The first was taken roughly a month before my birthday at my university’s end-of-year luau. (To explain the facepaint and group shirtlessness, aside from being drunk I also performed a haka.) Though there is no explanation for the shirtlessness in the second picture, it was about 3 months into the experiment that was my third decade of existence, on the set of a short movie I was in. Somewhere in between I turned 20. Allegedly.

It’s strange seeing those earlier versions of myself, mostly because I still very much identify with them — stupid, goofy, shamelessly shirtless whenever the opportunity arises. Though I often feel guilty for not documenting my life in pictures as much as I maybe should, part of me is glad that these are the types of photos kicking around from my 20s. They’re microcosms of how most of my life was for me: wholly unserious, hopefully in a charming way, but at the very least an amusing one.

If 20 year old me could see me now at 30, I’m not sure what he’d think. He’d probably be let down in a lot of ways, expecting me to have accomplished more than I have. But that may be giving 20 year old me too much credit: he had more expectations than actual plans, and he had very few expectations. He was also, objectively, kind of an idiot.

And I did accomplish a fair bit in my 20s. I graduated from two universities. I traveled a lot, within America and around the world. I was in movies and on TV. I worked in politics, a hotel, an ice cream shop, a burger joint, and an Apple store. I taught every level from kindergarten to university. I performed on stages in New York and Honolulu. I wrote countless shitty paragraphs and eventually arrived at some decent ones. I read a lot.

I made relationships that challenge and inspire me and bring me joy. I became an uncle. I met an amazing woman and she Said Yes. We got a dog.

Somewhere in all of that, a subtle shift occurred. In a lot of ways I’m still fundamentally the same unserious goofy idiot I was 10 years ago, but more narrowly so. I have solid expectations now, and concrete plans to meet them. My ambitions aren’t distant echoes of empty barroom chest-pounding, nor are they frail whispers locked away in secrecy like flower petals encased in a diary. My future is simply a part of my daily routine, an existential teethbrushing and facewashing. I’m less begrudging of the weight of my dreams, more at ease with what I want out of life. I still want all the things I loved about my 20s — the traveling, the good times with people I love, the random experiences I luck into — but the immediate allocation of my time toward those things has changed. In a way, I guess, I’m more serious, which has proven to be its own kind of fun.

I’ll leave this here, with the last picture of me in my 20s. I didn’t want to take a new one just for the occasion — that seemed inorganic, and rarely do I ever think more of my face is needed in the world. Let the record show that this was taken twenty days prior to my 30s:

Here’s to all the things that will change in the next 10 years, and to all the things that will not.

(At least I’m wearing a shirt here.)

Getting scared taps into something deep within the heart of man. The pure, primal adrenaline of fear is still as powerful a motivator for us as it was for our ancestors struggling for survival on some distant simian savanna.

Embedded within that fear is a labyrinth of uncertainty, the same mystery of death that also imbues the mystery of life. One mystery threatens us, the other drives us towards a cliff of unanswerable questions. We fear what we don’t — or can’t — know: What is my purpose? What causes things to go bump in the night? Is there a real me? How did this Ouija board get back into my house after I threw it away?

Will my next decision result in a trick, or a treat?

These are tough questions. They lay dormant beneath each Halloween celebration, treacherous waters we navigate only with a compass of willfully distracted ignorance. As luck would have it, there is a light guiding us, a modern day Virgil for our Inferno of existential fear: A.J. Jenkins, singer/songwriter for KidsTV123 and poet laureate of all things spooky.

Jenkins himself is a mystery. Despite racking up over a billion YouTube views, nobody knows who he is or where he is. Only rumors persist, which is pretty spooky in and of itself. What little we know about the man, however, is counterbalanced by the ideational wealth he has left behind in the form of catchy jingles and spooky animated dances. Here, we will uncover the mystery of the man by treating his work with the philosophical and critical rigor it demands but so seldom receives. Let us start from the beginning.

1. Pumpkin Pumpkin (2010)

Our journey begins in 2010 with “Pumpkin Pumpkin.” This is the origin story of Jack O’Lantern, who will later become the central character in Jenkins’ epic tale.

