During the dotcom, I learned a lot about stocks. Did you get any of those, back then? In the era when Al Gore was inventing the internet and San Francisco was invaded by hordes of black pant wearing, Jetta driving website makers. This is now the past. It was the ’90’s. It was a time when balding guys in suits would take me out to expensive lunches to pick my brain about guerilla marketing. I drove a truck and wore cut off shorts and brought a small black dog named Timmy with me everywhere I went and somehow got mistaken for an art director when really I just wanted to sit around in my garage and glue shiny things on to plastic horse models.

And the stocks. Oh lordy, the stocks. Oh, did I buy stocks. Sometimes people gave these to me, or I should clarify. Options. Options to buy stocks in these vapors that have long since vanished. And of course our genius millionaire plans that included investor meetings, sipping cocktails on patios of ocean side seafood joints, planning ways to make it look like the blue chip was a vision inside the beaver’s mouth. The stocks we picked, as it turned out, wrong ones.

That was the ’90’s and now it is now. It never seemed like that would be the past, but it also never seemed like I’d be driving a sensible small size SUV full of dog crates and wearing pink trimmed gore-tex sneakers with jeans from the Gap and attending events called Dog Show. Shit happens.

You know what I wish I had bought stock in, way back then? These things. Nylabone. I hope I’m not poisoning my dogs, letting them chew on translucent, injection molded thermoplastic polymer dog bones, made in foreign countries and shipped here by various oil guzzling transportation means. It feels horribly indulgent and decadent to drop coin on this crap. But I do and they’re the current currency at my house, everybody sits around and gnaws on them until they go a little glazy looking in the eye. We call them chewy bones. But you can call them Nylabone.