I don't know why our grocery store uses cheap plastic bags. For walks with our dog Merlot we need good stout plastic bags with no holes. Holes in a poop bag do not make a dog walk pleasant. We keep our plastic grocery bags in a drawer in the kitchen. I inflate the bags one by one and hold them up to the window, checking for holes. Over eighty per cent of the bags have holes.
Merlot stares at me as if to ask, "Why can't you just leave my poop where I lay it? Do you have a poop fetish? I want the other dogs to know who I am and how strong my scent is and how powerful I am. How can I hold up my head in front of the other dogs when I have an owner who is scooping my poop every time I take a crap? I have to put up with a lot of indignity just to be a part of this family."
When I walk my dog with Pete and his dog, Sugar, a big white fluffy female (for some reason I have an aversion to calling female dogs bitches), Pete requests the poop bag from me. He puts it in his compost. I thought we weren't allowed to put dog poop in our compost. All the newspaper articles say not to. "Oh, that's just if you're going to put it on your vegetables, and it's really only for Asian dog poop." "Oh," I say. Asian dog poop? Is that Asian dogs here in America or any dog in Asia? What we used to call Oriental dogs, but Oriental dogs took offense at the stereotype and now they prefer to be called Asian dogs. Merlot does not look Asian; Middle European, maybe, but not Asian.
Why is Asian dog poop dangerous to put on veggies, but American dog poop is safe? Are our dogs so much healthier and cleaner? Have our dogs had immunization shots against Asian diseases, and Asian dogs have not? If we keep this up, Asian dogs are going to feel that the term Asian has been given too much of a stereotype, and they are going to move on to another word that they prefer to be called. Eastern? No, not Eastern, isn't that the root meaning of Oriental? That would imply that the center of the world is Europe, giving the French poodles and dachshunds the advantage of being the center of the world from which all other parts of the world are measured. Perhaps the Asian dogs would want to be known only by their breed (Pekingese) or by the country from which they came (Burma), instead of being lumped into a broad category like Asian, as if the biggest continent has uniform doggity in it. And when will people stop spreading the rumor that Asian dogs are eaten by humans? What a nasty stereotype that is.
Our grocery store, from which we get our plastic bags, has been going downhill for a long time, ever since the new chicer grocery stores have moved into town. Maybe they just view themselves as a glorified quick stop market. I like them because they are nearby and they are the only store that stocks my favorite whole wheat bread, though they charge six dollars a loaf and it hardly seems worth it. But their flimsy plastic bags all seem to have holes in them by the time we get our groceries home.
One Thanksgiving my wife ordered a complete pre-cooked Thanksgiving dinner at the store. All you had to do was cook the turkey and the rest you just heated up, all for just forty-seven dollars. Well, when I got to the front counter they charged me ninety-four dollars and insisted all they had done was run the bar codes through. Well, I wasn't the one who had ordered the dinner, but I was pretty sure ninety-four dollars was not what my wife had spent on Thanksgiving dinner. I refused to release my credit card. There were people in line behind me. My Thanksgiving dinner was all bagged. Everyone stared at me waiting for me to pay. I started hyperventilating. I said, "I need to talk to my wife." So I dropped a dime into the callbox (this was ten years ago) and talked to her. "Talk to the manager," my wife suggested. So I asked to speak to the manager in a tone of voice that said, "I'm going to win this argument if it's the last thing I do." The manager came by and fixed it. It was forty-seven dollars. So I relaxed and smiled and tried to joke with the people at the counter. No go! I was persona non grata. They would check me out, but they would not meet my eye. I tried to explain that I had been upset, that now I was not, but they had made up their minds: it was over between me and them. They would be polite, but that was all. And maybe that's why they're going downhill. They don't know how to forgive. They hold grudges. You can't run a business and hold grudges. Everybody knows that.
Maybe that's why Asian dogs have such a bad rap. They don't know how to forgive. I should ask someone who knows an Asian dog.
Merlot stares at me as if to ask, "Why can't you just leave my poop where I lay it? Do you have a poop fetish? I want the other dogs to know who I am and how strong my scent is and how powerful I am. How can I hold up my head in front of the other dogs when I have an owner who is scooping my poop every time I take a crap? I have to put up with a lot of indignity just to be a part of this family."
When I walk my dog with Pete and his dog, Sugar, a big white fluffy female (for some reason I have an aversion to calling female dogs bitches), Pete requests the poop bag from me. He puts it in his compost. I thought we weren't allowed to put dog poop in our compost. All the newspaper articles say not to. "Oh, that's just if you're going to put it on your vegetables, and it's really only for Asian dog poop." "Oh," I say. Asian dog poop? Is that Asian dogs here in America or any dog in Asia? What we used to call Oriental dogs, but Oriental dogs took offense at the stereotype and now they prefer to be called Asian dogs. Merlot does not look Asian; Middle European, maybe, but not Asian.
Why is Asian dog poop dangerous to put on veggies, but American dog poop is safe? Are our dogs so much healthier and cleaner? Have our dogs had immunization shots against Asian diseases, and Asian dogs have not? If we keep this up, Asian dogs are going to feel that the term Asian has been given too much of a stereotype, and they are going to move on to another word that they prefer to be called. Eastern? No, not Eastern, isn't that the root meaning of Oriental? That would imply that the center of the world is Europe, giving the French poodles and dachshunds the advantage of being the center of the world from which all other parts of the world are measured. Perhaps the Asian dogs would want to be known only by their breed (Pekingese) or by the country from which they came (Burma), instead of being lumped into a broad category like Asian, as if the biggest continent has uniform doggity in it. And when will people stop spreading the rumor that Asian dogs are eaten by humans? What a nasty stereotype that is.
Our grocery store, from which we get our plastic bags, has been going downhill for a long time, ever since the new chicer grocery stores have moved into town. Maybe they just view themselves as a glorified quick stop market. I like them because they are nearby and they are the only store that stocks my favorite whole wheat bread, though they charge six dollars a loaf and it hardly seems worth it. But their flimsy plastic bags all seem to have holes in them by the time we get our groceries home.
One Thanksgiving my wife ordered a complete pre-cooked Thanksgiving dinner at the store. All you had to do was cook the turkey and the rest you just heated up, all for just forty-seven dollars. Well, when I got to the front counter they charged me ninety-four dollars and insisted all they had done was run the bar codes through. Well, I wasn't the one who had ordered the dinner, but I was pretty sure ninety-four dollars was not what my wife had spent on Thanksgiving dinner. I refused to release my credit card. There were people in line behind me. My Thanksgiving dinner was all bagged. Everyone stared at me waiting for me to pay. I started hyperventilating. I said, "I need to talk to my wife." So I dropped a dime into the callbox (this was ten years ago) and talked to her. "Talk to the manager," my wife suggested. So I asked to speak to the manager in a tone of voice that said, "I'm going to win this argument if it's the last thing I do." The manager came by and fixed it. It was forty-seven dollars. So I relaxed and smiled and tried to joke with the people at the counter. No go! I was persona non grata. They would check me out, but they would not meet my eye. I tried to explain that I had been upset, that now I was not, but they had made up their minds: it was over between me and them. They would be polite, but that was all. And maybe that's why they're going downhill. They don't know how to forgive. They hold grudges. You can't run a business and hold grudges. Everybody knows that.
Maybe that's why Asian dogs have such a bad rap. They don't know how to forgive. I should ask someone who knows an Asian dog.