It starts off with an ordinary pumpkin, endowed first with the gift of sight: “Let’s give you some eyes,” Jenkins croons, implying that whatever creator is responsible for endowing the pumpkin with life is a plurality. The pumpkin is then given a nose and a scary smile, completing its transformation into Jack O’Lantern.

Once the metamorphosis is complete, “the ghosts and the ghouls and the witches they will run a mile.” The thing to note here is that, in the hook, the perspective changes from second-person to first-person. At first, the soma of the pumpkin was the other, then it shifts mid-song to become the self: “I am a Jack O’Lantern,” he howls repeatedly to end the song, a Jack O’Lantern who will “chase the night away.”

The realization of self is the focal point of this origin story, and Jenkins intentionally blurs the lines between “other” and “self” in a nod to Descartes’ famous proposition that one exists only inasmuch as they are conscious. Do we therefore create ourselves through our consciousness, just as the pumpkin is a “you” before becoming the “me” of a Jack O’Lantern?

The implications are compelling, but ultimately there are more questions to ask than there are answers in this video. Plus this is one of the least spooky videos in the bunch.

2. Spooky Spooky (2012)

It took two tortured years for Jenkins to release his next video — the longest time between videos to date — but it was well-worth it. For his sophomore effort, Jenkins tapped into an aquifer of creative genius. “Spooky Spooky” exists in that rare intersection of artistic vision, critical acclaim, and popular success.

Here, Jenkins begins to fully realize the scope of his spooky universe — his Spookiverse, so to speak. On top of the witches and ghosts and ghouls from the previous video, new fiends emerge: monsters, vampires, ghosts, black cats, spiders, and skeletons. The kicker: buried in the midst of those characters is our old friend Jack O’Lantern. In “Pumpkin Pumpkin,” Jack O’Lantern scares away the evildoers with his scary smile, but here he is dancing a spooky dance alongside them. Is he a hero, or a villain? It’s a fascinating question that digs into the fractured nature of man.

The chorus asks the question “what kind of spooky thing are you?” This ultimately poses the question of whether or not there’s a difference between us and the things we fear, or if our inability to recognize the monsters lurking in the darkness within ourselves is the root of our fears. If we are to accept, as “Pumpkin Pumpkin” posits, that we are reflected in the Jack O’Lantern — that we create ourselves through conscious thought and rid ourselves of our fears by embracing them — then this duality of self is congruous with the contradictory identity of Jack O’Lantern.

“Spooky Spooky” is arguably Jenkins’ crowning achievement, a true masterclass of the power of artistic thought. And of course, the spooky dance is sure to chill the core of even the most hardened Halloween heavyweight.

3. Too Spooky For Me (2013)

It’s no easy feat to follow a hugely successful piece, but Jenkins proves his place in the pantheon of this generation’s great artists in his 2013 follow-up, “Too Spooky For Me.”

The video places us in an unknown house of supremely spooky ambiance. Ominously, a suit of armor stands guard as a fire burns. We soon find out this fire is not simply a source of warmth on a cold Halloween night; it’s the home of the fire monster, a terrifying beast who smiles as flames rage around it.

The fiends from the previous videos are no longer just doing their spooky dance — they’re inhabiting our world in increasingly aggressive ways. A monster and a witch hold hands as they levitate and disappear, and the ghost coming down the stairs is absolutely menacing. New unnamed monsters join in on the haunting, including one lurking under the stairs and a blood-red winged creature in the window. This is Jenkins at his most stylish and polished.

Yet in spite of the flare, Jenkins doesn’t lose his sight of the greater implications of horror. Jack O’Lantern mockingly covers his eyes as Jenkins wails “I can’t look, it’s much too spooky for me,” further blurring his role. Is he here to protect us, or is he here to spook us? When Jenkins sings that he would “rather not know” what is scaring him, it builds off of his previously-established ideas that we would rather embrace our ignorance than face our fears.

With a focus on setting and action, this is a worthy followup to “Spooky Spooky,” and a classic in its own right. If this is too spooky for you, no one will blame you.

4. It’s Halloween (2014)

As brilliant as “Spooky Spooky” was, and as perfect as “Too Spooky For Me” was, “It’s Halloween” is unquestionably Jenkins’ magnum opus.

