There are two things about the UK that are interesting and pertinent to this story. First, they have the same squirrels in the UK that we do in the states and second, the British are better at dogs then we are. The squirrels, I'm willing to grant isn't a life altering piece of news. But watching an entire city's worth of dogs off leash, behaving well, coming when called, and being cleaned up after spoke to a level of functional civility that was rather moving.

I was in England with two of my friends to see a "music" festival that got canceled right before we left. This left us with two solid weeks of London with no plans, and in my case no money.¹ Two weeks of walking around a really great city, people watching, buying extraordinarily expensive coffee, window shopping, and wishing that ATM's would tell me exactly how broke I was.

We were staying near Hyde Park and on the morning before we flew home we went for a morning constitutional. We took our take-away beverages of choice out with us for a short walk through the park. I was on high alert for one last good story. Sure I had seen a man scratch with his foreskin while wearing a skull mask; and I had lost 10lbs in two weeks because I was too broke to eat regularly and walked all day, everyday; and there was the time I was involved in giving north of 5 quid in change to a hobo.² But I remember stories instead of taking pictures so I am always looking for something to talk about.

So we saw a woman "walking" a standard poodle. Now I have a soft spot in my heart for the breed as I had one when I was a kid. He was energetic, too energetic. So energetic in fact that he had seizures, which is basically the last step in excitement before spontaneous combustion. This dog looked like he was on the edge of seizing. He was probably the worst behaved dog in all of London. And he was fruitlessly chasing squirrels while his owner yelled for him to behave like every other blessed dog on the island.

As we got closer to the woman and her dog, it became increasingly clear that the woman had a voice that was deep and resonant in a way that was at odds with her hyper-feminine outfit. Which was fine, trannies need to walk their dogs too. And a standard poodle seems pitch perfect, with its working dog function and its crazy flamboyant hair cut.

What ultimately let us catch up with the woman and her dog, was that the poodle had finally treed a squirrel. The dog's earlier efforts had been so manic and ineffectual that the squirrels had escaped with such thoroughness that even the poodle knew to give up and move on. But it had treed this one squirrel and was dead set on barking up this tree, forever. And as we got close enough to confirm our gendered suspicions we noticed something else.

The transvestite's dog was barking up the wrong tree.

Let that sink in.

Sometimes the universe provides. It presents you with a situation that you merely need to put into simple words. There is no work, no reframing, no setting up of subtle allusions, it's just a joke waiting to be stated.

¹I was in some perfect storm of negative cash flow at the time and was totally broke, but thats not really part of this story.

²I very distinctly remember my friend making this mistake, he distinctly remembers me doing it.