Hello. My name is Doug Fairchild, and I'm an artist. It took me a long time to figure it out, but it's a fact, and goes a long way toward explaining why I don't wear a tie. There will be some of my paintings and photographs on this site. I'll add them as fast as I can. It takes awhile, you understand, because there is always something else to do first.

The beret is another story. People say "Oh, of course you wear a beret. You're an artist." But that isn't it. I bought my first beret in Germany in 1953, because a girl thought I'd look dashing in it. I kept it after she was gone, because it keeps my head warm and doesn't get in the way of the camera dark cloth. But the real reason is to look dashing.

That's my pal Billy beside me. Billy is a Brittany Spaniel and my friend. We have come a long way together, since the day in 1981 when I met two little boys in front of Albertson's Grocery in Paradise, California, and one of them said "Would you like to have a nice puppy, mister?"

I looked at Billy, and Billy looked at me with his warm brown eyes and said "They're throwing me out. I don't know what I'm going to do. If you take me I promise I'll be good." I did, he was, and we have been together ever since.

We've been through some great adventures together, too. You might not think it, looking at two old duffers sitting on a cliff, but we have swum the wide rivers and climbed the tall peaks. He may have once been a miner, '49er, because he was always diving down and bringing up large rocks, as if still looking for that big nugget. Once, on the North Fork of the American River, not far from where the Gold Rush began, a current sucked Billy under and held him down. I found him trying to walk upstream along the bottom and brought him up. He was more careful after that.

Later on, we both caught Lyme Disease from the ticks up there in the canyons. The doctors at Kaiser told me there wasn't any Lyme Disease in California. Billy's Vet threw up his hands and said he didn't know what it was. After a year of suffering, with Billy nearly gone and in such pain I thought I'd have to put him to sleep, I found a physician who had kept up with his education. He said it sounded like Lyme alright and treated me for it. Some heavy artillery antibiotics. By this time, Billy was at the University of California Veterinary Medicine School getting all the most expensive and impressive tests they had, but they also thought there wasn't any Lyme in California. I spent around a thousand dollars on those tests that didn't tell us anything we didn't already know, and there were no doctors left who could perceive a patient with their own eyes. They needed machines to do it for them. Billy could hardly stand up. If you shined a light in his eyes he yelped. I had to carry him outside to do his business. If you picked him up wrong, he screamed. I couldn't stand it. I insisted on antibiotics. They prescribed tetracycline. It didn't work. I said, lets give him some Doxycycline, because we obviously have the same symptoms and it is working on me. They said they couldn't do that because Doxycycline hadn't been tested on dogs. They were adamant. I said, "You mean you are willing to watch my dog die a painful death when I have found a treatment that works, just because it hasn't been tested on dogs???" They looked right through me, just as if I were invisible.

I wasn't very polite about it, after that. I got my regular Vet to prescribe the Doxycycline, on the grounds that the alternative was euthanasia. He didn't know what to do, but he wasn't a robot, either. I guessed at a dosage and started giving it to Billy. In 24 hours he could walk again. In 48 hours he was no longer in pain. I told the doctors at the University of California, thinking they would be glad to know of a treatment that worked, but they just smiled and nodded their heads. Nobody home. It took nearly a year of these antibiotics to kill off all the little spirochetes, but we made it together. Not without damage, I am sorry to say. I got a damaged heart out of it and Billy got damaged joints. He had a hard time walking. So I gave him some Scientology assists. There are some that don't require the person you are assisting to speak Human. Speaking Dog is quite good enough. I got some of these assists myself, including the ones where you need to speak Human. Both of us got a lot out of them.

One of the assists was something called a "Nerve Assist". He liked it. Used to come up to me and ask for his Nerve Assist several times a day. I speak fluent Dog, which means I can see the pictures, so I knew what he wanted and would give him one. During the assist, his body would twist into a pretzel as the nervous energy was bleeding off, but as we continued, he would gradually straighten out, his posture would become normal and comfortable, and finally his tail would wag. I called it the "floating tail", and would tell him his tail was floating, and he'd saunter off, happy as a dog. Other Scientologists reading this will get a kick out of that. Those of you who aren't might want to find out The Truth About Scientology.

A few months ago I got into an e-mail conversation with a college student who ridiculed folks who think dogs are "little people". I finally told him that talking to him was like trying to describe the sunrise to a blind man who was convinced I was hallucinating. He agreed, and said it had been fun. I suspect the part about me hallucinating was what he agreed with.

Dogs are people, you know. A lot of people treat their dogs like things ... shovels and rakes and cars and such. Things. Not living, aware and feeling beings. They think they can't talk. That would be funny if it weren't sad, because the reason they don't know dogs can talk is, they're deaf.

Dogs can't speak with words, so they do it with pictures. Mental pictures. Skeptical humans call it telepathy and think it is "extrasensory" perception. ESP. There is nothing "extra"about it. But either you know what I'm talking about, or you don't, and if you don't it isn't too likely I could explain it so you would understand. It's not like that, a thing you can understand by having it explained. You have to experience it, and then you know. Like Mark Twain said, quoting the pilot who trained him on the Mississippi river boat: "When you have been on the river long enough, you will know, but you will never be able to explain it to anyone else."

On a sunny summer morning in the year 2000, after a full life of 19 and a half years, Billy's brave heart gave out. Farewell, Billy, my forever dog. We'll meet again.