When you're in Moscow, you see dogs. And I don't mean dogz, like, your boyz, or dogs like your parents gave away to a farm out west when you were 10, no, these canines are hardcore. I'm talking third generation street dogs - they're not begging you for scraps or just waiting for someone to look deep enough into their big brown eyes to realize that adoption is the only prudent course. No, they are veritable Moscovites themselves, claiming a citizenship and a right to existence on par with our own. Long past the hammer's fall they roam the city in tightly knit self-sufficient packs, following still the path swathed by the sickle's sweep and issuing a constant critique of Orwell's zoologic prejudice in their efficient and effective embrace of the Soviet ideal.  

They will not shy from a hand that feeds them, nor will they bite it off, but they've progressed beyond domestication;  they've rather adapted and evolved to survive in an urban setting - they're dependent on us, but only in the way a wolf is dependent on the grass the sheep eats. Thousands of years from now when mankind's time has come to a close, Moscow is where their greatest archaeologists will situate their most fruitful digs. 

But, they're still dogs. Adorable, cute, cuddly dogs. With a rough edge, maybe, and all of them could use a bath, but that hardly curtails my "awwww" reaction, and in fact their very independence makes it even cuter when they do people stuff. This is a segue to a personal experience. The other day as Val and I headed to school, we noticed a mutt waiting at the top of an escalator. He wanted to go down, clearly, but each time he braved a foot the machine's strange motion caused him to recoil in confusion. The flirtation continued as Val and I stepped onto the escalator adjacent. Not wanting to miss what might be my only chance to ever see, at least short of youtube, a dog heading down an escalator of his own volition, I leaned as far over the railing as I could that the spectacle might not cease. At this point the humor depends explicitly on a certain familiarity with the environment, and so I present to you exhibit A, a photo of said escalator:

(I found this photo here)

Now your first reaction is probably going to be something along the lines of, "damn that's a long escalator." But the careful observer of details with a keen eye for plot device will have appended a normally more mundane fact to this descriptive exclamation, letting their thoughts run on tracks more similar to "damn that's a long escalator whose central banisters are punctuated by large cylindrical light fixtures of a particular solid construction at about every six meters." 

For, you see, directly over that center banister is exactly where my head found itself floating as my eyes, working in conjunction with my neck and the greater part of my upper body, thrust it in an emphatic expression of their passion for the bizzarre. 

I think you know where this is going. To you, my reader, I must apologize. You probably think me trite, washed up, and old hack rehashing old materials. "Your characters are one dimensional!" you scream as your literary tendencies gain the better of your inbred American susceptibility to physical humor. And I sympathize with all my heart - I wish all my stories weren't about how clumsy I am, I wish that this ended with an acrobatic trick, or perhaps an impressive skateboarding move pizazzed further by torch juggling. But the truth demands its say:

"Clunk." A flicker and then a noticable dimming. A red flush is dealt on my face and a bruise cuts the umbilical. A few seconds later the light comes back online, its proletariat workmanship handling the impact better than my pride. But all throughout, something is missing. No laughter, no smiles, except for Val's chuckle. At 5pm the metros are packed, at least 20 people must've seen me do this, at least out of the corners of their eyes. But the Russian stoic has grown more sophisticated in humor. What in America would be a funniest home video in Russia is just an american, doing those things  americans do while they look on, secretly wondering how on earth, of all the peoples in the world, they lost in the 1980 winter olympics ice hockey medal round to us.