The mood takes center stage here, opening with a hauntingly muffled organ as Jenkins sings “It’s that spooky time of year again…The night is dark and all is quiet.” Indeed, it’s Halloween. It is Jenkins’ most dramatic effort yet.

He is no longer building the Spookiverse. As any true artist knows, there comes a time when you must divorce yourself from the art itself. Here, Jenkins lets his creation run free in the Spookiverse. He shakes up their world like a snowglobe and sits back to see what happens. Zombies and mummies make their first appearances in the series, as well.

Most notably, Jack O’Lantern makes a triumphant return. The chorus brings hope — and clarity — in the form of the pumpkin we met so many years ago: “Don’t be scared,” Jenkins insists, because Jack O’Lantern is going to chase away all of the fiends in the Spookiverse. Why? “So you can play your game.” Finally, we see Jack O’Lantern for what he truly is: protector of the game. The game, of course, is Trick or Treat. Or, as most of us call it, life, for what is life if not a series of tricks and treats?

It’s not all hopeful, though. Implicit in the chorus is the idea that the monsters will return, which is why Jack O’Lantern will chase them all away “if they come back again.” This is a powerful statement on the resilience of evil, for as long as man lives, the evil inside of us will continue to manifest into reality.

Jenkins returns to his philosophical ruminations when he says that it is “time to put your costume on.” If we refuse to face the monsters within, why not project them through our outward appearance for all to see? When he dares us to “see if [we] can scare someone,” he is stitching back to lyrics from “Spooky Spooky,” when he asks us what kind of spooky thing we are.

Most unique about this video, however, are the religious overtones. Jack O’Lantern sacrifices himself to spook away those who would spook us. If this is not a clear enough parallel to Christ, then having Jack O’Lantern ascend off the screen should leave no doubt.

The video ends by listing all the characters up until now. This is an homage to the original sin, whereupon man learned the knowledge of good and evil. Yet as the previous videos suggest, the line between the two is still blurry, as the capacity for both exist within each of us. More than anything, it’s a dare. Do you, viewer, know which of these fiends is good and which is evil? If not, are we still in Eden? It’s also worth noting that Jack O’Lantern, the Alpha and Omega, is listed last.

There’s a thin line between genius and madness. Jenkins, you crazy for this one. But you’re also, without question, a genius.

5. Halloween (2015)

All good things must come to an end.

Three bona fide classics in a row, in any artistic medium, is a remarkable achievement. In Jenkins’ 2015 video, simply titled “Halloween,” the strains of his success start to show.

Visually, lyrically, and conceptually, “Halloween” is plain and derivative. Monsters do spooky dances, disappear and reappear, and Jenkins tells us their names again. WE KNOW THEIR NAMES, A.J., YOU TAUGHT US LAST YEAR.

Sometimes the weight of success can start to wear down on the artist, pressuring them into thinking they have to keep topping their previous efforts. This video reeks of artistic insecurity. Jack O’Lantern, who is further clarified as a guardian who “lights the way until you’re safe at home again” is the “only light you see” on Halloween — other than the moon. Comparing Jack O’Lantern to the celestial body of night is crude and contrived, a painfully obvious metaphor that is below Jenkins’ craftsmanship. Though the subtlety of his allegorical and poetic musings were certainly lost on some, there was no need to be so overt here. Art works best as a mirror when we don’t even realize that it is a mirror we’re looking into. Jenkins proved he is more than capable of achieving such nuance.

If the viewer weren’t so relieved by the video’s end, the echo effect when Jenkins says “Happy Halloween” would be delightfully spooky. Simply put, “Halloween” is devoid of both ambition and adequate spookiness.

6. Halloween Night (2016)

Disastrous.

Following the critical flop of “Halloween,” Jenkins makes the common artistic mistake of inserting himself too much in the narrative: “I went out on Halloween night,” Jenkins announces, “what did I see?” He then proceeds to count various objects he saw during his night out.

Aside from the relentlessly un-spooky melody, Jenkins makes several strategic errors. First, he counted upwards. One Jack O’Lantern, then two bats flying in the sky, then…the audience stops caring. We get it, A.J., you can count. The implications of a countdown are far spookier, and given the importance of Jack O’Lantern in the Spookiverse, it was foolish to start with him instead of end with him. Jack O’Lantern was given the correct number, but the wrong order.

