K-Section residents awoke yesterday to the disquieting sight of 27 attack dogs roaming freely through the streets of their quiet, middle-class neighborhood. In a cost-cutting move that they forgot to tell anyone about, the Neighbor Up the Hill had fired all their dog handlers and doubled down on K-9’s, equipping each dog with an AirTag and a GoPro camera before releasing them into K.
When we stopped in at Bodhi Tree to see what all the fuss was about, we found Bodhi’s beloved guy-out-front-who-watches-the-bicycles sitting on the white Bodhi steps, staring down at his Pixel 6, slowly transitioning into his new role as guy-who-watches-the-dogs. We sat down next to him and counted more than fifty blue dots moving across the screen. “The guests show up as blue dots too,” he said, with a touch of hopelessness. “It’s kinda hard to tell them apart.” Then he brightened and pointed out a cluster of blue dots near the bottom of the screen that were not moving at all, and said, “See? That’s Ceibo’s house.”
Ceibo’s house – as our readers know – has become a black hole of sorts for Bodhi Tree guests trying to find the beach. Bodhi Tree management believes that nearly a third of their weekly guests end up in Ceibo’s living room at some point during their stay, with a significant number never returning at all. AirTag data currently shows some of these guests still roaming K-Section, weeks after leaving Ceibo’s house, in what is rapidly turning into a PR nightmare for Bodhi Tree.
“We have people in yoga pants knocking on our door at 2 AM, asking, ‘is this the portal? is this the portal?’” said K resident Patricia Delgado. A short walk through the neighborhood uncovered more stories – Bodhi Tree guests swimming naked in pools, Bodhi Tree guests hugging dogs for a Very Long Time, and Bodhi Tree guests doing Strange Things with garden hoses. Solar Pathway Lights. And – in one story we heard – African Palms.
“People are blaming Bodhi Tree,” sighed the bicycle guy. “But it’s really Ceibo.”
Wanting to get a deeper understanding of why 27 remote-controlled attack dogs roaming freely through a quiet middle-class neighborhood was a good idea, we spoke to several sources inside Nosara’s tightly-knit Counter-Terrorism-and-K-9 – Handling community. All of them nodded in admiration at Bodhi’s hybrid, asymmetrical strategy of pairing military attack dogs with one guy on a cellphone.
“Letting the dogs run loose in K is the real game-changer here,” said one. “With 27 dogs and 27 cameras, K is their bitch now. Sayonara, sound guy.”
Most of the K-Section residents we spoke to had a more nuanced point of view. “Are you fucking kidding me?” said one in disbelief. “They put the bike guy in charge of 27 attack dogs? “
Bodhi Tree is asking K-Section residents to ‘lean in’ and support the new system. “Please don’t leave any pet food out. Or pets, either, for that matter. And for the first few days, it would be great if everyone can just stay inside. That will make it a lot easier for the dogs to figure out who is who.”
When we left the bike guy, he was several levels deep in the Pixel’s Android settings, trying to disable the Manchester United screensaver that kept randomly rebooting the phone, plunging both dogs and guests into uncollapsed quantum states of being both dead and alive at the same time. We unpacked that idea for him, and it freaked him the fuck out. “It’s not really even my phone,” he said. “It’s my cousin’s. I don’t even like Manchester United.”
We wandered down the hill to Ceibo’s house, hoping to get a comment and a little of that deep-but-soft-voice Ceibo contact buzz, but Ceibo was not around. The giraffes gazed quietly down at us, chewing we knew not what. We stood there for a few moments, enjoying the silence and the giraffes. Then, hearing footsteps behind us, we turned around slowly, pretty sure of what we would see.
Five of them stood there, lululemoned from head to toe, radiant with that unmistakable Bodhi Tree glow.
“Code is 1234,” we said on our way out, with a smile, and a pleasant nod. “Careful how you pet the giraffes.”
