You know you’re turning into a curmudgeon when you can’t decide whether to write about dog poop or leaf blowers.
The anti-leaf blower
lobby is already gaining traction in the Letters section of the Light.
Personally, I’m fine with whatever construction noise, leaf blowing and
tree trimmer chain sawing goes on during the week, but on the weekends, I’d love
to give all of those guys mandatory time off.
Fire up that leaf blower on a Sunday morning while people are outside
reading the paper and the Noise Police would come and stuff you into a metal
trash can which the neighbors could pound on with aluminum rakes until you
promised never to do it again.
Ah, I feel better
already.
OK, now that we’ve
covered that, let’s whine about dog poop.
Now, we don’t technically own a dog although we seem to be habitually
harboring our grand dog, Winston the Wonder Dog. We genuinely love dogs, and in particular, the
perpetually-recalcitrant Winston.
But if you opened our
trash can on any given day, you’d think we were running a kennel for digestively-compromised
canines. This is because our city-mandated-and-dispensed
black trash receptacle lives at the far end of our driveway nestled next to our
house, its unfortunate accessibility making it the neighborhood poop dump of
choice. In the pre-city-dispensed receptacle
days, our trash cans lived safely inside our back gate away from
excretory-abandoning miscreants. But
the required new bins are too big for that space.
I do not exaggerate when
I say that opening the lid of a trash bin with a week’s worth of neighborhood
pooch poop is a veritable biohazard, a fetid feculence, a mephitic miasma, a
noisome nose full. It could drop a goat
from ten yards.
Our neighborhood is
truly Dog Central. You can’t go five
minutes without seeing someone walking a dog. I can understand that dog owners
don’t want to walk for a half hour clutching a bag of steamy effluvium. But so plentiful is the canine population in
our area that there are a number of strategically-located dog poop bag
dispensing stations which include a convenient bin to deposit their
odiferously-amplified contents. I often see two guys driving up in their city
truck to empty these bins and replenish the bag supply. I’m not sure what they pay them. But given our own experience, I’m guessing
it’s not enough.
Despite the city’s
uncharacteristic prescience in providing these bins, we would hear the lid of
our trash can opening and closing all day long and the gentle thud of bags of
leaden dog leavings hitting the bottom.
So we decide to importune the offenders with a polite entreaty on the
top: “Please - No dog poop in the trash
bin!”
Like that worked.
I was telling my friend
Lorraine about this and she said, “Well, geesh, Inga. You totally DARED the dog people with that
sign. I’m surprised they haven’t tweeted
your address!” Even I agree that people
who leave jars of water on their grass (which are supposed to, but don’t
actually, keep animal ordure off your lawn) or who post curt “Curb your dog!”
signs positively beg dog owners to do
the opposite. After their dog dumps on
your sidewalk, a photo of the offending egesta is probably posted on their
Facebook page within minutes.
But as I explained to
Lorraine, in our case, the sign (written on about half of an 8x11 piece of
paper) is discreetly taped to the top of the can. You have to actually walk up
to the trash bin at the end of our driveway to see it and then you can’t miss
it. I agree that if it were on the side of
the bin and visible from the street, I would be declaring open season on
myself. (“Let’s fill @trashcan with
#dogpoop LOL!”)
Interestingly, a neighborhood
friend said that when the sanitation truck missed her trash one week and the
receptacle sat on the street for four days, it acquired at least two dozen bags
of puppy putrescence. Puzzling, she said,
since there was a city doo-disposal bin exactly sixteen feet away.
Despite the sign, I
still hear the lid of my trash can being raised during the day, but more
quietly now, and I will have to say, much less often than before. I confess that I sometimes entertain
delicious fantasies of rigging it in some excretorially vengeful way. But forget to disarm it even once and the
garbage men would never pick up our trash again.
No, I think the real
solution lies in wheeling our bin to the middle of our front yard and letting
the ever-unpredictable Winston chase the baggers around the front yard doing
his crazed pit bull imitation. On one of
those laps, they’d see that the sign on the top now read “Make My Day.”
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