Large Fierce Mammal

We’ve all met the sunshiny creepy asshole who spouts some iteration of the phrase, “When life serves you lemons, make lemonade!” as if it represented some kind of a solution to the real life problem of your car just having blown a head gasket. I wish it were otherwise, but the reason we’ve all met that asshole is because there are so fucking many of them. In fact they’re the reason all those pussified, touchie-feelie “Chicken Soup for the (fill in the blank) Soul” books keep getting produced. While one of the most annoying things about this mantra and the dickheads who chant it is that it’s presented like it was some sort of metaphoric solution to all life’s problems, the thing that annoys me the most about it is that lemons are a piss poor choice for such a grand intention.

Think about it. Unless you’ve spent time in the deepest and darkest of the planet’s shitholes, everybody you’ve met knows what a lemon is and has some personal experience with it. They know that in its raw, natural state it’s sour enough to turn most people’s heads inside out and its juice is enjoyable as hell to get in a cut, as long as it’s someone else’s cut. Diluted and sweetened that same juice makes a deliciously refreshing drink, and can be used to flavour orgasmically tasty deserts. Sour or not, lemons are useful and respected. So what’s the point of referring to them as though receiving one was demanding of immediate action to turn it into a beverage?

To my mind, a better approach would include an ingredient that nobody is indifferent to and that is widely criticized by the Great Unwashed. My choice: Dog Poop.

Dogs and I, we go way back; and therefore by extension does my relationship with dog poop. I learned early in life that I have a gift I suppose the term “shit magnet” would literally describe. Many times have I walked at night across pastures heavily mined with cow patties and somehow managed to evade every one, but if I got off a plane at Cairo airport and there was one fragment of dog shit anywhere in Egypt it would be magically attached to the bottom of my boot the instant I set foot on the tarmac.

Yet this life experience has not soured me (not a reference to any poop-lemon connection) to maintaining a bright and realistic view of three simple and unalterable facts:

1. What goes in must come out;
2. Better out than in, to quote Shrek; and
3. Shit happens.

Whether my outlook respecting dog poop grew from my resolute, confident, and self-reliant nature or the other way around is still a topic of hot debate in the pubs of Lunenburg County, and while it has sparked many a fist fight over the years it cannot be denied that I have successfully used dog poop to solve some real life problems.

In 1998 I bought a house on York Street in old town Lunenburg. At the time I was known to have a pack of five dogs, in fact was a very visible dog owner, and on top of that it was widely known that dogs found roaming at large by the police were routinely brought to me to be cared for while I located their owners. I had a 100% success rate in that by the way.

When word got out that a deal had been struck to buy the York Street property, the fat, lazy, stupid asshole who was renting the house behind it, a person who had never met or interacted with me in any way, began spreading rumours through the neighbourhood surrounding my soon to be residence that I would be moving in with a huge pack of dogs that would bark and howl day and night.

Equally well known throughout the town was that I operated the emergency dispatch centre that processed and dispatched the calls directed at five Lunenburg County fire departments, including the one serving the Town of Lunenburg, and the Lunenburg-Mahone Bay Police Service. My office, the dispatch centre, and my personal residence were all to be housed in the York Street property with everything that brought with it: Staffing 24/7 by competent and highly trained dispatchers. Regular presence of police vehicles and personnel at all hours. All the kinds of things one would think would actually improve the comfort level of a neighbourhood. Well … a non drug dealing neighbourhood that didn’t make its living from prostitution and racketeering anyway which this wasn’t, so you get my point. All that mattered to the asshole and his equally stupid wife was that I was moving in with dogs, and details of the rumours were fed back to me by other, more friendly, soon to be neighbours even before I moved in.

I wasn’t in residence a month before a little old lady whose house I knew to be three blocks away stopped me in the street on my way to the post office and confided that she had been approached by the asshole’s asshole wife to sign a petition against me and my dogs.

“Were you?” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “I told her I never heard your dogs barking at all.”

“So you didn’t sign her petition then.”

“Oh of course I signed it,” said the old lady, “I didn’t want to make bad neighbours!”

