I’m full of it

I spend a ridiculous amount of my average day removing, cleaning, scraping and wiping up fecal matter. It all starts way, way too early in the morning. My son wakes up with a steaming load in his diapers so utterly repulsive it requires the use of a yellow Hazmat suit and gloves. I postpone the task until I’ve had at least one cup of coffee. The little angel with the sagging dirty diaper sits there and watches 64 Zoo Lane while I procrastinate. I know that the longer I wait the more likely it is to dry and crust over on his silky smooth butt. Still I scroll through my wife’s Facebook account (which she has conveniently left open) and look at photos of her friends in bikinis. Finally I grab the package of wet wipes and the bio hazard bag and get down and dirty. I have a friend, P., a retired colonel in the IDF, a decorated paratrooper, a veteran of two wars for Christ’s sake, who squeals like a little girl at the sight of D.’s soiled diaper. Me? I’ve been wading in shit for so long that I do the whole stinky affair on auto pilot. There’s nothing like the smell of a shadoobie in the morning. It reminds me of victory.

The next devilish deuce awaits me at my car. I live on a narrow and quiet tree lined street in Ramat Gan, and while I don’t own a Bentley I have great pride in my automobile – a 2005 Suzuki Liana which I bought second hand not long ago. I bike to work so during the day I like to keep it in the shade beneath one of the many overhanging tree branches. The downside is that the bats (yes, Dracula) collectively use it as a port-a-potty at night. There are few substances known to man that are more corrosive to a car’s paint job than bat shit. I spend the next half an hour scraping and wiping guano off my lovely Liana, a Sisyphean task if there ever was one. Merde!

The following crap calamity is never too far behind. Once I’ve rendered my car guano free I walk back to my apartment to get my bike out of the basement. For some reason the canine owning residents of this fair city never bother to pick up after their fucking pooches. Even though the city has provided small boxes on the recycling bins that contain little black bags for their convenience, they never seem to bloody give a damn. I step on dog excrement daily. What’s even more exacerbating is the fact that I, like most Israelis, wear flip-flops. The only thing worse than the sound of stepping in fresh dog manure, is seeing it on your feet.

Unfortunately I am not a coprophile nor do I engage in any scat related activities, though I did spend a few years working at one of the world’s largest porn websites as a film reviewer. Suffice to say that I’ve seen my fair share of sick shit, literally, and I’m not here to judge. Whatever gets you through the night, a great man once said.

My next foray into the world of meadow muffins comes later in the evening and is pussy related. M. and I adopted a cat a while ago, Chairman Mao, or Mao for short, who is cursed with long wispy strands of hair in his anal region. Every time he takes a number two in his kitty litter, inevitably a nice, pinkie-sized nugget gets tangled in his butt hair. He spends the next hour rubbing his gluteus maximus all over the tile floors and carpets in our apartment in an attempt to get it off. M. has to hold him down while I cut off the nugget with a scissors. I then proceed to scrub the floors because D. is a perpetual ignorer of the five-second rule. I usually end the day by scooping out all the clusters of piss and poop from Mao’s litter box, which medical researchers now believe causes schizophrenia. Ain’t that some sheise.

If my turd collecting ended there I would consider myself a fortunate man, but alas, there is never any rest for the wicked. I recently (quite by accident I might add) found mouse (or mice) droppings beneath the cabinets in the bathroom when I dropped a shekel. I quickly swept them up, hiding this startling find from M., lest she jump to any wild conclusions about our living conditions. I gave Mao a stern lecture, reminding him of his primary duty in the house and continued on my way. I have never seen this mouse (or mice) and know him only by his mysterious (yet consistent) droppings that I clean up nightly. If you’re reading this, please stop taking dumps underneath our cabinets.

So the next time you feel sorry for yourself and think about how shitty your day, your month or even your year is, just think about me and all the shit I have to put up with on a daily basis. Shit happens. I know it does. I just wish that for one day shit wouldn’t happen so often.