The accompanying descriptions for the fiends were a nice touch, all things considered. Witches are wicked, ghosts are scary, skeletons dance and zombies are — you guessed it — zany. Another strategic error arises, however, when spiders are adorned with the word “spooky.” This is the franchise word, and spiders are, at best, tertiary characters in the Spookiverse. Unless given to Jack O’Lantern, the word “spooky” should have been off-limits.

Ultimately, “Halloween Night” was cliched and structured in a tiresome format. It comes off as a Halloween version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” This is Halloween, A.J., we need original contributions, not cheap knock-offs of Christmas carols.

Jenkins ends strong, letting the words “What did I see?” linger in your memory while the viewer sees a path forward through a thorny thicket. Poetic touch, but too little too late

7. Spooky Time (2017)

“Spooky Time” is a return to form and a breath of fresh air for the series. A true artist can achieve profound effect by simply painting a picture. No exposition or explanation is needed if the feeling comes across. This is how Jenkins succeeds after two forgettable years.

Jenkins experiments with his voice in “Spooky Time” more than in any of his previous videos. When Jenkins begs “please someone tell me why are the skeletons dancing?” you feel the earnest hopelessness in his inquiry. During the bridge, three ghosts approach singing “ooooooh,” and when they reach maximum spookiness, they snap into an “ah!” Jenkins seems free here, perhaps liberated from his own fear of failure after releasing several critical darlings in a row.

Jenkins also doesn’t shy away from the existential philosophies that defined his previous work: “All around the neighborhood, everybody’s playing trick or treat. Dressed up in Halloween costumes, Jack O’Lantern’s lighting up the street.” This is a powerful amalgamation of his ideas, that trick or treat is a distillation of life, and Jack O’Lantern — a reflection of our power for good amid the suffocating darkness of the world — is both a participant in and a savior from the spookiness of Halloween.

Werewolves roam free in gardens and zombies claim roofs as their own. This is spooky stuff no doubt, but spooking the viewer is not the only purpose for such imagery. Jenkins continues: “Though I can’t be certain, I think my next door neighbor is a vampire.” Here, the spooky house from previous videos sits adjacent to a regular house. It’s been there the whole time, just as the monsters within us have been there the whole time — on our roofs, in our gardens. We diffuse our fears by projecting them on to our neighbors, but ultimately it is a reflection of what we fear in ourselves. Though this can certainly be interpreted as an indictment on the current wave of American nationalism infecting our politics, Jenkins smartly avoids any overt polemics.

Jenkins also expands into new territory. Spooky time isn’t a specific time. Time itself is spooky — every moment. The time on the watch changes as the face changes. Both the hour and minute hands move back in time; the only thing scarier than the present moment is our inability to free ourselves of our pasts, which continue to haunt us in the present. Implicit here is the failure of the previous two videos, unquestionably a result of the artistic strain Jenkins felt from the mounting pressure to deliver classics every year. In “Spooky Time,” he is announcing that those failures are behind him, as is his fear of failure itself.

In the video, Jenkins asserts that witches laughing, creepies crawling and black cats calling are “the spookiest sight.” While those images are certainly spooky, I disagree with Mr. Jenkins. The spookiest sight will be the day that Halloween comes and goes without any new videos. Now more than ever, the voice, animation, and artistic imagination of A.J. Jenkins are needed.

When I first started dating my fiancé, before we had a dog, we discussed this hypothetical: if a dog that belonged to you and a human stranger were hanging in peril, and you only had the time and ability to save one of them, which is more deserving of rescue? At the time, I made a logically-framed argument, maintaining that humanity is fundamentally more valuable than the life of any other animal, that a person is capable of producing so much more good in the world than a dog is, and that the risk of the stranger being a complete monstrosity of a person after being saved from impending death would be minimal compared to the odds that he or she would be a valuable contributor to society. Her rebuttal: just wait until you get a dog.

I waited. We got a dog. She was right.

