Bottle

The thing is, it’s actually worse for the guy if the fucker doesn’t break. I’ve seen four guys get hit with bottles in my life. Three of those the bottle just broke. Smashed like normal. One of those guys, he got a sick cut on his head – blood streamin’ down. Blood everywhere. Anyway, the fourth one…fourth guy – guy’s name was G.R. – For him the bottle wouldn’t break. Fucker stays whole. At the same time he bottle hit his head, I hear this crack. Like a dull crack. Like a knuckle cracking, but loud. And this dude fell out. I mean G.R. (as he said this, the guy telling the story slid toward the edge of the couch and looked down like he was looking at G.R.)I thought he was dead. No – scratch that – I knew he was dead. ‘Cause he was.

Fuckin’ guy was dead?

He was dead. G.R. was dead. Dead when he hit the ground they said.

So you saw – what you’re telling me – you saw a guy hit a guy in the head with a bottle. You knew the guy who got hit. You knew his name and everything.

I knew him himself. I drank with him, fucking like every night. He was a friend of my friend. He was always around. You know come to think…G.R. I actually saw him get hit with a bottle twice. That was the second time! The first time…

So you saw a guy you know get killed by getting hit with a bottle. Murder, basically, is what you saw.

Fuck yeah. In fact, lots of people saw it. It was done in a room full of people and the dude who did it stayed for a long time afterwards. First he yelled at G.R. dead on the ground, and then he had some drinks.

He had some drinks. A guy’s dead and this guy have drinks? Fuck.

Yeah

That’s a fucker.

He was a fucker. The whole thing was because of G.R.s slutty girlfriend. In fact, she was the person who I saw hit him the first time. She hit him with a bottle while he was already passed out. And, actually this is kind of funny, he woke up. He woke up from being passed out drunk. And – fuck I’ll never forget this –he wakes up, looks at his girlfriend, she’s glaring back…He walks across the room and sort of mimes lifting something in the corner, and then he whips out his dick and takes a five minute stinky-ass asparagus piss right in the corner. No lie- five minutes just pissing.

(laughing) Fuck!

Five minutes and she’s just holding the broken bottle and crying and staring at him. He’s bleeding, and pissing, and he says…

(still dying with laughter) he says??!

He says “I’m just trying to get to the Post Office”!

(Convulses with laughter)

The Post Office!!!

Yep. Fucking post office. Blood and piss everywhere. They left together that night. They were together even after that. Right up until he died.

(still laughing)

Yeah, he was a funny fucking guy.

Dogshitland

The neighborhood where I live is nice. Looking out the window on a snowy day, or during the summer after a rain when everything is green and overgrown, it’s easy to see how people driving through might see it: an archetype of sorts. A picture-perfect northeastern suburb where people care about how their lawn is landscaped and whether or not their cars have been washed recently. A place where you trust the people that live next to you, and you can allow them to take stuff out of your garage and your backyard without asking first. A place where children can be allowed to roam, unaccounted for without fear of being harassed or threatened. And that person’d be right – this place is all of those things and more. Living here is pretty fucking awesome – except for the dogshit.

Yesterday morning, just as I was opening the garage for the first time that day and preparing to gauge the day’s weather, I became witness yet again to a situation that I regret to say, occurs WAY more often than you’d think it would – or at least way more often than I’d think it would. As the door slowly shimmied its way up, revealing itself from the ground up was the familiar sight of a neighbor of mine allowing his dog to shit indiscriminately on my lawn. Now, aside from the fact that the basic premise here is gross and potentially disease-causing, I have to wonder: Why? Not “Why do dogs shit?” – I’m aware of the gastro-intestinal process that takes place inside a fed dog. No. I mean why is it OK? I’ve seen other dogs shit on other neighbor’s lawns with nary a raised eyebrow. In fact, coming from an urban environment, Lawn-shitting was something that I had to get used to. It became an unanswered question among many others and it gets back-burnered every time something more important comes up, and then I remember it every time something like this happens. So why? WHY MOTHERFUCKER WHY???!!!

