The other day our Smartest Dog In the World diagnosed Taylor with strep throat. I finally feel justified naming her Dr. Harley Medicine Dog, now if I can just get her a TV show. Aaaannnd, there it goes.
Stream of consciousness slows to a trickle
Desire to write down my thoughts becomes fickle
The bats in my head
Began stirring and bred
And none of this rhymes with Nantucket.
Really? A limerick!? I don’t write a column in forever and that’s what comes out? Hrumph. At least it’s bats and not flies in my head. I pick up dog poop so I know what’s on flies’ feet.
I have two VLD’s (Very Large Dogs, make and model: English Mastiff Slobberpottomus and Great Dane Goofball) and their poops are the size of fallen redwoods so they’re easy to spot. You gotta be vigilant, though, or they’ll overtake the yard. I once waited five days to do doo doo duty and when I went out back there was a National Fly and Dung Beetle Convention going on. You may remember it as The Great El Paso Fly Invasion of 2015. Wouldn’t ‘The Dung Beatles’ be a great name for a really lousy Beatles cover band? Anyways, I became the Luke Freakin’ Skywalker of flyswatters that summer, probably single-handedly preventing a fly in the ointment. Everywhere. I’m still waiting on my hero’s parade.
The real unsung heroes are people who pick up after their dog when they’re on a walk. For ‘is dog’s tail sagged, An’ a plastic poopy bag, Was all the field equipment ‘e could find, When the smelly poop-train lay, An pickin’ it up through the day, ‘Cause ‘e ain’t leavin’ ‘is arfers poop be’ind.
And people who keep their dogs on a leash. These seem to be a pair of tasks WAY too difficult for most people who walk their dogs around Fierro Park, even though there are two conveniently located mutt mitt stations always loaded and ready for action. If I left my dogs’ deposits unclaimed at the park, in a matter of days logging companies would be setting up camp in the playground and dung beetles would rent every available house and apartment in the area. You know, that might be good for our economy. I wonder if I can get one of those ubiquitous property tax breaks for bringing in outside investors? Or I could walk my pups around Duranguito and the cranes and bulldozers would be so busy removing giant poops that they would never get around to demolishing buildings. Unlike City Council, I’ll leave it up to you, the citizens, to tell me what to do.
In the meantime, I’ll thank Bela Lugosi that it’s bats and not flies in my head because, think about it, flies spend half their life standing on something that’s dead, rotten or came out of a critter’s butt. I DO NOT want them flying in my head and landing on my brain with their poopy feet. But if they ever do and it makes me sick, at least I have Dr. Harley Medicine Dog to diagnose me.
But no licking, I know where dogs’ tongues have been, too.