Can I Get You to Read a Post About Dog Shit?

Typically, I'm not terribly into setting challenges for myself.

Sometimes, however, I get kind of into it. The excitement, the thrill, the dipping of the toe into the pool of the unknown, the uncertain outcome-- will I succeed? Will I bellyflop onto the murky pool of life wearing a pair of "BUDWEISER" swimtrunks?

Gee, I don't know. But it'll be fun finding out.

Since my wife and I adopted Molly, our lives have increasingly revolved around dog shit. Finley, being an elder statesman of sorts, is predictable and reliable and knows that vacating the contents of his bowels occurs outside. Molly, being an impish puppy, hasn't really grasped that point yet. Oftentimes, when I enter a room she has been in unsupervised for any length of time greater than two minutes, my eyes furtively scan the floor for mini-muffins or the rug for scat streaks. We have a stalwart supply of rug cleaners/pet stain remover products under our kitchen sink, and it is with these tools that we do battle with our 24-pound puppy who is slowly but surely making me obsessed with shit, in much the same way that a 15-year-old boy is obsessed with the red-head down the street, his own penis, and becoming a meteorologist.

In case you've never lived in suburbia before, I would like to warn you that, if you ever do decide to make the great white move, you will become gradually or instantly obsessed with dog shit, depending on your level of consciousness. Also depending, of course, on whether or not you own a dog. If you don't own a dog, trust me, you will still become obsessed with dog shit-- it will just be the dog shit emanating from the bungholes of other people's dogs. My suburban guilt meter is positively off-the-charts, such that as soon as either of my dogs' rear legs start to bend, I am swooping down with the plastic bag, beginning to catch shit before it even hits the grass.

Yes, I have been known to catch dog shit in the space between my dog's asshole and the ground. Mid-air. The space between. Take that, Dave Matthews. Defying gravity. Take that, Elphaba.

Of course, I feel my diligence slipping now that I have two dogs. When walking them together, I'm not able to be as agile, as coordinated, as graceful. I love when they cross paths and lace me up like a fucking Victorian corset with their leashes. That's classic. If the shit-filled plastic bag gets squeezed in between leashes, it's even better. If the bag rips: instant classic. Just bust out those cameraphones and say "YouTube!"

My wife and I try not to be brand-whores when going to the market. For instance, we're pretty diverse when buying "chocolate sandwich cookies." We won't really eat Oreos, because they have gross things in them (seriously, check it out. Like, octopus bits and shit), and our favorites are Newman O's, but we'll buy Tuxedo cookies or even the store brand if we're really hard up. Even if the creme in the middle is sickly-sweet or if the cookie part is a little chalky, we get through it. We care even less when it comes to dog food. And, really: why should we? Molly eats wristwatch bands and her own shit, and Finley prefers soymilk and broccoli, so why should we sweat Purina vs Science Diet? We don't notice any difference in the shininess of our dogs' coats, the sweetness or foulness of their breath, the vavaciousness of their jump, the decibel of their bark or the springiness of their step no matter what we feed them.

Maybe that just makes us assholes. I don't know.

My wife recently bought a bag of "Kibbles & Bits." I have finally noticed a change in our dogs. The name of this particular dog food should be called "Kibbles & Mountains." The sheer amount of fecal matter that this food produces in our dogs is nothing short of elephantine. I am thinking of obtaining a Class D license so that I can follow our dogs while driving a front-end loader. As if the quantity increase wasn't bad enough, it has also tinted their shit seafoam green. Which is just wrong.

Thank you, my loves, for reading a post about dog shit. I don't know for whom this speaks the worse: you or I.

About Dog Shit

As I was sitting in front of the television last Thursday night, my eyeballs helplessly riveted to the images of Ken Burns' latest documentary about National Parks, I turned to my wife, who was standing on the fifth stair, in her pajamas and brushing her teeth and I said,

"You know, Ken Burns could make a documentary about dog shit and I'd watch it. As long as it had those sentimental close-ups with a slow pull back, narration by Kevin Conway, and laconic piano music by Jacqueline Schwab, I'd watch it."

