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Published:
10/06/05

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Damn Dogs

By H.G. Miller

It’s a beautiful, clear night in Los Angeles and all I can think about is crap. Dog crap, to be specific. The steaming piles of canine dung that decorate the small patch of grass in front of my apartment building.

Rest assured, the absence of doggy doo would not turn our little lawn into the envy of the Home & Garden crowd. The migrant workers who tend to the mowing and trimming of my neighborhood are not the motivated Martha Stewart types you find in suburbia. These guys hack the grass down to the yellow roots and move on so fast you might think some INS officials were tending to the lawns across the street.

However, despite these shortcomings, I’d prefer to walk across my little bit of yardage without needing to leap over the large turds that litter the landscape.

Alas, my neighbors are rednecks, and they will never pick up after their dogs, and they will never train them to shit in their own yard.

And this is what I’m complaining about today.

How can an individual move 2,000 miles to get away from the wife-beater-wearing, muscle-car-revving, tattoo-parlor-frequenting, defecating-dog-owning rednecks that populate the flyover states and wind up with a gaggle of them next door?

Sounds like a sitcom pilot from hell to me.

The apartment building next to mine is populated by a group of guys who, as far as I can tell, don’t do anything but work on cars and play with their pit bulls.

The cars I can deal with. After a while, the steady revving takes on a subconscious feel and I can ignore it along with the other neighborhood sounds like false car alarms and crazy people screaming at tree stumps.

After a while, you start to get into the rhythm of it all. At noon on Saturday’s, they’ll have the two dirt bikes out, peeling out on the street for a few minutes before they take off to build houses for the homeless or read to the blind or some other worthy cause, I’m sure.

11 p.m. every night is when the guy with the Thin Lizzy tattoo will get into a fight with his girlfriend about her refusal to consider a wage-based sliding scale tax reform policy that reflects the economic realities of all geographic regions as a viable policy of balancing the federal budget and providing relief to the lower social classes. (Sometimes, they fight about how he’s a male slut.)

After a bit of yelling, he’ll slam the door, run outside and rev the engine of the car he’s been restoring for the last two years until the proper amount of steam has been blown off.

All of this noise, I can handle. It’s the dog crap I can’t stand.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with pit bulls, but they aren’t the most lovable creatures on this planet of ours.

You may also be unfamiliar with the Los Angeles Municipal Code that makes it illegal for a dog owner to leave his or her pet’s droppings in the yards of non-dog-owning citizens like myself.

Like my redneck neighbors, you may not care.

Look, if I owned a dog, I wouldn’t want to carry around plastic bags, using them to grab up fresh turds, and disposing of them in the appropriate receptacles. Of course, I do own a cat that can squeeze out twice her weight in kitten dung every day while I’m at work, so I am familiar with a bit of feces management.

I’m just saying, does it have to be in my lawn? For God’s sake, the neighbor one house down is a total dick. Can’t your canines crap in his yard?