LJ Idol Season 8 Topic 3: Coprolite
Growing up in the woods, we had an on-again off-again friendship with the only other kids on our road. We were as mismatched as could be, but it was the forced friendship of necessity. There was nobody else to hang out with.
So, we put up with them no matter how weird they were.
For example, on several occasions, I had to respectfully decline when the neighbor kid asked that I give him my Nintendo. He was fairly polite about it every time he asked, but I was never in a mood to donate my primary means of entertainment, so we circled around this impasse for months.
One year, they started bugging out about our dogs. See, we lived on a ...ranch? Compound? Swampy construction yard with an enormous and leaky house planted in the middle? Anyway, we had a lot of animals, from chickens to long-running cat dynasties to our collection of hunting dogs.
They started accusing our (admittedly rambunctious) dog Buck of some ...weird transgressions. They claimed, for example, that he had pinned their dog down in their back yard and "sucked the breath out of 'im". They had sawed it, they did. They sawed it happen, right in their backyard, Buck suckin' the breath out o'Snoopy.
I wish I had sawed it. I'd kinda like to know what in the hell that actually looks like.
One day, the three neighbor kids stormed over in formation. They stopped at the gap in the line of rocks that separated our two properties. We sent a delegate of our own to the summit.
They were demanding an apology, because, as they claimed, our dogs had been pooping on their back porch. Let me rewind a bit to put this in perspective: they were claiming that our dogs would proceed through the trees on our property. Favored poop spots. Having passed through the minefield of their own creation, they would then purportedly jump the rocks. They'd top off their evening with a jaunt across the large grassy field. Snubbing their noses at the mown grass, they would finally climb the wooden steps to the neighbor's second story back porch, nose the gate open, and, having finally ascended to their Brown Nirvana, pinch off a loaf on the boards of the back deck.
I guess they would then hop off the deck and slink into the night, never getting caught but for the neatly coiled traces of their transgression?
After laying all this out, the neighbor kids continued their three granite stares. "Yeah."
Jaw working, I finally put forth, "How do you know it wasn't your dog? You know, the dog that lives in your house and is constantly on that back porch?"
They almost laughed. "Oh, it couldn't'a been Snoopy", the eldest girl said with firm assurance. "Snoopy poops white."
Snoopy poops white, ladies and gentlemen.
That phrase cemented a suspicion that we'd long held: that the neighbors never, under any circumstances, cleaned up after their dog. Every dog poops "white" if you leave it there to bake in the sun for a month. A collection of vintage, artisan deuces, hand-made and sun-baked to perfection.
So, we put up with them no matter how weird they were.
For example, on several occasions, I had to respectfully decline when the neighbor kid asked that I give him my Nintendo. He was fairly polite about it every time he asked, but I was never in a mood to donate my primary means of entertainment, so we circled around this impasse for months.
One year, they started bugging out about our dogs. See, we lived on a ...ranch? Compound? Swampy construction yard with an enormous and leaky house planted in the middle? Anyway, we had a lot of animals, from chickens to long-running cat dynasties to our collection of hunting dogs.
They started accusing our (admittedly rambunctious) dog Buck of some ...weird transgressions. They claimed, for example, that he had pinned their dog down in their back yard and "sucked the breath out of 'im". They had sawed it, they did. They sawed it happen, right in their backyard, Buck suckin' the breath out o'Snoopy.
I wish I had sawed it. I'd kinda like to know what in the hell that actually looks like.
One day, the three neighbor kids stormed over in formation. They stopped at the gap in the line of rocks that separated our two properties. We sent a delegate of our own to the summit.
They were demanding an apology, because, as they claimed, our dogs had been pooping on their back porch. Let me rewind a bit to put this in perspective: they were claiming that our dogs would proceed through the trees on our property. Favored poop spots. Having passed through the minefield of their own creation, they would then purportedly jump the rocks. They'd top off their evening with a jaunt across the large grassy field. Snubbing their noses at the mown grass, they would finally climb the wooden steps to the neighbor's second story back porch, nose the gate open, and, having finally ascended to their Brown Nirvana, pinch off a loaf on the boards of the back deck.
I guess they would then hop off the deck and slink into the night, never getting caught but for the neatly coiled traces of their transgression?
After laying all this out, the neighbor kids continued their three granite stares. "Yeah."
Jaw working, I finally put forth, "How do you know it wasn't your dog? You know, the dog that lives in your house and is constantly on that back porch?"
They almost laughed. "Oh, it couldn't'a been Snoopy", the eldest girl said with firm assurance. "Snoopy poops white."
Snoopy poops white, ladies and gentlemen.
That phrase cemented a suspicion that we'd long held: that the neighbors never, under any circumstances, cleaned up after their dog. Every dog poops "white" if you leave it there to bake in the sun for a month. A collection of vintage, artisan deuces, hand-made and sun-baked to perfection.