Not only would I now save my dog without so much as a flinching hesitation, I’d probably save a stranger’s dog before I’d save the stranger. Sure, having a dog of my own has helped change my mind, but there’s more to it than that. An honest inspection of humanity yields a much stronger argument. Dogs are better students of character than humans — they bark at those worth barking at, offer their belly to those deserving of intimacy — which begs the assumption that perhaps they are simply better than people.

The problem is, I know humans. I am one. If you’re reading this, good chance you are, too, and have been one for a while now. We’ve spent more time around humans than any other creature, and we should be proud of our species. Humans have done a lot of incredible, awesome things. But just like there’s a sour taste in your mouth whenever your mom compares you to your over-achieving cousin who went to Yale on an oboe scholarship, there’s something fleeting, unsatisfying, even anger-inducing about those great feats and accomplishments — especially when they’re not really yours.

It’s not that the geniuses and marvels of humanity aren’t deserving of recognition, but those are the astronomically few needles in the hayfields of our otherwise humdrum history. Most people suck, yet as a species the accomplishments of the few justify an exorbitant smugness in the many, as if our ability to send emails implies a latent genius inside of us that other people actually had in order to develop that technology in the first place.

People are dishonest, greedy, selfish, manipulative — a specific litany of words and expressions that are endemic to describing ourselves and ourselves only. If dogs have any knock against them, it’s that they are too enamored with their immediate, impulsive desires. And really, isn’t that considered a tragically admirable human trait? Can you hold it against a dog if it is so passionately enthralled with life that it doesn’t listen, or if it is so fanatically loyal to its owners that it barks at everyone else? Those sound like de facto job interview responses: “My biggest weaknesses? I work too hard! I care too much! I’m a perfectionist!” Only it’s no treacle with dogs; they’re the same with or without the promise of a treat. The only human comparison that comes close is a young child, but they eventually grow up and out of their earnestness. Dogs don’t.

I remember vividly the day our dog Thor came home. The man who sold him to us insisted he was 10 weeks old, but when I first held the fuzzy palm-sized potato in a single hand, I doubted he was older than six. He was the runt of his litter, and the last to go because of it. Being the youngest of four brothers, I felt a kinship with him. “I don’t care if your brothers are playing on the varsity basketball team,” I whispered, “I’ll go to all of your JV games.” Thor is my first dog, and though I’ve interacted with plenty of other dogs in my day, it’s not the same as when you own one. For the record, I cringe at the thought of “owning” a dog, especially since Thor is a dachshund, and anyone who has cohabited with a dachshund knows that the picture of who-owns-who becomes pretty unclear pretty quickly. But he’s not mine the way that my computer or books are mine; he’s mine like how my fiancé, or my parents and brothers are mine.

Anthropomorphism aside, I know Thor understands me when I tell him to quit barking, or to stop chewing whatever it is he’s chewing, but instead of following orders like a “good dog,” he looks up at me, pauses, tilts his head, and continues whatever he’s doing while staring me in the eye. My thumping footsteps follow, causing him to belly-up and tuck his paws neatly into his chest — a tried-and-true method to instantaneously absolve him of any wrongdoing, transforming his punishment from a scolding to a belly rub. I’m tempted to say Thor has learned nothing, but he has. He’s learned how to tow me around on a leash, his undeniable cuteness the strings to my marionette.

Prior to becoming an uncle, the baby pictures of friends and relatives were beginning to mound into one generic visage. See one baby and you’ve seen them all. My niece Esther, though — she’s something else. I still couldn’t tell her face apart from any other baby, but I’ve spent enough time with her to distinguish her from her diapered peers through her behavior. Child-rearing feels to me like reality television or romance novels; not something I see myself getting into, but I get the appeal. To watch that cute little blob of a person forge the first signs of a personality, or to see her display the Herculean resilience of learning the tricks of bipedalism, it’s easy to catch the fever. The unbridled curiosity of a child is moving. Even her tantrums, sporadic as they may be, wear a certain charm. I’m sure my brother and sister-in-law don’t quite share the enthusiasm the rest of the family does when we see those little tear droplets scale the curvature of her chubby baby cheeks, but to us, she can do no wrong. She is too cute to hold even the most pungent of diapers against her.