Let me make a short and by no means complete list of the reasons why it shouldn’t be ok to let a dog shit on somebody’s lawn (and yes cum-head I’m aware that you pick up the shit with a plastic sandwich bag worn like a glove and that you take said shit away after the animal is finished. Doesn’t matter. Read on)

1) Fucking dog shit is fucking disgusting. This is the first point and as far as I’m concerned we need go no farther than this. We will…But we don’t have to. It’s Dog shit you fucking jerk! DOG SHIT!!! It’s your dirty fucking dogs dirty fucking ass. It’s in full view! On my fucking lawn!! Just typing those words I can actual smell generic dirty dog-ass smell and that smell is not nice. Anything involving shit and a dog should never take place on a lawn. Front lawn, back lawn, my lawn, your lawn…It makes no difference.

2) There are children here. I’m not one of these sheltering, coddling, faggot hippie-types who try to keep their kids in a bubble and pretend that people don’t die and that life doesn’t really suck and that animals just eat and magically never have to void their little animal bowels. That said, I don’t see any reason to have an installation on my front goddamn lawn paying fucking Technicolor tribute to same. My daughter knows that her uncle Jim died last year and that means that he’s gone forever. We didn’t – however – have Jimmy’s corpse rotting on our fucking porch for a week to drive the point home.

3) That shit smells like shit!!!! Really self explanatory but then again so is the entire crux of this essay. Picking up shit with a sandwich bag worn glove-wise doth not a smell-eater constitute. Go away fucking dog-owning stench bringing old man!

4) Germs. Let me use an analogous example to make my case: For whatever reason, my three year old shits in the tub while taking a bath. While it’s funny in the retelling let me assure you that the reality was horrifying to say the least. Of all the things that I used that night to disinfect the both child and the tub and the entire bathroom, never once did it cross my mind that sticking my hand in a sandwich bag and grabbing the floating shit logs would IN ANY FRIGGIN WAY solve the problem once and for all. By my calculations there has been un-disinfected shit dropped on just about 100% of my lawn. I’m looking at the sentence I just wrote and I think I just got a huge zit on my eyebrow.

Enough with the list I’m sure you understand. Perhaps you yourself are a dog owner, and maybe you live where I live. Perhaps you are just a dog-owner who lives somewhere. No matter because I’m going to bring you into the state of the art with an apparently heretofore un-suggested suggestion. Let’s not have your animal make on my, or anybody else’s lawn shall we?

How have we arrived here anyway? In a society where I can conduct business of any kind anywhere with whomever I want from a seated position in my living room, In a society where any wish, any desire, any kind of information at all can be had at the touch of a button…How are we still touching dogshit in that kind of society? How can we not have invented some sort of operation, or prosthesis, which makes dogshit obsolete? How can that not have happened already? Where’s fucking DOGSHIT.COM or CANINFECEES.NET? Aside from that, what’s wrong with your lawn dog owner? Why the voiding on my lawn - where my little kids go to play with their toys.

When I was a lad, in the eighties or there-abouts. If you’d given me the bullet-point cultural and technological tenants of the 2000’s I’d ‘ve punched you in the fucking face. My conception of the future back then was a place where - despite the fact that there were still had big, cumbersome looking land-line telephones – you could still get in your Chrysler and fly to the fucking cosmo-mart. Flying cars motherfucker! That’s what my future was in 1989 dude. I had no vague conception of a world united by near constant information exchange via hand held devices and an electronic network that connected the whole of humanity. To be honest, if you had told me about the internet or cell phones back then I don’t think I would have been interested. I’d accept those things only as part of an interior package of the 3000 horsepower Camaro that I’d be piloting back and forth to my job on the moon. Tiny phones and porn on demand? Compelling on their face but nothing that I’d spend any great deal of time trying to sort out.

Cont…