nlaruccia said:
I'm glad you have been able to avoid stepping in dog poop. Unfortunately, a lot of blind people who live on my street are unable to avoid it.
I'm surprised by that. I understood that blind people had a more acute sense of smell and could detect incoming poop distance and placement and hence avoid alley apples with ease.
A blind chap once lived nearby my student digs in Bristol, Old Greg, and he hated dogs and used to take a wide meandering course through the local park all based on sense of smell, all the meanwhile berating the owners by name on the nuttiness, meatiness and generally stench of their pets' rectal soup.
I sat next to Old Greg one night in the local and after my buying him a few vermouths we got on to the subject of his handicap and he told me that he went blind as a child, from the toxocara virus, contracted from somebody's pet's mud bunnies left abandoned in the park he played in as a child.
This of course left him quite bitter towards pet owners in general, more so the ones responsible for the undeclared bum nuggets in public spaces. He ranted and I let him talk, until he arrived into the arena of early 20th century politics and loudly declared that he had it from a Wiemar historian friend of his that Hitler's animosity towards certain peoples stemmed from his embarrassing step, slip and roll into some 1920's German toilet twinkie left by a Jewish dog, that was also black. This led to him embarrassingly wiping off the culpable matter from his tweed slacks with his hyperinflation bank notes that had spilled from his trolley, whilst swearing in German ("Ohh sheisse!", ironically), and getting clipped around the ears by his elderly mother, Mrs Hitler, when he arrived home a loaf of bread short.
Well, I laughed, thanked him for the story and never thought of it again until a recent comment by Gpop:
To me, the poop is an analogy of the problems of the city.
The "stewards" do know better and it is entirely within reason that the crap can be cleaned up like any responsible person should, but they don't.
They talk about it, or claim that they always do, but actually never did. It's someone eases fault. They were in a rush, or the blanket "mind your business!" attitude.
Having to dodge the pooch-pies daily is probably (on some subconscious level) the reminder of all that's wrong with this place, but we are powerless to appeal to the sense of responsibility of people who assume that "someone else will clean it up...eventually".
I am thinking, do all our problems at home, work, politically, socially and more stem from dog poo? Is this the evil that has been plaguing our lives while we futilely harangue democracy and seek justice and change when the REAL problem has been under our feet.
I know that the only time I stepped in feculance in this great city it changed me, I became bitter and my outlook on life and the country changed thereon. Imagine if I step in a poopsie again? I might enter politics.
Great Expats, I petition you all to drop whatever it is you are not doing, grab a shovel, a plastic bag and some gloves (maybe some preventive corks as well) and let us take to the streets, fight the great fight, and change the world.
We can lead the new Argentina and, like the successful 19th century immigrants, make this land great and fruitful and a shining example of a free, just, democratic nation. This is OUR poop-free land. God sent Moses across the desert and he found manna, well we have arrived in pastures fresh and we have poop! We can work together to clean the poop from the streets, the poop from our homes, the poop from INDEC, the poop from the halls of office and the poop from the unminding soles of society.
Who's with me?