No example of our willful ignorance towards babies is stranger than what you will find if you search the internet for 3 words: “cute,” “baby,” and “poop.” Countless videos pop up of babies shifting seamlessly from giggling to clenching, with faceless “oohs” and “awwws” audible behind the cameras. Human feces usually only exists as disgusting and/or funny. Apparently, our species is high enough on oxytocin to graft a third offshoot of “cute” when it comes to babies. I pray that caveat never extends to adults.

While I haven’t heard anyone describe Esther’s poop as cute (or at all, for that matter, which leads me to believe she’s hiding something), our family is no less innocent of being intentionally revisionist when it comes to her less attractive qualities. Esther’s charming baby flaws, to us, will one day become the headaches of someone else. I know from experience.

I had taught elementary and middle school for a number of years by the time Esther was born, and the contrast was jarring. Every day I worked with a classroom full of someone’s precious little angel. Being around them — playing with them, teaching them, herding them and shooing them around the school — was the single most effective form of contraception. Singed in my memory is one student in particular. Let’s call him Derek.

Derek was the nightmare of the school. Within seconds of being escorted into the classroom ala Hannibal Lecter, he would grab the closest object he could find and forcibly introduce it to the closest person he could find. This sort of hyper-aggression made it so he couldn’t be left unattended for even a moment. After the previous teacher quit, I was appointed as his shadow. One day, in the middle of class, he informed us that he had to use the bathroom by swiftly up-and-leaving. I followed, waiting outside the bathroom, having previously been warned that I was a male working at an elementary school, and all it would take was a single accusation to ruin my life forever.

Derek unzipped his pants and dropped them to his ankles before entering the stall, looking back with a smile and a laugh as he showed me his naked buttocks. “Derek,” I scolded, “do your business, please.” I heard the crack of the toilet seat as it was whipped down, and shortly after, a deep sploosh. Everything seemed to be in order. Then I heard another splash, but something was off about it. It wasn’t a single-drop, rather more of a person learning to swim kind of splash, like a kid kicking in a pool while holding a mini-flotation board. My first thought was that he was blowing out his anus in some grotesque way, so I stepped in to make sure he was fine. What I saw was truly, hauntingly unforgettable: Derek, having successfully fished out his freshly-plopped turd, was mid-chew with a smile on his face. It quickly faded into a look of horror. It was the first time I felt comprehensively helpless as a teacher, utterly confused about professional protocol. I slapped the log out of his hand as he started to spray the stall with whatever was coming out of his mouth, vowing to never have children as the pitch of his banshee-shriek ascended.

When asked when we’re planning on taking the pregnancy plunge, my fiancé and I always joke that we already have a kid, he’s just covered in fur. The rehearsed follow-up is to note that dogs, unlike kids, can legally undergo ownership that would be deemed negligent for humans. When we go to work, Thor stays behind in our apartment to fend for himself, kept company by toys and knots made from old socks tied together. Try telling a woman fresh out of the pregnancy ward to do the same with her child.

Beyond that, though, Thor is everything anyone could ever want in a child. He’s always excited to see us, never stops loving us, and is adorable even when he is at his most annoying. I’ve taught too many kids, for too long, to be convinced that any child is as reliably well-behaved as Thor. Watching him do “people things” is no less adorable than when an infant does “adult things.” Even when Thor’s behavior is the same as my niece Esther’s — or even Derek’s, for that matter — we still bestow a sense of pure innocence upon pets that humans aren’t afforded past the age of five or so. Or, until they begin eating their own shit, in which case they have irrevocably forfeited it.

We had to move apartments a while ago, and the overnight change of scenery got to Thor. A few days went by where we noticed that his food wasn’t making it out the other end. He ate a little bit, but he spent more time poking at his food with his long nose, retiring to his warm spot under the couch shortly after. Even when we made him chicken, his favorite, he seemed uninterested after a few bites. At night, he would suddenly leap up from his usual position wedged between our heads, jump to the floor, and start throwing up.

Naturally, we took him to the vet. Everything checked out, but we knew he wasn’t fine. After three days that seemed like a constipated eternity, he finally sloshed one out. A maniacal celebration ensued; we were dancing and singing about sloppy dogshit on the floor. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it was cute, but it was definitely not as disgusting as it probably should have been. I’m just thankful that Thor didn’t attempt to eat it. That would have really tested the boundaries of my ability to look past his flaws and love him unconditionally. Yet that’s a limit that doesn’t exist in Thor’s beautiful, perfectly simple world.

