Friends in Low Places
July 22, 2025 at 09:57PMFor Texas Highways, Greg Marshall takes his quirky Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Zeus, to the Buda Wiener Dog Races, a genuine Texas Attraction which celebrates all things low rider. It includes a pet parade, a costume contest, live music, and more, all of which is prelude to crowning the fastest wiener dog in all of Buda, Texas.
Walking around a tent with posters from previous wiener dog races, seeing the humble dachshund photoshopped onto Tom Cruise’s body in Top Gun or beautifully rendered as young Simba against the savanna sunset in “The Wiener King,” it occurs to me that some textbook projection is at play. In Texas, a state where everything from the trucks we drive to the cups we drink from has to be bigger, there’s something comforting about going small. In this one realm, on this one weekend, our heroes don’t need to be giants. They can be fallible, charming—a little more like the humans who love them. Wiener dogs, you are us.
On my final loop of the grounds, I find a wiener dog in a stroller decked out to look like a tropical parade float. “Retired Dog Racer” is affixed in poster board to the front. The float features plastic hula skirts and leis, plus a paper cutout of a palm tree, orchids, and flamingos. Its occupant, a dachshund from Wimberley named Ruben, raced for years before COVID, his mom tells me. Now, he’s 11 and has no teeth. He’s gray around the eyes and his tongue lolls out the side of his mouth. I imagine his breath is atomic.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/22/friends-in-low-places/
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