The TaxPoodle

I was born in the coastal town of Santa Monica and raised in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale. I am very proud to be a native Angeleno, though I now live 2 hours away in Palm Springs.

I spent the first five years of (young) adulthood as a Franciscan friar studying in the seminary to become a Catholic priest, but I abandoned that life-plan in my early twenties and set out to look for honest work. What I found was that Philosophy majors were in about as much demand as those who had focused their studies on the Elizabethan poetry of the Tudor period in England.

I did eventually land a job that turned into a 17-year career on the administrative side of the entertainment industry. But at the age of 40 I fell ill and nearly died from a neurological complication of HIV.

You could say that my mid-life crisis was an actual crisis!

Following a diagnostic brain surgery, I found myself disabled, in a wheelchair, and unable to work. So I left Los Angeles for good and moved to the desert, because that is what my people do.

I live with my human, a guy called Matt. I met him at a place called “the shelter,” a very scary place with cold hard cement floors to sleep on where those of us without humans live.

The shelter had been my only “home” after I was abandoned for what seemed like a lifetime. I dreamed of leaving the shelter with one of the humans that came to visit, which is all I wanted:  my own human – but none of them ever wanted me. I had a painful hernia poking out of my belly (which was really ugly) that was in need of surgery. The guards had determined I was a lost cause, so they scheduled me to be “put down.” But I got a last-minute reprieve when the Friends of the Palm Springs Animal Shelter rescued me, brought me to the desert, and paid for my surgery.

Meeting Matt – wow! that might never have happened but for an administrative mistake that listed me on the shelter’s website as available for adoption the day of my surgery; I was supposed to have at least ten days to recover first. Matt turned up after reading my story online, and insisted on seeing me the moment I got out of surgery. He convinced them it would be better for me to recuperate with him at his home, which is my home now too.