I have been pondering just what I would use this BLOG for, what I have to say that might be of interest to other people. While I was walking my dog Bear this morning, it occurred to me that what I was doing could be an analogy for life. If not a strong analogy, it should at least lead to some humorous musings. I felt this would, at least, be sufficient since I believe that a sense of humour is necessary if one is to get through life with any sense of justice. After all, none of us are getting out of here alive.
So, how do I get from walking my dog to the meaning of life? While I can argue that there are many reasons I walk my dog, exercise, bonding with the animal, breaks to routine, encountering nature, breathing fresh air, enjoying the view (and from my neighborhood the view is freaking fantastic, but more on that later), it really boils down to one thing – chasing scat.
Now, scat can refer to many things, just check out any on-line dictionary and you will find definitions like:
Jazz singing in which improvised, meaningless syllables are sung to a melody
to go away in haste
any marine and freshwater percoid fish of the Asian family Scatophagidae
the definition that fits with my most frequent activity is:
Excrement, especially of an animal
So, what I, or someone in my immediate family, do twice a day is follow that dog until he decides to pause and drop a little scat on the ground, and then pick it up using a convenient little bag I pick up at the Dollar Store. This got me thinking about how clever someone was to call the stuff scat. We know it by many names:
poop
do-do
number 2
crap
droppings
dump
brownies
I could go on, I just visited a web-site with 133 euphemisms for having a crap. What I am saying is that we are so fascinated with this particular bodily function that we have focused a huge part of our language to describing it and along comes some someone who gives us a name for it that can be banted around by the most dignified people in our society without anyone being offended. Scat, it just sounds like it belongs at a debutante ball or at least on the desk of our Prime Minister. And yet, it mostly lays around on the ground, and gets picked up by me at least twice per day, every day.
This last point got me thinking about just how much scat I have dealt with in the lifetime of my current dog. Now Bear is a little dog, as dogs go. His breed is bigger than the dog. He is a Maltese-Shitzu (and isn’t that appropriate considering the topic of this rant). He weights about 10lbs. How much scat could that produce in a lifetime? Well, speaking from experience, he drops about a quarter pounder (word choice is on purpose so sue me fast-food franchise) a day. While I am chasing him about and stooping and scooping it seems like so much more but reality forces me to be conservative in my estimates. My arms have not grown any stronger or longer from carrying around vast quantities of scat so I think my daily estimate is reasonable.
From that humble beginning I can extrapolate that every four days he produces a pound of scat. That means that every forty days, he produces his own weight in scat…now that's a lot of crappola except that it’s true. In a year he is producing 91.25 lbs of poop. I have been watching what comes out of his butt for ten years (almost) so that means he has laid out almost a half ton of scat in his lifetime. Scat seems like such a small word to describe so much activity.
How does a half ton of passengers on the hershey highway fit into my view of life? You’ll just have to read on to find out.