Feces occurs.

About eight feet from my driveway is a lonely turd, lying in the street.

Yes, I do realize that personalizing a turd is sort of weird.

I mean personalizing it by investing it with a personality that comes solely from my brain and suggesting the turd is lonely... not personalizing it with an engraver or some paint or tying some colorful yarn around it...you get that, right?

Because I didn't do anything like that.
And I'm not going to.

No matter how dry it gets before it eventually gets picked up or ground to dust by someone's tire as they drive by, I will not touch it.

I briefly pondered photographing it for you, but really, who hasn't seen a turd before?

It's been lying there on the pavement in the sunshine for four days, drying out.

Well, until this afternoon when it rained a bit.
Now it's probably a little soggy.
I'm not planning to check.

Every time I drive past it, I puzzle over it.

How did it get there?
Was it dropped by a dog?
Coyote?

So I asked Eric what he thought.
He said, "Single turd, middle of the street? Coyote."

And yesterday, even though it had been there three days, neither Matt or Lyssa had noticed it.

So when we got in the car to go Goodwill hunting, I turned the vehicle around so they could see it. And did not drive away until both of them had seen it out the windows on their respective sides of the car, which was a cumbersome procedure that involved me backing and filling and backing and filling and ending up with the front of the car pointing in the opposite direction from which I originally started.

And yeah. Bad grammar. I know.
But the grammar police don't read my blog.
Or if they do, they never leave comments.

Puzzlingly, neither one of my kids is too concerned about the turd or where it came from. I attempted to get them to formulate a theory, but I guess it's not all that exciting or mysterious to them.

I don't understand why they find it so unimportant.

I offered the opinion that it possibly came from one of the feral children who lives just up the street.

My kids just looked at me. Rolled their eyes.
They think I'm weird.

You may be asking yourself what sort of family sees a piece of shit in the street and discusses it and I'd have to tell you that our family discusses all kinds of things.
Really wacky things.
All.
The.
Time.

The way we pull into the driveway, it's puzzling that none of the three drivers in our household have run over it yet, but it just... lies there.

Being a turd.

Now I live on a paved street. In a town.

Am I the only person who thinks it's strange for a hunk of doo doo to just... appear overnight in the street?

I'm starting to get a little concerned, actually, because there was also one on the sidewalk in front of the school when I arrived for work this morning.

Not in an area where anyone would be walking.. so guess what I didn't do?

That's right.

I did not drop it, therefore I steadfastly refuse to pick it up.

But it led to an interesting discussion with some of the kids this morning.

Rachelle* told us excitedly that coyotes poop in her yard ALL THE TIME.

Mark* said that his neighbor's pugs always poop next to his fence and that his dad picks up the poops after they dry and throws them at the back door of the house where the dogs live.

"He's getting pretty good at hitting the door, too." he said proudly.

Andy* told everyone that they can't play in the sandbox in their back yard anymore because 'all the cats in the neighborhood have crapped in it.'

When I stopped snorting laughter through my nose, he said, "No, really! There was cat shit EVERYWHERE and my mom got really pissed off!"

Half the kids were horrified by his language, the rest were in hysterics.

I laughed, too.
Sometimes, I just can't help it.

A few minutes later I took him aside and asked him to be a little more careful when choosing his words because we have a lot of younger kids in the program and he agreed that he probably shouldn't say 'crapped.'

:-D

Then, later this afternoon, I had an interesting talk via IM with Tami regarding turds in lakes and swimming pools.

Yeah, we talk about all sorts of things.

One never knows which direction the conversation will go.
It's often quite amusing, actually.

Tami shared a story about taking her kids swimming in a lake and seeing a turd just... float by.

She said she could not get them out of the lake fast enough, and once again told herself that swimming in a pool was probably a better idea.

So I told Tami that when I was a teen, someone turded in our local public swimming pool and everyone had to get out of the pool for the rest of the evening.

Eric came home from work during the discussion and contributed a couple swimming pool "evacuation" stories of his own.

Ha. Did you catch what I did there?
'Evacuation.'

::snort::


So yeah.
Evidently, random turding is a growing problem .
Who knew it was so widespread?

And although I probably don't need to mention it at this point, I was a 12 year old boy in my past life.