Image: The most well-designed, well-styled ’lost dog’ sign I have ever seen (photo by Paul Wertheimer)

Lest I be accused of being heartless, let me begin this blog post by saying that I grew up with a family dog, and we loved her. As the saying goes, “some of my best friends are…” Anyway, the above massive poster-sized sign has been distracting me since I first saw it plastered over two central parts of our canyon. I’d be talking to someone over coffee, deeply engrossed in conversation when suddenly behind their shoulder, there he was beckoning me: the lost dog in all his prestigious ascotted grandure–his signage representing all that is so utterly wrong with Los Angeles.

It is an unfortunate fact of life that people lose pets. It’s sad. The owners often go door-to-door in search of them, or they staple handmade signs up to telephone polls and on bulletin boards. They’re usually 8 1/2 by 11 pieces of paper often festooned with brightly colored crayon letters–some sad little kid or other lost their pet and is desperate to find him. But this behemoth sign–expensively–no doubt–and professionally printed with its perfect layout and photograph befitting of the cover of Dogue, just rubs me the wrong way.

I try and I try to focus on the LOVE that went into the act of bold desperation. Instead, I see a billboard, not unlike the barrage of intrusive billboards that accost me as I’m driving down the Sunset Strip. Only this one isn’t for Gucci or the latest George Clooney movie–however it’s equally intrusive as it rapes the otherwise unspoiled landscape with its subconsciously narcissistic, proprietary, ALL CAPS, red letters, exclamatory message: MY dog is the most important dog in this whole damned town!

I’m sure I’m exaggerating, considering I am currently reading the new Eckhart Tolle book, “A New Earth” (the latest self-help rage that literally EVERYONE is talking about). But something about this sign–though I’m sure it was well-intended–feels, to loosely quote Tolle, like a manifestation of “the collective egoic dysfunction of humanity.”

Now I hope of course that these folks, who I’m sure are perfectly nice, find their lost dog. And God bless the person who gets that juicy cash reward. But some of us Canyonites have been musing that perhaps a mutiny is afoot, and that the petite canine got tired of sporting that fashionable-yet-confining tie and went A.W.O.L. in search of his freedom…in search of a lost dog’s lost soul…something that, frankly, is starting to sound better and better to me.

Posted by Shana Ting Lipton