She gently removed the toothbrush from her froth-covered mouth and said,

"Ah gnhow."

It's not that National Parks don't interest me-- they do-- but I don't think another documentarian could entice me to flit two hours of my life away learning about them. When I was a junior in high school, I took a snow day and plowed through the entirety of "The Civil War." I mean, this is a pretty big deal to a kid who was attaining the absolute zenith of self-pleasuring activities. We're talking three times a day on average, and on a snow day, only serious chafing or a dizzy spell would curtail those activities. So to supplant my zeal for touch-touch with unending VHS tapes about Antietam, Vicksburg and Bull Run, well, as documentarians go, you've gotta be worth your weight in crumpled tissues.

My statement, though, about Ken Burns and a documentary about dog shit got me thinking-- what inane thing could I write about in such a way that it would engage my average reader enough to follow the blog post through to the end? I mean, I've run you poor people through the goddamn mill on numerous occasions, and some of you are still here. That's kind of amazing to me, even after all this time.

As I was thinking, I started to get a little bold...

Could I get away with a blog post about dog shit?

Truly, I don't know exactly what I'd say. I mean, after six years of dog ownership, I guess I can say I'm pretty well acquainted with dog shit, though I have no doubt there are those who can claim more intimacy with said subject than I. My dog is currently eating a food that turns his shit green, which doesn't make picking up after him any better or worse, really. It is, interestingly enough, easier to see the green shit in the dark, so that's good. Picking up dog shit used to be a real drag when I lived in the city, and cadres of black kids on bicycles would laugh at me as I stooped down to pick up the crap, an Eckerd drugstore bag covering my hand like a lunch lady's hairnet. In the suburbs, elderly ladies in track pants coming home from an early morning run at the JCC congratulate and thank me for picking up my dog's shit.

I'm not particularly fond of either resposne.

My outside trashcan smells ferociously, and I'm not sure what, if anything, I'm supposed to do about it. I try to close the lid very securely after each deposit, and I double-knot all my poop-baggies, and yet, every time I open the lid, a thick avalanche of malodorous skunk-air fiercely train-rapes my nostrils. I hear trashmen make a pretty good living, but you couldn't pay me $600,000 a year to be present next to my open trash can for longer than two seconds once a week. I feel bad for the trashmen. I have no doubt that they hate me and dread coming down our alley to get our trash. When I was an EMT, there were certain patient names and certain addresses that I would just pray wouldn't show up on our radios during a shift of mine. Invariably, they did. The foul-mouthed black guy with a cholostomy bag and no legs, the filthy, skeleton-looking woman with a bacteria-infected trach, the 450-pound guy with the watermelon-sized tummy tumor. I know that, for the trashmen, I am watermelon tumor guy.

I've tried putting baking powder in the trash can, but it doesn't work. When I do that, it looks like a cocaine and shit dump, and it still stinks to Christ's ass. The trashmen are just going to think I spilled cocaine in there and they'll call the cops. Or start snorting, though they'd probably die from the stench first.

Did you know that there's services out there that will come to your yard and pick up your dog's shit for you? At least, there are where I live. Growing up, I never knew that I lived in a well-to-do neighborhood, but now that I'm older and I see vans that say, "Tired of Picking Up Your Dog's Poo? We'll Come to You!" I finally get it. Fortunately, we don't have a yard where we can let the dog shit freely, and, if we did, we'd pick it up ourselves.

Actually, come to think of it, we used to live in a house where the dog shat outside, and we pretty much just left it out there. It never smelled as bad as our trashcan does, and, in the winter, it didn't smell at all.

Sometimes, my father and mother take care of our dog when we go away on a little trip, like for the weekend or something. My father loves our dog, and while we're out hiking or on the beach, I'll get a typically awesome text message from my father that will read something like this:

"Finley is great! he made
three bum-bum golden
brown. beeutiful. i sent it
to the art museum for
exhibit. love dad."

I wonder what he'll say about Finley's shit now that it's green. Will it still be museum quality?

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Congratulations-- you have just read an entire blog post about dog shit. Can I have my Ken Burns money now?