I want a mulligan. Hit rewind. I didn’t ask for this next chapter. Fuck the universe. Most of my family was taken in minutes. Those dogs deserved a dignified ending in my arms at the end of a natural life. I’m peering around for silver linings.
My dear friend Steve Guy wrote on Facebook for me:
IN MOURNING TODAY
Early this morning (January 18) around 8:00 AM, Joe Hayden was returning from a veterinary visit to the house on Wellfleet in Glen Cove, Vallejo, when he saw indications of a house fire. The house went up in smoke and flames and it looks like most of the interior burned or has smoke damage. Despite having access to the yard we assume the fire blocked the dogs’ exit or confused them. Joe and his neighbor, Jeanette, who was traveling with Joe at the time, attempted to rescue the dogs, but they were unable to get past the fire.
FIVE of the 7 dogs passed away from smoke inhalation.
Cappy, Matty, Pancho, Polar and Snowball passed away from smoke inhalation.
Peaches and Snoopy escaped. Peaches has been returned to her original family. Snoopy and Joe will be staying at Greg and Steve’s until Joe can figure out insurance claims and other details. The house is not inhabitable and it will be months until repair and restoration can make it livable again.
January 18, 2024, is the worst day of my life because I was not there to protect five innocents who could not speak for themselves or understand the danger. It was the worst day of my life because I could not see it coming and say goodbye like I did with other pets and even my own family members who had illnesses before they passed away.
I have asked people who want to do something to give to HSNB.org/donate in memory of the Hayden Dogs that perished while I was out helping my friend and neighbor Jeannette take two foster dogs to get neutered.
My house was on fire twelve hours after I attended a meeting on (wild) fire prevention as President of our community Association. I’m staying at the home of very close friends nearby. Shando flew back for a few days from Las Vegas, where he now lives. Snoopy, my surviving dog, is with me. The other surviving dog was already intended to be returned to her family of origin this weekend. I’m glad I did not have to devastate them with notification of a sixth death. That morning of the fire Shando was gone, so his trauma differs from mine. I already applied to lease the house next door to our home as it has been on the market. My neighbors, including the retired fire chief who lives immediately across from me and his wife and so many others on my block and the cul de sac behind me, have been incredible through the process, and I have friends who are claims adjusters and renovation experts. I’m being inundated by the Vallejo community’s generosity and emotional support. I suspect my homeowner’s insurance will be comparable to what my mother had and help me rebuild, so it’s taking me some mental adjustment to say yes to having people bring me physical things as I am fixated on mourning the souls lost.
This is literally the sixth fire my family has suffered in my life.
Three of them were on base in an apartment building on Governor’s Island when I was a military brat. The apartment across the hall, with adjoining walls, had a pyromaniac kid. We had to evacuate down the stairs from the 11th floor three times into the cold New York nights.
One of the fires was on Staten Island New York in an adjacent townhouse when my daughter was an infant. Infuriatingly a man with emphysema fell asleep while continuing to smoke and almost killed us all from one floor beneath us, which partly explains my passion for tobacco control).
Then there was my mother’s fluorescent garage light from the 1950’s causing her home to be destroyed in 2016. My mother, brother, and nephew moved in with Shando and me at that point and my poor mother was diagnosed and died of ovarian cancer within a few months before the house could even be restored. There’s a lot more to that tragic story, but my point is that I’m now a veteran of going through the long and arduous process of a rebuild/renovation.
Because of all of this history, I specifically remembered turning off and unplugging appliances as I did ROUTINELY when I left at 5:30 am that morning of January 18, 2024. I did not allow open flames in my house and I had close calls with my daughter scorching the blinds with her curling iron when she was a teenager. If anyone fears being in another fire, it’s me. In none of those fires did I lose a single soul, though, because my mother’s death was NOT related to the fire in her house.
I dedicate countless hours to saving these creatures from an untimely death, so I can’t help but feel I let them down. Yes I know I gave them good lives, which is well documented. I’m looking for silver linings and I hope some things will improve in time. Shando and I are very lucky to be physically unscathed, although I do have some injuries from throwing garden furniture into one of the sliding doors and trying with neighbors to extinguish the back deck before the firemen got there.
