steaming piles of crap

Wow, I haven't posted in a month!

A lot has happened. Truth to tell, the end of the year mostly sucked, and so far, 2008 sucks too.

But I won't dwell on it, because it's pretty tiresome to write (and read) about despair and woe and..well, things that suck.

Unless it's something like this:

We got this puppy, see, and he's called Hooch. He's going to be 7 feet tall. He's about 3 1/2 months old, and his feet are as big as hockey pucks. He's great, but he's a puppy, albeit a huge puppy, and puppies are a big pain in the ass. I'd forgotten that. No, I didn't forget it; I never really knew that, because when I first had a puppy I was 11 years old, so I mostly forget about its care and feeding, except I suppose my mother mostly took over those duties.

I do remember that when you took the dog out, he crapped wherever he felt like, and that was that. There was no fussy scooping, no tricky turning the plastic bag inside out to pick up the crap. The steaming crap in winter. No, you just left it, and it hardened eventually, and disintegrated. Maybe someone would step in it and drag it into the house, but that didn't happen often.

You never heard of anyone getting a disease from stepping in a pile of dogcrap.

That's all changed now. It's a federal offense to let your dog crap freely around the neighborhood. People give you the hairy eyeball if you don't pick up the crap. Little children blithely pick up and throw dogcrap at each other, sometimes even sampling a morsel because they think it's chocolate. And they now DIE from that, evidently.

And yet, there are still piles of crap on the ground. Someone's not following instructions.

Me, I always pick up the crap because I don't want some neighborhood Mrs. Kravitz giving me shit about not picking up crap. It's a distasteful chore. And the idea of picking up dogcrap in a plastic grocery bag is totally ludicrous, essentially giving the crap a half-life of a thousand years in a landfill, rather than, what, a couple of weeks out on the lawn? It's stupid. I'd really prefer to just let it sit and become one with nature.

Now they have compostable and recyclable poop bags made from corn, which I suppose is a slightly better alternative. Someone's making money making compostable bags for the rest of us to pick up and dispose of our dogs' crap. The idea is just a little insane.

Hooch can be quite prolific. It's unbelievable what a dog's bowels can hold.

So that's my first post of the new year, a post about picking up steaming piles of dogcrap. Surely a harbinger of the year ahead.