Poo Are You?

This latest Blogfuscation was going to be a Facebook post to our local residents group. About the gobshites … sorry, people …  in our estate who let their dogs out alone, and they poo everywhere. 

The dogs, not the gobshites. Though they might as well.

A declaration of dissent figuratively nailed to the door of our Residents Group page like Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses nailed to the church doors in Wittenberg. 

And with similar provocative conviction and anticipation of dissent.

Going dung ho at it.

Well at least it was a step up — maybe — from addressing these bastards at gunpoint, and after sticking their noses in a big soft mound of their pooches’ smelly goo, maybe pen them together in some secret location and have them play out life or death kids game, just for my amusement, like on the fascinatingly grisly Squid Game, on Netflix.

Squit Game, anyone?

Okay, okay … maybe just post the offending doggie merde in neatly tied untraceable poo bags in through their nice shiny letterboxes. Like any normal sociopath would.

But no, as always, I would just give out politely about ‘that sort of thing’ in the vague hope that after reading my mildly castigating words they would fall upon the ground in abject self-chastisement,  before running out with mops and buckets of soapy water to cleanse and purify our paths and decontaminate all our green areas

Or not.

But it is really so annoying, all this essence of putrescence left to decompose and disintegrate on paths and grass banks all over our estate, sticking to my shoe and in my craw as I walk out my own dogs.

And how I feel compelled to pick all these iterations up, where I find them, one snitty, shitty poo bag filling at a time. As well as hovering over my my own two dogs’ ablutions, bag unfurled and ready.

I just can’t ignore these untended evacuations. Just can’t.

There we were the other morning, myself and Lily and Bella, out on a miserable early Sunday on our well-trodden circumnavigation of a block in our estate. So wet and cold it was, even the cars in their forlorn parking spots looked abandoned and unloved, each exhaust pipe dripping rainwater, rust and despair. 

And there it was before us, a phewy queue of gooey poo. Brazenly splat on the path … loitering in the grass off piste… leaning nonchalantly against a fence … hiding out behind a hedge. Fat ones, lean ones, dribbly ones, decaying and furrily brittle ones. Vomit-green … pus-yellow … sewer-brown … bilgewater-beige … beige-beige. A whose poo of every breed and size of dog.

Well, eight poos I counted and despatched as best I could into my dripping dark green poo bag. The worst? The two particularly large and disgusting loose slimy ones adhering to the grass so sodden, only 90 per cent, at most, of which I could extract from the blades to which they clung defiantly, leaving behind a shiny smear that caked the butt of the clump. 

A regular bag of dung swag it was before too long. Quite the hefty, swinging load to be deposited in the bin out on the main road.

Oh, how could I forget to mention the four black poo bags I found behind a hedge. Poo in them. This one really gets me: some dog walker has done the good citizen thing, seemingly, swished out the poo bag, gathered up the fresh crud, binned it — and then tossed it behind this hedgerow.

But why pick up other people’s canine excreta? Even when my wife, when she’s with me, hates to see me doing so. 

Now my wife hates litter, and picks up stuff all the time for the bin, but scoop up some gobshite’s dog poo? ‘Let someone else do it’, she says. And I’m thinking, which someone else? The someone else who has already passed it, will pass in again, and could even be the someone else who owns the dog that dropped it there in the first place?

I guess I do it out of some sort of enlightened self-interest, as I see it.

It’s like these poos fouling this tiny corner of our homeland, are also actually desecrating my living place. So cleaning it up is ultimately cleaning up my neighbourhood. And the world. Our world is my world, and vice versa. The whole neighbourhood looks better, we all benefit, and I benefit too.

Not that I don’t resent bagging other people’s dog poo. I fume and snarl at those who would leave their hounds loose to evacuate their bowels, or worse, or let them do so on the end of a lead and leave it there.

Hence the original idea of posting a tirade and putting it out on our residents group. And risk the ire of the anonymous posters who exist and promulgate even in our tiny Facebook group. Defacing Facebook.

Shouldn’t they be cut off and they can start their own Faceless-book group?

I was reading something recently, that research has show that agit-posters and provocateurs, be they right, left-wing, batshit-crazy wing, only form about 7% of the population, but the vast majority of us are silenced, numbed and shouted down into paralysed inaction by this small minority of cranks and fools.

But look, maybe the revolution can start here. In our own little corner of the world.

You have to start somewhere … scoop that poop.  

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