I stared at her a moment and then said, “You knew it wasn’t true but you signed a petition against me and my dogs. Doesn’t that make you a bad neighbour to me?”

Transfixed by my gaze she stood a moment, and then recoiled as though I had slapped her. Her lips began moving but no sound came out. I left her that way as I continued my errand, and as far as I remember she was there until she died a few years later.

About a week later there was a knock at the door. I answered to find the asshole’s asshole wife standing, all alone and defenseless, shoving a document in my direction. You guessed it. She was delivering the very petition I had heard so much about, bearing half a dozen spidery signatures left by people who didn’t want to be bad neighbours, and a preamble describing my alleged sins in a language that may have been a primitive form of English. I told her what to do with her petition and went back to work.

As the next few months went on, I learned that the asshole had made repeated complaints to the Town of Lunenburg, alleging that my dogs barked night and day; something that could easily be given the lie because on many of the alleged occasions members of various law enforcement organizations were present drinking coffee with my dispatchers. The Town’s bylaw enforcement guy humoured him by hanging around the neighbourhood off and on for a few days after which the asshole was finally told to drop it or face the consequences.

So one day soon after, I took my Golden Mountain Dog Cinders out in my well fenced yard to work off some steam. It was around 11:00 AM, and our play was boisterous enough to raise some barking from both of us. At the sound of barking, the asshole erupted from his back door and down the three stairs to his lawn headed straight for my back fence.

My fence was six feet high and of solid plank construction, and it was obvious that he hadn’t registered my presence. As he hustled red faced muttering oaths of impotent rage toward the fence, I simply stood looking at him. He was about eight feet from the fence when he realized I was there and skidded to a panting blustering stop.

After a moment of silence I asked, “What is it you were planning to do exactly?”

He got redder and then cranked up enough bluster to start venting. Yet I regarded him with calmness until I found my gaze drawn to a fresh turd Cinders had just laid only a few feet to my left. That turd called to me so I bent down, picked it up, looked my suddenly silent back neighbour in the eye, and spoke one word.

“Catch!”

I have never seen a fat, out of shape, angry shithead run backwards with so much precision! He was across his lawn, up the stairs, and behind a slammed screen door before the subject of my underhand toss hit the ground. From that vantage he glowered as Cinders and I finished our play time, but it became clear from then on that the toss of a single turd was the genesis for the turning of the tide. That day, Cinders had laid, and I had tossed, the turd smelled round the world … or at least our neighbourhood.

Fast forward to autumn 2009. Now living on the edge of a pine woods near Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, Diana and I have noticed an increasing amount of destructive interest in our garbage on the part of a racoon family whose range clearly overlaps ours. Amazing creatures raccoons. Given the incentive, they can open the cover of a top heavy compost cart like the one pictured without tipping it over, only doing so if the contents are worth further effort. If you don’t lock your car they’ll hot wire it.

Our Pack consists at the moment of five dogs, four of them large, and visiting dogs from client Packs are also common here. We pick up a LOT of shit in a week that is temporarily held in a large bin pending disposal in the compost cart. Yet, as with so many things in life, timing is everything. Dump the shit at the wrong time and it has a chance to break down before the bi-weekly garbage day rolls around. Let it marinate in its own juices though, and then pour it over your green cart contents the night before garbage day, and it sends to the ‘coons what politicians like to call “a clear message”. Bags of household garbage piled around the green cart are as safe as if they were behind a force field.

The end result, after extensive testing, is that the neighbours either side of us, each of whom suffers the inconvenience of having only one dog, get their garbage strewn about the landscape. As with most things there are cons to counterbalance the pros. In this case we learned we have to move our car further away from the green cart because the stench was removing the paint and causing rust around the wheel wells on the facing side, but at least we don’t have to handle our refuse more than once.

While we sympathize with the neighbours and will gladly share this countermeasure with them as soon as final testing ends and our patent lawyers give the all clear, what we have in the mean time is a family of raccoons that would rather hide in the skid marked crotch of Bubba’s blue jeans than come near our garbage.