#78

Been thinking about feces today. I'll elaborate.

As a kid, I liked the idea of having a dog in the apartment enough to ask for one. None of the attendant realities appealed to me at all, though, and once my parents explained it to me a a couple of different times a couple of different ways, I left off for good. By the time I was six I felt like maybe it would be tolerable if we happened to one day have the kind of life where a dog would be possible, if I wasn't the one who had to be responsible for its feeding, health, safety, and most especially, its poops.

In short, I haven't seen the appeal of owning a companion animal for a long time, and a bedrock for that has always been that I have considered it beneath human dignity to handle the waste product of another animal if that animal is not the covalent in true husbandry, such as would be called manure, or for scientific inquiry. I'm talking about plops and turds, here. Usually left someplace inconvenient.

Other considerations (not exhaustive):

• yeah, you can think of it as symbiosis or coevolution but it can also be easily construed as slavery and I believe there have always been individuals and institutions ready and willing to take it to that level on the real. The carriage driver whipping the overworked nag whose entire lifespan he has stolen and brutalized to death in the street the very hour her overtaxed strength gives out: an important image.
• obviously, researchers maintain perfect dignity as they study animal feces in their noble efforts to increase our understanding of wildlife.
• most creatures bred to live in houses suffer from the same breeds of terrible and unique afflictions we self-domesticators have inflicted on ourselves and each other, such as overbreeding to the tune of gross musculoskeletal disorders, air passages that barely allow the lungs to inflate, etc. Humans selectively breed canines and felines to capitalize on traits that create miserable, stricken lives, and feed them dead food which sickens the animals and dooms them to a further-ravaged, cancer-ridden graveslope. 
• creatures bred and raised more responsibly require vast territories and huge demands on their energy and drive to maintain exemplary health. Such animals are constantly denied this by the majority of modern animal owners, largely because of factors outside their control, which is sad for everyone. People love their frustrated, anxious, and depressed animals, of course, and they love their people, but then, they would, in a codependent relationship; all these afflictions and gains are comorbid and duly portioned. I don't like the thought of playing loving jailer, personally.

Yes, pet ownership is something I had essentially relegated to a privileged fraction of the world's people, all things being equitable and just, but of course that would be a poorer world. To say that it would be more ethical for there to be less life and that most human beings do not deserve the love and companionship of creatures is to me outstandingly cruel. Life lives to beget life, to crowd in on life, to push into the cracks and break open new niches and inscribe new signs and boundaries. Sometimes it's unspeakably ugly to witness. 

Yet life endures incredible privations in the name of love, and rightly so. There is value in acting out of sheer irrationality even if we don't always like paying the price, just as there is value perfect reasoning even if it is not desirable and even harmful to act out its consequences. 

My younger brother irrationally went and got a fucking dog one day even though I told him not to do that five hundred times in a row. Now he lives on a different part of the continent, engaged in peacework. I'm here taking his dog for walks on freezing winter morning. He needs an operation in his leg, someone cut his nuts off when he was little more than a baby, he had PTSD from abuse when he came to live with the family, it took a year to calm  him down, and he's still a neurotic sort. This is an animal with intentionally bred dwarfism. But he's happy a lot. He makes us happy a lot. He's some life in our life. 

Which brings me back to handling another animal's shit, which I realized this morning, I'm finally just totally cool with. Huh, I thought to myself this morning. Once again it is shown, though you would think it would not need be so many times over, that one can  get used to anything. I do not resent picking up this warm turd that the family dog just rhythm-squeezed out its rectum in the slightest. Huh. Huh! Wonders unceasing.

*

Monkeys and apes will shit into their hands to throw it at whatever they're mad at or scared of. People do this too.

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According to W.C. Fields: "there comes a time in the affairs of man when he must take the bull by the tail and face the situation." Also: "What is a dog, anyway? Merely an antidote for an inferiority complex..."

*

The family dog wished to take a second shit upon his walk this morning, and I lacked a second bag. He almost shat in someone's front yard before I snapped to and unfortunately yanked him from his business. However, it is very very poor form to have that sort of thing go down, so to simply abide was not an option. He tried to stop a couple more times but I hustled him out of the neighborhood we were at and onto a spit of land off the road where he could do his thing and I could quickly hoof back to after I took him home.

Having done that, I returned to the stop and hunted down his leavings. As I picked up the little pile of dogshit, I shuddered, gripped with fresh revulsion. I experienced a fundamental difference in the handling of fresh shit, filled with bacteria and complex living systems, rife with the potential to nourish, to fertilize, to give rise to life anew, and the feeling of this cold lump of matter, rendered biologically inert to human senses. It felt deader by far than a corpse, deader by far than cold raw meat dead for days and sealed in plastic. It was not sterile, not really, I know this in my intellect, but to my body, it epitomized sterility. DNA memories bloomed in my chest about it.

I guess if one were afflicted with coprophagia it would be different.

*

I've had to handle plenty of fecal matter, professionally and personally. It's not easy, at first. Personally, you know, I'm a big brother, I got lots of younger cousins. Sometimes your friends have problems. Sometimes you do. Illness strikes, catastrophe rains down a cruel rain. Your roomate heedlessly destroys their own bowels, but also, never properly cleans up after, leaving you to chip away at a hardened, reeking lacquer underneath layers of fresher spatter should you flag in cleaning up after him, or should you stop doing so in a vain attempt to get him to notice there is a problem. Professionally, well, you end up cleaning some bathrooms, at least in my career path. Sometimes the food you serve them or previous foods or sheer bad luck means they create violent, demonic scenes in these bathrooms. Sometimes drunk people seem to wish to give vent to a form of pre-mimetic creativity with only the material of the body; back to apes. As a person who has often let the lizard brain take over through the fermented passage, I have no room for judgment, but also, as a person who has cleaned up lots after others, I can hold up my head.

See, dignity has nothing to do with excretion, with "waste", which is not. Shit simply is. You gotta clean it up, or it'll cause problems. Simple. Finally I have come to be able to look Dolores Claiborne in the eye. Finally I have ceased to think myself as better or cleaner or any different than shit in my own hand. Nothing is better or worse than shit. Nothing ever could be.

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When I was a kid, a real little kid, I stepped in massive dog doo in my nice shoes. The shock of reek  that floated up to me as my hard-soled black shoe squished through the center of the turd almost knocked my head off my shoulders; I can smell the damn thing now. I'm getting over it, though. Ha!


--JL