Our condo association conducts its business in a remarkably passive-aggresive way. When problems arise, everyone talks about them with neighbors, but no one talks directly to the people involved. Ultimately, someone will go to the association president; rather than chat personally with the offender, Mr. B. will type up a letter to all residents and stick it in your back porch gate.
The latest letter addresses rules for the pool … and for the poop.
Before moving here, Chelsea the Wonderdog pooped in the spidergrass at the most distant corner of our old back yard. This was a self-managing process. Chelsea pooped. Rain came. The spidergrass thrived.
Here, though, grassland is limited. It took Chelsea no time to select her new spot: the long, narrow stretch of grass, punctuated by four crepe myrtles, along the edge of the abandoned tennis courts. The area is at the very back of the property; few residents (other than the four of us who live nearby) linger here.
This out-of-the-way location has been very convenient … but now, we’ve gotten The Letter, and things must change.
(I don’t really think we’re the offenders in question. There are a number of people with much bigger dogs who allow their pets to poop on the sidewalks in the heart of the community. Still, I don’t want to be the guy people point to and say, “Why should I scoop the poop if he doesn’t have to?”)
It’s not pleasant, but it’s a fact of life, and it has to be done.
And there’s a lesson in it, too. I love writing. I can put words to paper several hours a day. That’s handy, given the fact that I’m now a writer by trade. With just a little discipline and focus, I can crank out books at a rate of 2000 publishable words a day.
Know what I hate? Packaging that work for the publisher. There’s no creativity involved in this kind of work: setting headers, checking file formats, printing hard copies, packaging them in boxes, sending the whole thing off.
But books don’t make it to the shelf without that kind of effort; if you want what you write to be available to other people, you have to find some way of getting the drudgery done.
In other words: sometimes, you just gotta scoop the poop. It’s unpleasant … but it’s just a fact of life.
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