Blame it on dog poop

With awareness of the fact that I have mentioned dog poop in this medium many, many times now (here, here and here for starters), I have yet another dog poop story. To put it on context though, I must explain that my current mental health status is questionable. For reasons that are hard to put into words, I am experiencing incredible stress and anxiety of late and these feelings are presenting themselves in the forms of:

• Weight fluctuations
• Lack of sleep
• Increased grinding of my teeth
• Inability to open my mouth all of the way during the week (related to grinding)
• Headaches during the week (again, related to the grinding)
• Irritability

So now, I have ideas about why all of this is occurring, reasons I will not be sharing here for fear of being dooced. But the important thing to take note of is that I am stressed and often on the brink of losing it.

For the past few days I have been dog sitting my family dog, Maggie Dog. Maggie Dog is kinda awesome because she is such a pu$$y and kind of worthless as far as dogs go but I still love her, of course. So the other day I went home over lunch to take Maggie Dog for a walk and to take a break and try and regain some mental stability. Popsicle in one hand and Maggie Dog’s leash in the other, we walked about a whopping 4 blocks. (Maggie Dog weighs about 13 pounds and is 10 years old so four blocks is pretty far for her. I took her on a mile-and-a-half run the other day and I think it almost killed her.)

During the walk Maggie Dog made a deposit on someone’s tree lawn. I had of course forgotten a bag but thought I would pick up her deposit on the way back from the walk with my then empty Popsicle wrapper. (Being a dog owner / sitter has some really nasty aspects that no one talks about.) As we continue on our walk this neighbor woman starts RUNNING after me. RUNNING after me for like two blocks before I notice her.

“Excuse me,” she says. “Are you from this neighborhood?” Now, to clarify, this is the shit that pisses me off about communities and small towns that people can feel like we are a scoop-poop kind of neighborhood or whatever. But, I say, “Yes, I live down the street,” since she knows this and has talked to me on multiple occasions. “Well,” she says. “I saw your dog just poop and you didn’t pick it up.”

I was pretty dumbfounded so I mostly stared at her and explained my plan and then kept walking. But this, I tell you, was the final straw.

And so I went home and cried.

And I could blame it on the dog poop obsessed neighbor. But instead, I think I will lame it on dog poop. And all of the unmentionable things that have led me to a place where dog poop can lead me to tears.