I'm not a dog person. I don't care if you are--go with god, you know? on that and all your perverse likes and dislikes--but I'm not. Actually, I like to think I'm more of a cheetah person. A friend of mine recently went to Africa to help with a cheetah conservation project, and I was totally hoping she'd bring one back as a pet. (One guy on the trip got bitten by a cheetah, which, seriously, that guy will never have to buy himself another drink for the rest of his life.) Just for starters, if you taught your pet cheetah to fetch a ball, it'd have that thing back in your hand pretty much before you threw it--like my cousins, Dr. Einstein, it's all relative!--unless you, like, fire the ball out of a cannon, and I would totally buy a cannon just for that purpose if I had a pet cheetah. For another, my cheetah would be easy to feed; I'd just turn it loose every now and again on my block, which would keep down the rat population, not to mention the dog population. (Of course, it would need a hu-hu-hu-yuge litter box, especially after dining on St. Bernard.) The dog zero-population-growth would be kind of a boon, because, I have to tell you, the dog owners on my block have not been picking up the slack. And by "the slack," I mean, "their dogs' shit."

            Now, listen, I get what a hardship it is to pick up your dog's shit. I would not pick up the excrement of any creature to which I was not related by my very own personal DNA, and very damn few of those. Frankly, I would question who is the pet and who the owner, who is, in a word, in charge, in any relationship that requires me to pick up something else's shit. But, you see, dog owners, you have taken on a sacred responsibility, to love and care for your pet. And also? To pick up its fucking turds. It's right there in the fine print. You know where else it is? In the ordinances of the City Of Chicago. Because our city fathers and city mothers don’t like stepping in your fucking dog's shit either. For one thing, they can afford nicer shoes than me. Crime, proverbs to the contrary, does too pay.

            I know you, dog owner on my block, love your widdle doggie-woggie like a member of your family, and your widdle doggie-woggie loves you like a big source of meaty dog food, but when that widdle doggie-woggie has converted said meaty dog food into doggie doo, I am not, contrary perhaps to your misinformed opinion, eagerly awaiting my very next opportunity to baptize my hiking boots with that very doggie doo. The parents of the little kids who live next door to me are equally uninterested in teaching their kids one of life's great lessons: just when you think everything is going great, boom, you step in dogshit. (I know; they do not have the spirit of the philosopher.) Nor am I eager for their kids to learn that lesson either, because, being kids, they will then track the dogshit through the hallways of my condo. (And also? My neighbors' kids actually are members of their family, and you don't see them leaving kid shit all over the sidewalk.) I get nothing from your cuddly li'l bundle of furry joy (and don't get me wrong; I want nothing from said cuddly li'l set of instinctive responses that you anthropomorphize into love for you), and asking me, and the neighbors' kids, and everyone else in the neighborhood to step in shit so you can think you are loved by the only thing on earth stupid enough to do so is a bridge too far.

            Also? And not coincidentally? It's the fucking law. Q.v supra, re Chicago city ordinances, again, some more. I am considering becoming a Chicago cop, just so when I see someone not picking up his dog's shit, I can shoot him. Or perhaps I'll just shoot the pile of dogshit; dogshit spatter is a bitch. (Hee! Bitch. See what I did there?)

            (Yes, I understand that cops cannot just shoot people, or even dogshit, willy-nilly. I will claim that the dogshit was resisting arrest.) (Also, I'd like to be a cop in order to give people tickets for new infractions that I would make up: Bad Wig, Stupid Driving, Drunk and Dysfunctional.)

            Look, pookie, I know it's a hardship. It's undoubtedly more than a little retch-worthy feeling that warm slimy stinking dog-dump separated from your own personal hand-skin by only a thin sheet of plastic, but that's the price you pay for unconditional love. (The price I pay? Generally around $200/hour.) (And it's not so unconditional either; seriously, Bambi, what do you mean, no "'Adam and Eventually?'") (Ours is a fallen world.) I am not a fan of the excreta either, which is but one reason I--and feel free to say this with me--don't. have. a. dog. Nor do I appear in German porn.

            But you, dog owners of my block, have chosen to. (Have a dog. Not appear in German porn. So far as I know.) I know my libertarian friends--of which I have none--like to imagine that all the rights they claim they have come without responsibilities, that there's never anyone's nose around when they want to swing their fists (well, or they don't care if there is), but that, my friend, is fantastic bullshit. It is simply pushing off on all the rest of us the costs of your choices. Like, say, just for example, the cost to me of an hour or so of reaming the end-you-should-excuse-the-expression-products of doggie digestion--doggie digestion that did not occur inside my own personal dog, because of how I don't choose to have one--out of the recesses of the sole of my boot. Which very boot, the next time I see your dog taking a squat and you without a bag to pick it up, I will use to kick your ass up around your shoulders, after I have enticed you to bend over with the false yet irresistible promise of a stirring game of Leapfrog. Or maybe I'll just feed you and your dog to my pet cheetah, which I've sent away for from that company that also sells sea-monkeys.

            Let's try to remember what our mothers and fathers should have taught us before letting us out in public, shall we? We must clean up our messes. Even greedy paranoid homicidal Fred C. Dobbs, Bogart's character in The Treasure Of the Sierra Madre, understands that he and his companions have to put the mountain that was so good to them back the way it was before they leave. (Of course he dies in the end, but that wasn't the mountain's fault, nor that of his perhaps only good impulse in the movie.) It doesn't matter if you are Dow Chemical, Exxon, the Republican Party or the fratboy dipshit living down the street from me with two Great Danes in a one-bedroom apartment: we must clean up our messes.