That’s the whole point: even though my love for Thor is a deep aquifer, somewhere, at some point, it has a bedrock. I’ve earned my fair share of glares from onlookers who watch while I allow Thor to lick my face. As far as I can tell, it’s his way of showing his love (or that he enjoys whatever crumbs are hiding on my face), and I kiss him right back; I’m one of those people. Still, if I see Thor lick himself, let’s say, inappropriately (see: on his dick), best believe I’m not letting him near my face until he’s chewed down a couple of those green minty toothbrush treats. There’s a point where my willingness to accept his affection hits a snag. There are circumstances where I will reject him, however infrequent, insignificant, or innocuous they may be, but no such point exists from his end. No matter what I’ve done, no matter where my hands and lips have been, he eagerly invites them to pet and kiss.

Dogs are lucky, if anything, to not live within the boundaries that we constantly navigate. Social norms of working routines, interpersonal expectations, even hygiene fence us in and away from truly existing — for better and for worse. Of course it’s a good thing that we don’t struggle for daily survival, lick our genitals to keep them clean, or shit on the floor — those are easily defensible evolutionary developments. What I’m not so sure about is our insistence on schedules and busyness; our capitulation to and adulation of ambition; our servile obsession with the rat-race; our distinctions of normal, acceptable, tolerable — and all their opposites — in any facet of the modern human life.

It’s not that we necessarily want to subject ourselves to such confines, we’ve just reached the point of no relapse. We’ve erected unshakeable walls that herd us into a mass, shared collusion. Even when we want to escape them, we can’t. They exist because of our inability to reconcile the logical orderliness of our evolved states with our basic, animal instincts. It’s a fundamentally human paradox, our modern Scylla and Charybdis.

The societal fabric that we have contrived is an unprecedented feat of organization and cohabitation. As a species, we’ve fine-tuned the spatial mechanics of living between buildings next to other people living between buildings, everyone complicit in general unspoken principles of putting up with each other’s sights, smells and sounds. Somewhere along the line, between property-line fences and neighboring walls, invisible structures of social behavior and public decorum grew to enclose us similarly, to the point we can’t manage our most primal tendencies inside its walls. Our macro, species-wide engineering is fascinating, if for nothing more than the fact we’ve built something too big for us to naturally operate within.

It sounds obvious, but the fact that we need to tame ourselves is exactly why we do it. We have our social awnings and enclosures because we can’t completely shake the perfidious bloodlust writhing inside of us somewhere, and even though most of us know better than to rip our clothes off and spring on each other — or bark at strangers passing by, or unceremoniously thrust our faces into our food, or impulsively snatch things we want upon seeing them — those rules keep us in line just in case. It’s why I can’t leave the door open when I go to work, lest Thor becomes too distractedly excited by the sights and sounds of the world that he bolts into the middle of the street and gets hit by a bus. For all the charms his simple love of life holds, it’s not worth the risk. So we shut the door when we leave. He may not subscribe to our social-behavioral structures, but he’s bound by our physical ones whether he likes it or not.

Dogs are man’s best friend because they’re man’s best mirror. To see a dog so earnestly happy — to play, to eat good food, to run outside — is to relive the sincerity of childhood. That isn’t to endow dogs with infallibility, because they can certainly be the opposite. The same can be said of any child, too. The point isn’t that dogs or children are perfect, it’s that their imperfections are unequivocally honest. Adulthood, along with the social confines that dictate it, eliminates that purity. We’ve told ourselves that we should know better, that we shouldn’t act like children. We’ve grown up. But really, what is more childish than a persistent desire to be a grown-up?

People have built a lot. Ceilings intercept walls while doors and windows convince us that these are rooms we spend our lives in. I don’t doubt that these structures keep us safe, keep us alive even, but I do worry about what we have left outside. Sometimes, I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to chase the sunlight into the outside world, tongue out in the wind as it sweeps past us, to dash across the street even if we risk getting hit. I have to believe that it’s better than waiting inside for someone to open the door.