My babies died, I’m told by the fire inspector after an extensive investigation, because of a bad extension cord (officially an accident so Shando and I can slow down on beating ourselves up with guilt) connected to a RECLINING COUCH that was only two years old.
Many of you know how much I love my home and garden. I post extensively on my blog and even toyed with the idea of having my garden in the Vallejo Garden Tour one year. The loss of the material things, including many sentimental items from my parents and grandparents that survived my mom’s own fire in Hayward eight years ago, is gone, but it is my innocent loving canines (mostly seniors and one five-year-old and two of whom were BLIND) who deserved a more dignified ending and certainly with me there with them. Thank FUCK they only suffered inhalation. I made a point to look at their bodies in the chaos and none of them were burned. A local veterinarian apparently agreed to cremate them all for free while I was still in a daze after some confusion. I think one of my amazing neighbors negotiated that on the spot.
There are many more details I’m missing, but I wanted to get some information out.
PLEASE remember to give to HSNB.org site in MEMORY of the HAYDEN FIVE – Capulet, Snowball, Pancho, Polar, and Matty.
View from above the hill that my friend and neighbor took that morning.
I’m a broken man with five family members lost. Our babies did not deserve to die. I believe it was a six-alarm fire. We are overwhelmed with the community’s generosity and we’re working together to help one another through this loss. Our love for our family and each other cannot be denied no matter what happens, but for now, if there isn’t something specific that you can do for us and if you want to do something, helping other homeless dogs and cats would mean so much to us.
This is my friend Barbara and me with the two miracle survivors, Peaches and Snoopy:
Today is a grim 33rd anniversary of my father dying at age fifty from a painful, elongated death from his tobacco/nicotine addiction. I’m planning to write extensively about the gory details at some juncture. Like so many in countless families, my dad was gone too soon. Handed loose cigarettes while growing up in Hawaii at age 12, little did he know that he would grow up to die at the same young age that his mother would.
My dad and me:
At 55 I can safely say that my siblings and I have ensured that the “family tradition” of being addicted to nicotine and dying at 50 does not continue with us, since we remember how he suffered firsthand. Thankfully none of our kids smoke, but that doesn’t mean they were not targeted. They are definitely surrounded by their peers who have now normalized vaping in front of others. I am proud to be working harder than ever with my activism, one which was triggered when Dad died. I could think of no more noble cause at the time I entered law school than to save as many lives as I could, but Big Tobacco is still trying to addict new generations with vapes, even having the audacity to suggest they are smoking cessation devices! If that’s the case, why do some e-cigarettes have the equivalent of 400 cigarettes?
The biggest drug dealers in the world are making profits off of 22% of the WORLD population. Does this CARTEL deserve that? How many needless, preventable early deaths will they be responsible for throughout history? There is no depth to which this one industry will go, and yet it continues to prosper off the blood money of our families and now our youth. Big Tobacco is the enemy. Ask me how you can help.
Can you even tell which of these are vape pens? Neither can parents or teachers when they are consumed IN CLASS.
It’s a sad day in our home. We lost our most senior dog, Timber, who was well over 18. Several days ago she must have had a stroke. Suddenly, she was no longer able to use her hind legs, so we said goodbye to her this morning after making her as comfortable as we could in her remaining hours.
Some of you may recall that she survived cancer over six years ago, at which point we thought we’d just have a matter of weeks or months of palliative care, but the surgery to remove the huge tumor from her leg was a success. Indeed, she thrived right up until very recently.
We’re happy we were able to give her a much longer life than she would have had when my sister’s in-laws were stricken with their own immense health issues about seven years ago. There had been talk among those extended family members of “taking her to the pound,” to which I said, “Hell no…not on my watch.” I had known her from various holiday gatherings since she was just a puppy. We are so grateful to have so many pictures and videos of her from many vacations and trips to beaches and parks these past seven years.
