Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Is Rex a Dog?
    Is Rex a Dog?
    Is Rex a Dog?
    Ebook91 pages1 hour

    Is Rex a Dog?

    By Kevin J Lenard

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    I've been asked if Rex a metaphor for the author. Rex isn’t a metaphor! Rex is a dog. Dogs are simple. Many women think men are simple. Rex is anything but simple, however -- the "ex" in Rex is complex.

    Rex’s stories are metaphors for our human tendency to label each other. I see that tendency as a natural inclination to reduce complexity, to simplify people, to simplify our view of the opposite sex, but men are so much more than dogs... What you think is actually going on at first, may not be what’s really going on. ;-p

    This collection of short stories about the inner workings of one man’s mind are not designed just to titillate, but to help uncover what makes men different from women, and why women find male confidence alluring. Society is better for all of us when we understand each other’s natures better and can laugh at our differences. Woof!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKevin J Lenard
    Release dateDec 1, 2018
    ISBN9780463923948
    Is Rex a Dog?
    Author

    Kevin J Lenard

    I’ve been called a hopeless romantic and (upon occasion) a dog, which was the inspiration for my "Is Rex a Dog?" book of short stories in which Rex and his alter-ego navigate the treacherous waters of life and the mysteries of the fairer sex by relying on each other's instincts when the timing's right. WOOF! I have lived here and there, from the Middle East, Eastern Europe, to Australia, Hong Kong and Mexico. I've circled the globe a few times, spending 2 years hitching around the world with my first wife after university. I spent my career working for international ad agencies, primarily as a specialist in marketing strategy, but interspersed that pursuit with entrepreneurial adventures, from running a speakeasy, to a pre-internet entertainment booking service, to an ad agency on the beach in Cancun, to marketing consulting and public speaking, to running my own landscaping and home renovation firm. My interests are eclectic, my thinking diverse and my politics dead center. My writing reflects my varied pursuits with hundreds of thousands of words in several blogs, one focused on the future of marketing, another on insights into human nature. I've spent the past decade doing far too little with my healthy IQ and I'm trying to do a better job as of 2018 of leveraging my passions, applying my experience in marketing to my own brand. Let's see where the effort takes me...

    Related to Is Rex a Dog?

    Related ebooks

    Romance For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Matters Of The Heart

      Jan 17, 2022

      Matters Of The Heart
      5 min read

    • Article

      Now That It’s Come to This

      Jun 3, 2021

      Now That It’s Come to This
      13 min read

    • Article

      Six Poems

      Nov 1, 2023

      loved best. Words I have neversaid. New sentence, at 80. Of coursenot more than his children, and their children. That goeswithout saying—but I want to lay down eachelement of love’s house. First,the hole, under—apple cellar, potato cellar,cellar to

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Plague Legends

      Dec 1, 2021

      The Plague Legends
      12 min read

    • Article

      Porochista Khakpour on Stephen Dixon: An Excerpt from McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #63

      Aug 4, 2021

      When you really live, and when you really tackle that life in your art, the pages never quite end. The narration might drop out, but the story is still in motion. If done right, the border blurs, the boundaries of life and of art fade into each other

      8 min read

    • Article

      Slavery Has Ended, But Her Journey Has Only Just Begun

      Mar 13, 2023

      In Eleanor Shearer’s eloquent debut novel, “River Sing Me Home,” Rachel, along with the other enslaved people on Providence Plantation in Barbados, has just heard the joyous news that they are now free. Except they’re not. While the British parliamen

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Daniel Levin Becker

      Dec 17, 2019

      This year, I read in twos. Maybe this is always happening and I just started noticing. I also have a brain that’s unrepentantly hungry for patterns, so who knows. The post A Year in Reading: Daniel Levin Becker appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Bundles

      Feb 15, 2021

      Bundles
      4 min read

    • Article

      When Mollusks Fall in Love

      Nov 16, 2017

      Outside of gothic works of fiction set in Transylvania, we rarely read of enduring friendships that have been initiated by a bite. But that is exactly how nature writers Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas—the two extraordinary, quirky, and i

      9 min read

    • Article

      Eroded Tropes and Fears and Consequences: The Millions Interviews Alyson Hagy

      Sep 28, 2018

      It’s been 18 years since Alyson Hagy and I both won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Nested within the list of grantees was a scattering of addresses. I wrote to Alyson. She answered. We’ve seen each other just twice in all these yea

      8 min read

    • Article

      Septet as Memoir

      Apr 8, 2024

      Septet as Memoir
      6 min read

    • Article

      Six Poems

      Jul 1, 2018

      When I said, to my mother, What was a goodthing about me as a child?, my mother’sface seemed to unfurl from the center,hibiscus in fast motion, the anthersand flounces springing out with joy. Oh you wereenchanting, she breathed. What do you mean—craz

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Poet’s Craft

      Jan 1, 2020

      To begin with a definition: A poem is a text structurally constrained by the repetition of any language element(s). The continuum of poetic constraint is extensive, stretching from operations that a reader will find completely imperceptible to overwh

      9 min read

    • Article

      Remastering The Mythos: Questions For Ruthanna Emrys

      May 4, 2017

      When Ruthanna Emrys first read H.P. Lovecraft's classic tale "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," her sympathies were squarely with the monsters — and that sympathy was the seed of her new book, Winter Tide.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Shelf Life

      Nov 2, 2023

      I’m not sure if I can truly pinpoint the moment my new novel Once A Monster was born – but I can trace the history of some of its most important ingredients. As a boy, looking through an old illustrated book of Greek myths, and being at once captiva

      5 min read

    • Article

      Unlearnable Lessons on My Father’s Deathbed

      Mar 21, 2017

      I was at my father’s side much of the time in his final weeks, a witness to both the gifts and miseries of being near death. Nurses came and went, patient, long-suffering. They sat beside him for hours at a time, dousing spongy lollipops in water and

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Anne K. Yoder

      Dec 12, 2021

      Reading Levy helped me envision a way to write myself again into existence, to remake a home and a life, to visualize it as the adventure I was thrust into. The post A Year in Reading: Anne K. Yoder appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Is Rex a Dog?

