I could hardly believe it when I realized that it's been a whole month since my dog made some book recommendations. Since it's almost my birthday, Molly would like you all to read Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice”, “The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis” by Jose Saramago, and “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I see that she’s trying to bring me down during my b-day week, and I guess all I can say is that if my breath smelled like a corpse all the time, I’d be a bitter, old bitch too. Why not “The Death of Ivan Ilych”, Molly, or “Death in the Andes”? I mean, Mann over Tolstoy? Really?

But let's be real for a second: mortality is depressing to think about. When I feel sad, I like to just look at Molly and think "You'll probably die first." It's all about perspective, you know?

Bonus: I tried to think of a way to celebrate my birthday, pictorially, by pimping out Molly's picture, but I didn't want to do something banal like put her in a birthday hat. My original idea, which I shared with my brother and with Chandler, was to stick some bunny ears and baby legs on her with Paint, because in real life, if I had a baby with a dog's head and bunny ears, I would be totally into that and think it was cute squared until the scientists took it away from me and put it in an institution where they later developed a dog-human hybrid slave-species (the Anubians) that eventually takes over the world. No one that was sober agreed.

So then I started having this dream of dressing her up as something better than a dog that likes to eat its own butt all the time continually every minute of the day. I have decided that every year from now on (read: never again) I will dress her as a literary character. And so, I present a photo shoot with Shermoll Holmes.

Happy birthday to me.