In hindsight, this video of her tongue acting like this at the beginning of September might have been a sign of her having a stroke, cute as it is:
Here are pictures of some of Timber’s last days. We put bells on her collar so we could hear and find her when she wandered off to strange parts of the house and yard.
More commonly known as “Monte,” the Capulet (Cappy) to his Montague is now without her counterpart.
Born in Friant, California (near Fresno), I had this amazingly athletic dog pretty much his entire life, which was more than 15 years, except for the first few weeks. He was extraordinary in many ways.
He went on countless vacations and beaches with me from Seattle to San Diego. He also traveled to Phoenix and many other places inland over the years. For the first three years of his life, he was the only dog I had, and he loved it that way.
I have footage of him pulling blackberries into his mouth with his paw.
He would dive into any body of water to chase a tennis ball, a feat he learned watching my friends’ big dogs in Oakland. Many people asked me what kind of dog he was emerging with a ball in his mouth he had retrieved from the bay, the pool, the lake, the river, etc.
Upon returning from vacation yesterday, Monte did not respond to our entering the home as he normally would have, with elation and energy. Upon re-investigating his difficulty eating and inviting our mobile veterinarian over, we found a huge splenic tumor in our 15-year-old Yorkie. An emergency 24-hour trip later resulted in a confirmation that there was nothing operable and even if it was benign, it was pressing on his major organs. He had lost 50% of his body mass in just the last few months, despite medications to stimulate his appetite and quite a variety of changes in the food we prepared to appeal to him.
In 2008 I implored my daughter to go to a shelter to find a dog, not even knowing what I now know about the transactional problems with going to a breeder. She was hellbent that she wanted a male Yorkshire Terrier. I was basically bribing her with the dog of her choice to move to California where I’m from after raising her in New York, where she was born. I desperately missed her the year she went to high school in New Jersey near her mom. Before that, I had always had primary custody of my daughter, so I was willing to bend my principles to get her back. She did a lot of research and seemed very sure of what she wanted, probably because she saw some celebrity with a Yorkie.
So Monte started out technically as her dog. I wasn’t naive, so I knew it was quite likely I’d be taking more responsibility, and that was fine, as she bounced around the country after getting out of high school. I joked all this time that she just wanted him for a Myspace photo op. A week after she got him, I took over the potty training and everything else, and my daughter assisted for a while.
He was probably in a lot of pain these past few weeks, although he hid it. We’re so glad he survived our being gone that week. One of our amazing dog-sitters said he waited for us. The tumor could have burst at any point with a blunt hit or fall in hindsight, and that would be disastrously painful. Ironically, I was invited to my first online pet loss support group today, but I decided it would not be healthy for me to join minutes after he was put to rest, which turned out to be the timing that was convenient for the mobile veterinarian.
Ironically our 18-year-old Pomeranian-Chihuahua mix has really bounced back and we were worried about leaving for vacation with her being ill about a month ago. Her fur is now once again lustrous, and she’s gained some weight, eating heartily daily and still quite ambulatory. One never knows with these things. She herself survived cancer at least six years ago when a huge tumor was removed from her leg.
Below are the last video and pictures I took of this tough little guy. You cannot tell how skeletal he is because he has fur, but he was indeed emaciated and his eyes were glossed over. He moves slowly and it was hard to keep him hydrated and fed. He could not even go up a single step and mostly had to lay around in his last days. I’m sure it was uncomfortable for such a normally frenetic animal. He had hardly ever even been ill in all of his days. In these he is on my desk while I work so I could be as close to him as possible and keep an eye on him.
Today makes seven years since I lost my mom to fucking cancer (ovarian). She was only 73, so she would have been 80 this December. I was named after my mother, Giuseppina, and she was named after my Nonno, Giuseppe. I was a huge momma’s boy. We spoke all day in chat when I was at work for YEARS, not to mention at least a few calls a day even when she was visiting Italy or I was living on the East Coast.
