On each side street of my city any time of year, you'll find 2 or 3 (at the very least) hand-sized bags filled with palm-sized portions of puppy shit. These bags, whether squished, busted or still intact, are sometimes found dangling from the branches of trees, but are usually left in the middle of the sidewalk. Presumably so mom will know where to find them when she comes to clean up our filthy town.
But I guess expecting dog owners to carry Rover's poop all the way home is pretty unreasonable of me. And it's not like they're rude jerks who don't even bother to bag it.
No, they're the yuppie gods of compromise, lovingly wrapping each individual dog turd, but instead of lugging the stinky homemade stressballs all the way home, they leave them for me to find. I wonder if its strategic and surreptitious, or if they carry the PRIZE INSIDE bags around and sneaky-drop them when they think no one's looking?
Next logical question -- Where does it go, if not on the sidewalk?
Would you believe --
the compost bin? The city, you see, encourages eco-minded folk to mix those individually black-bagged fido leavings in with the potato peelings! I shit you not! The plastic baggies that you'll still see melting into the sidewalks year round are biodegradable you see, and gosh, folks use cow manure for fertilizer all the time. So it's the
exact same thing! Right?
And here's where my head explodes. Toronto closes public toilets throughout the 90s and early into the 00s with the excuse that gay people like to fuck which is dirty-wrong and AIDS, while in the meantime and in totally unrelated news, all the park benches get seemingly pointless dividers down the middle so that no one can sleep on them anymore. Same bat channel, the downtown shelters get closed while new shelters open up on the outskirts (6$ a day just to get there and back downtown where the panhandling's a little better). So, while the city's fattest legislate away the right of homeless people to stop walking, there's human crap in every semi-private public nook all up and down the city streets because the city has left people with nowhere left to GO.
But what we
can do, because
we're people who care, is individually bag each shit from each purse poodle, mix em all in with our leftover food, and then spread that nutrient rich eco-benefit all over our gardens. Not to mention all of the cat piss, shit, litter, bird cage stuff and so on. Dagnabbit, now that's work worth doing!
I hear you ask, "What else goes into a healthy Torontonian mulch?" How about raw fish and chicken, leftover cake, baby diapers, candy and menstrual pads?!
YUM! This lovely mix is then sent (after 'chemical digestion' and some kind of pressing process) to Compost Farms, where our old plastic and nastiness goes to make "high quality compost" (that looks suspiciously like landfill).
But back to the point. This, to me, epitomizes the Strange Times: side-stepping around one of those ridiculous carefully enviro-wrapped little black baggies only to step
in that long red-brown thick smear of human shit on my way to work.
