance mythologies); expect PR; lead with your own disclosure; and—when cornered by spectacle—choose the dog and the joke.

Not many humorists write frankly about pet death without condescension or mawkishness. Markoe does. A Dog Is a Dog Is a Dog opens with absurd tragedy: Stan dies of a ham overdose while she’s away. He’d once eaten a ten-pound frozen turkey and survived; ham’s fat destroyed his pancreas, liver, and kidneys. She returns to a house where his stare ought to be—the stare that believed every sock drawer had a ball at the end of it. The essay is a clinic in grief language: specific, unsentimental, and full of love for a dog who dumped in third inning with the ball in his mouth—and was, on balance, perfect.

Choosing again (imperfectly)

She tours rescues and pounds (including a suburban woman with dogs in every yard, car, and room), tests “chemistry” in meet-and-greets where the newly liberated dog tornadoes past her toward OUT, and realizes the truth: she’s scanning cages for Stan’s eyes. The pivot is humility: there are millions of perfect dogs; you’re not finding a clone—you’re making a life with the next random miracle. (Anyone who has adopted will recognize this: first you think you’re rescuing the dog; then the dog rescues you by requiring breakfast forever.)

Lewis arrives, then rewrites the script

I, Lewis is the origin story from the dog’s POV. Expecting to move into the White House with Barbara Bush, he lands with “a mixed-breed” woman in L.A., where every idea (eat wires, remove nails, chew needles, annex Johnny Carson’s tennis compound via saturation peeing) is censored by a tyrant who pays in shots and kitchen confinement. It’s comic rebellion with truth: dogs don’t arrive pre-installed with your rules; they find edges by crashing into them. Later, in It’s a Wonderful Lewis, an angel shows him Merrill’s life had he never been born—pristine hats, boots, antique coffee tables, film offers for a well-behaved dog named Phil—and sends him home to keep shredding expensive items because “no dog’s life is a failure so long as he still has expensive items to shred.”

Talking to animals (and the limits of knowing)

If I Could Talk to the Animals documents three animal communicators with three incompatible backstories for Winky’s highway origin: the maid left the estate door open; he followed a dog at a supermarket and lost the car; a jovial man in coveralls abandoned him in a park. The punch line is gentle: either the psychics are delusional, or Winky is a sociopath. The wisdom is quieter: some histories are unknowable; your job is to love who showed up.

What the dogs truly teach

Wake joyful, expect breakfast, greet often, nap whenever your name is called, and—when in doubt—throw the big flat wet thing.

Grief, in Markoe’s world, is permission to re-choose (another mutt with catastrophic habits), re-learn (how to leash-unspool), and re-laugh (at the angel who sends your dog back to ruin the couch so you don’t become the sort of person who loves antique coffee tables more than life).