The guy with the beer in the picture below is my dad, of course. We lost him way too early from his smoking. He was only 50, so my mom was widowed at age 47. Both my parents died before one of their own parents, so I had the most unfortunate duty of consoling my Nonna (in my mom’s case) and my grandfather (in my dad’s case) over the loss of their offspring. Continents and decades apart, I heard them both scream about how it should have been them instead.
I met Jonathan somewhere online when he first moved to New York City around 2001. He was immediately engaging on several levels, including intellectually. We both really liked each other and became friends, reasoning that our age difference was probably too big to seriously consider dating, although we would both end up dating people with a broader age range as the years went on. The important thing is that we always remained friends.
This is the hunk I first chatted with in the early 2000’s.
When I first met him I was living in Park Slope, Brooklyn and he was on Roosevelt Island, of all places. He was originally from Iowa but moved to Chicago for a while. He worked in accounting/bookkeeping and always seemed to be advancing and making pretty good money doing payroll in the entertainment industry. At least that was the best that I could surmise. Years later he would do the bookkeeping for my own business, Ursinet. He really knew his stuff!
This was one of the first pictures I ever saw of him, which reminds me of his intellectual side.
He later informed me that he had found a roommate situation about three blocks from me in Brooklyn, which was thrilling. I don’t know if I was part of his incentive to move to that hip area, but it certainly facilitated our hanging out more and seeing each other all the time. He actually moved into the apartment immediately above the restaurant my daughter and I loved most on a quiet street, so we often met to eat there.
In NYC Jonathan center and me on the right in March 2005.
He seemed very comfortable with travel, having gone to visit his friend Chris in Ireland a number of times, and with his German language. We spent time as friends going to New Hope, Pennsylvania, hanging out in New York City and he always had interesting stories to tell, including the time when he was on a reality TV show where he dated a guy. I never got to see it, but I found his description of that date and some of the other ones he went on, very entertaining. One time in particular he told me about this guy who blogged about his excitement in anticipation of dating Jonathan and then, despite what Jonathan described as an objectively interesting and stimulating date, continued blogging almost immediately after his disappointment, seemingly for sympathy and click bait (long before that term was coined). Jonathan immediately left comments on the blog to the surprise of the blogger and then the drama ensued.
What a smile!
Jonathan visited me a few times after I moved back to California because he was good at staying in touch. He would stay with me when he visited. When he told me of his intention to move out to San Francisco himself, I was thrilled. It was great to spend time with him about once a month or so these past ten years or so. I know he really appreciated a lot about living on the West Coast and that he was professionally thriving in a city where it can be a challenge just to stay afloat. In a way, it was very flattering that he kind of moved to my area TWICE, but that’s how good a friend he was.
Looking closer at this picture today I see that he appears to be sitting on garbage bags somewhere in Europe
Unfortunately, some of his interactions with others were less than optimal. I’m sure Jonathan had plenty of drama in his life over the years. I saw him in what I considered healthy, productive relationships and some that left him emotionally drained. I know Jonathan always tried to send me information about some of the physical and mental health challenges he had. I could go back and look those articles up, but the sad point is that he ended up dying at the age of 45. I do not know the details, but the most objective description from his mother that I saw a copy of in her own writing was that he was “found dead in San Francisco” despite my last working communication with him is a claim that he was on a train back to Iowa via Chicago. I have no idea if that trip actually manifested, but his memorial services did take place in Iowa.
To make his passing so young even sadder, his older brother apparently died within ten days of him. I’m also not sure of those circumstances.
Some of the speculations about Jonathan have run amuck, with at least one person attempting to rewrite history. Fortunately, that person has very little credibility and has been blocked from communicating with me further after callously informing me of the death, which I had to research to prove to myself subsequently. Jonathan was only a few weeks past his 45th birthday when he died on October 27, 2022. There is no evidence that he intentionally committed suicide even though some may claim that.
Riding the NYC subway circa 2007.
