I like to fetch .
       I like to fetch just as much as Chauncy Gardener (from the movie “Being There,”) liked “to watch.”
       I live to fetch and my master knows it. Maybe I don’t fetch the same way as my master’s previous dog “Shiny” liked to fetch, but she was a Labrador retriever mix and looked at balls a bit differently than the way I look at balls. You see, Labs brings stuff back and I don’t: I just like to chase after things, catch them, and then chase after something else.
       I’m part greyhound and I live to run: To exercise my long, lean muscles is the closest thing to paradise, especially after being cooped up in a house, all day long.
       I can run like the wind. I can outrun just about any living critter. I’ve got to run at least once a day or I get the heebie-jeebies. It’s no good having a dog with the heebie-jeebies because they’ll make you crazy: It’s better to wear a dog like me out before I start making your life crazy.
       When my master first adopted me from the pound, we would go way out into the hills at the outskirts of town. I would chase herds of deer and sometimes they would chase me.
       I would get stuck with cactus and get into all sorts of mischief. All that ended when my master started getting compression injuries from hiking like a wild man. So we stopped going into the hills and started haunting the nearby parks instead.
       It didn’t take long before my master figured out that I could get my exercise from chasing balls. He would collect lost balls from the tennis courts and I would fetch them at the park. He always needed to have a few balls with him because I would never bring them back to him. He would need extra balls to distract me from the balls that I would catch.
       After a while, my master realized that he could not throw a ball often enough or far enough to satisfy me. So he went to REI, our local outdoor shop and bought a device called a “Chuck It!” A Chuck-It is a long plastic device that acts as extension of the thrower’s arm. With the Chuck-It, my master could throw a ball three times further than with his arm.
       Unfortunately, after a few months of playing with the Chuck-It, my master’s arm started to get sore. Since my master believes pain is an indication that he is doing something bad to his body, he decided to look for another way to launch a ball into the air.
       Next came a racquetball racquet. My master would take a tennis ball and hit it with the racquet. This worked out OK, but after a while this also began to bother his arm.
       So he looked for another device.
       After exhaustive searching on-line, my master found an odd device called a “BallStomp’r.” The BallStomp’r was basically a rubber bladder with an open mouth at one end. My master would shove a tennis ball into the mouth and then stomp on the device. This worked for a few days and he managed to get the ball to fly about 30 feet. One crisp, cold morning, my master stomped the device a bit too hard and it developed a huge hole in its side. I guess you might say he stomped it to death.
       After the BallStomp’r came the slingshot. This was an extra-ordinary device, big enough to shoot a tennis ball and it worked quite well. It cost my master $30 and it didn’t cause him any pain. The problem was that my master could not figure out why it didn’t cause him any pain since it was a wicked device that really called on every muscle in the body in order to stretch the elastic. My master figured that it was an accident waiting to happen so he put the slingshot away in storage and began to study the Internet night and day, hoping to find a device that could launch a ball and not take its toll on the body.
       He googled “ball launcher,” “ball thrower,” “catapult,” “trebuchet,” “tennis ball machine,” until he found the perfect keywords, namely, “pitching machine.”
       And so, after forking over $150 to an Internet vendor, my master and I became proud owners of “The Ultimate Pitching Machine,” by GameMaster.
       This baby is made of solid steel and is not a toy. It can toss a ball over 100 feet, way up in the air. My master asked the tennis ball coach at the University for dead balls and he gave us 100 of them. My master can launch all those balls within a space of 15 minutes and by the time we have gone through three repetitions of 100 balls, I am fully exorcized, I mean exercised. Well, maybe exorcised is not far off the mark: The demons are all gone and I am exhausted.
       Thank you for visiting Chucksville.
        

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