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Is Rex a Dog? - Kevin J Lenard

      Is Rex a Dog?

      Copyright: Kevin J. Lenard, 2018

      All rights reserved.

      Content and intellectual property (concepts) may not be used, copied, forwarded, published, or re-posted online without full attribution, back-links and/or written permission from and/or contractual agreements with the author.

      Table of Contents

      Acknowledgements

      Prologue – Rex’s Alter Ego Writes…

      Chapter One – Rex Likes Poodles

      Chapter Two – Rex Awakes

      Chapter Three – Rex Does What He Does

      Chapter Four – Something in the Air

      Chapter Five – Rex to the Rescue!

      Chapter Six – Alpha Dogs and Pomeranians

      Chapter Seven – Rex Backs Off

      Chapter Eight – Rex Quits Dogging It

      Chapter Nine – Life's a Rex! (NOT...)

      Chapter Ten – Cave Dog

      Chapter Eleven – Rex's Human Rights

      Chapter Twelve – Rexless in Seattle

      Chapter Thirteen – Rex Meets Regina

      Chapter Fourteen – Rex in Reserve

      About the Author – Follow/Contact

      Acknowledgements

      My eternal thanks to my several muses and all the cherished experiences I’ve had with the ‘fairer sex’: the American Foxhound, the Maltese, the Golden Retriever, the ‘Wife I Haven’t Met Yet’ (…Hadn’t…), and the other wonderful women, some real, some imagined, in Rex’s stories. (Plus a nod to the men who provided Rex and his human with the foils that make life interesting.)

      Rex’s Alter Ego Writes...

      I've been asked if Rex a metaphor for the author.

      Rex isn’t a metaphor! Rex is a dog.

      Dogs are simple. Many women think men are simple.

      Rex is anything but simple, however -- the ex in Rex is complex.

      Rex’s stories are metaphors for our human tendency to label each other. I see that tendency as a natural inclination to reduce complexity, to simplify people, to simplify our view of the opposite sex, but men are so much more than dogs...

      What you think is actually going on at first, may not be what’s really going on. ;-p

      A 2018 Caveat in Acknowledgement of the #MeToo ‘Movement’:

      These stories began at a time when feminism had yet to morph into rampant ‘political correctness’ and ‘sensitivity training’ had yet to spark the need for the office doors of male bosses to be left open when a female employee was inside. Yet the nature of sexual attraction between consenting adults will never fundamentally change – it has evolved over millions of years and our most recent seven thousand years of living in permanent settlements will never re-wire our brains.

      Our differing instincts will always be what they are, and women will forever be most attracted to men who are confident and understand what pleases ‘the fairer sex’ most. Men will always find women who appear to be most capable of producing healthy children most appealing. These are not ‘cultural byproducts,’ they are genetic hard wiring and part of the reason for our species’ runaway ‘success.’

      This collection of stories about the inner workings of one man’s mind are not designed just to titillate, but to help uncover what makes men different from women, and why women find male confidence alluring. Society is better for all of us when we understand each other’s natures better and can laugh at our differences. Woof!

      Rex Likes Poodles

      Tapping into what he was thinking as he sat out beside the sidewalk staring intently at a passing poodle’s wagging hindquarters, scratching absently behind one ear, most people would say Rex was just a dog. Most people would be misreading him. Rex was more than met the eye.

      The poodle turned the corner and left little for him to remember her by other than strong whiff of some expensive shampoo. She left his brain. Rex tended to live in the moment, even while his brain was planning for the future. He yawned, languorously, got up and stretched, drawing out the moment while waiting for an impulse to strike him. 

      Other dogs fretted over where the next meal was going to come from, which female in the neighbourhood was in heat (and which ones they might stand a chance with), whether or not they were going to get in trouble for making a mess of the living room. Rex wondered whether or not, if you told a female you thought she smelled like warm honey, she'd let you have your evil way with her faster than if you told her you thought she was pretty. 

      Rex was bored and thinking, as he often did, about why humans did what they did. Such a fascinating species: Homo sapiens. So complicated versus Canis lupus familaris, the domestic dog.

      Satisfying a sudden itch Rex rubbed the right side of his nose vigorously with the back of his right forepaw. A few bulldogs waddled by, several cougars slinking, a couple of saber-toothed tigers, many of them casting him a sidelong glance, a tentative sniff in his direction, but there were no poodles in sight.

      He pulled out his phone, looked at a couple of messages and put it back in his shirt pocket. His jeans were pushing his ‘package’ to one side and he shoved his hands in his pockets to rearrange things as surreptitiously as he could while leaning against a wall on a busy street in the city's bustling business district.

      Another poodle approached from up the street, her teased-out mane framing an attractive, though not striking, muzzle. Her snout was a bit long for her face, he mused. She looked at him as he started his assessment down at her clacking heels and worked his way up the A-line skirt, the ringless left hand, narrow waist, smallish B-cups and long neck, sipping her like a iced cocktail in a tall glass. She rewarded his attention with a frigid glare.

      Rex smiled wryly, tipped his head and, as she came within range, said, If that hem was an inch shorter, I’d have asked you out. Her face went blank; the lipsticked lips parted slightly, her eyes shifted ahead then came back to his as

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1