I lost far too many good friends at a young age without much explanation, and I sometimes feel helpless. I have tried to help to a great extent (as I did with Tony Perri) as some of you (including Jonathan) witnessed, but while I don’t know exactly what went wrong here, I do know that some people genuinely cared for Jonathan and others took a hand in any level of self-destructive behavior that he may have had. My solace is that at least my home was a sanctuary and a refuge for Jonathan over the years, and I remember him telling me how safe he felt when he was in my presence. I wish he realized that he deserved that sense of safety and security all the time.
It could happen! Once in a while, I can proudly land a perfect one. I row with the Solano Rowing Club on a whaleboat most weekends. Maybe you had to be there, but while we were putting the boat away for storage today our coxswain Alison said, “next time we’ll work on ab holds”
I retorted, “What did you call me!?”
Coxswain Alison with Becky & Karen as strokes. We often see sea lions swimming by!
An original quote from yours truly is that “laughter is the best revenge against death,” by which I mean we can laugh and that alone makes life worth living. On another macabre note, I always wished I could sleep less when one thinks that a 75-year-old person has slept away 25 years of his or her life. I’ll never forget the chill I get when I heard the antagonist in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea claim “sleep is just a slice of death.”
Now for a segue.
We recently lost the goddess of candy pants, Judy Tenuta, to fucking ovarian cancer at the age of 73 (the same age my mother was when she died of fucking ovarian cancer in 2016). I saw Judy live in New York City years ago to my glee. Riding the subway home I had to hold on to my companion because I thought I’d fall on the subway tracks I was such jelly from recalling her jokes. I’ve always gravitated toward funny women, which partly explains my Streisand fandom, but Judy’s wit will be so uniquely missed. I went out and ordered her books and whatever else I could find on her but I always searched for her online to see what she was up to. I recently read her first book on the plane to Hawaii and quickly started using her quips with my husband on vacation. I still believe Judy was very underrated.
Fortunately, Judy was sometimes on the Stephanie Miller Showto talk about not just politics in her special way, but also her attempt to KICK CANCER’S ASS. I do listen to Stephanie Miller every morning on FreeSpeechTV and encourage everyone to join in. Stephanie spoke at Judy’s celebration of life recently. Through the last several years of SCOTUS packing and general mayhem in American federal politics, comedy like Stephanie’s and Judy’s has kept me sane.
“Is anybody hearing this? I feel like I’m taking CRAZY pills!” — Will Farrell
A woman in Catalonia wrote me to ask for permission to do a story on my parents, who I mention on my blog lived in the northern part of Catalonia near Girona and the French border. Our entire family lived there but my siblings were so young that they do not have as clear memories as I do. I know the picture of my parents featured in the article was one cherished by my mom. On this same cement slab is where I learned how to ride a bike. We lived there from 1975-1977, when we moved to live on base in New York City on Governor’s Island. I remember celebrating the American Bicentennial on base in Spain. It was quite a culture shock to move to NYC. The article is written in Catalan, a Latin-based language of the region of Spain where we lived.
This is hard to talk about because it ended so tragically. Shando and I fostered this gorgeous puppy (not the guest dog named Cookie, who is having a moment), for about a week.
When we got Poopsie, I thought it was really cute because that’s the pet name that my grandfather had for my grandmother, although if we would have kept him, he would have been called Iggy.
We almost immediately found a home nearby where we knew he would be treated well, but unfortunately, while they were out walking Poopsie, a vicious dog in the neighborhood, who was being dog-sat, got off leash and attacked and killed Poopsie (who had been renamed). It was traumatic for our neighborhood and many of us rushed to the scene with the screams, which also threw Poopsie’s new mom to the ground and injured her. I could not believe my eyes and openly sobbed when our vet, who had rushed over, could not resuscitate him. Life is so short and can be so unfair. This is probably the only footage we have of him, which I was glad to find.
I was named after my mother, Giuseppina, and she was named after my Nonno, Giuseppe. I was a huge momma’s boy. We spoke all day in chat when I was at work for YEARS, not to mention at least a few calls a day even when she was visiting Italy or I was living on the East Coast. 
