about excrement

so, i just passed a business pickup truck advertising on its sides that it belonged to a company named "Doodie Duty", further described as a "premier pet waste removal" service.  um.  huh?

my reactions:
1)  har har, that is kinda funny.  doodie duty!  clever!  har har!  har.

2)  Hey!  there is far too much disposable income in this city/state/nation/world...no wonder there are riots and class wars and can we look again at that tax schedule, please?--, and

3)  humanity is getting farther and farther from "home", when it comes to living.  we remove ourselves from the un-pretty.  we outsource simple, any-child-can-do-it, ownership-responsibility related experiences to the point where it is anesthetizing, and are we/we are raising children who will not be adept at navigating the complex, ugly, and unwanted in their lives.  we are constructing a reality, when we can afford to, where we are able to and do refuse to look at the plain, the pain, the excrement, the difficult.

and those things--existing on a continuum running from icky (doodie and other seepage) to violent (war and "collateral damage") become remoter and remoter.  through distancing, we are also more readily willing to ignore the recipient body of our sightlessness or brutality.  it is so very easy to harm via dismissal or aggression, because we don't really understand, or ever have to see up close the effects and the consequences of our actions.  or lack thereof.

some ways we contemporary and american urbanized withdraw:  we take our ironing out.  hire cleaning services.  go to drive thru rather than packing a lunch.  drive to school rather than walk, when walking is a possibility.  hire dog walkers and gardeners and personal shoppers.  buy split wood instead of splitting it ourselves.  have our babies in hospitals (a human, and a product of this society, i say thank god for hospitals, compassionate and expert OBGYNs who kiss the top of my head and tell me i am beautiful when really i am a large whale in stirrups, and of course, epidurals.  call me a hypocrite.  i also like laughing gas).  we create circuses for our children at each of their birthdays, hiring the geeks, of course.  we hire people to mow our lawns, shovel our sidewalks, wash our cars, clean our gutters, paint our toenails, wax unwanted hair, deliver our groceries, alter our clothes--heck--make our clothes... .  we hire handymen to do insanely simple tasks that we honestly do not know how to do, and mother's helpers (in addition to the television) to give us a break from the needy people we are raising who must never feel bored and deal with that feeling constructively.  we send out fill-in-the-blank thank you notes instead of writing a few appreciative lines ourselves.  we buy prepared foods in boxes instead of ingredients, and "cook" by heating.   i am guilty.  and rather more often than not.

i am not admitting a discussion of economics here.  this is something else--i am talking about an entirely different point:

today, where food comes from is being taught in schools.
fish comes cleaned and without eyes from the fish monger, for the squeamish and/or uninitiated. 

we are disgusted by the very idea of hunting, tend to not eat food that looks like an animal (in english this comes down to even naming our foods ambiguously--pork instead of pig, beef instead of cow, etc., and what would Wharf say about that?) and are generally freaked out when we smell a farm or think about what's about to happen to that chicken being carried away by its feet.  we don't teach our children what real dying, death or dead people, or real killing or real violence look like, (nightmares are a bad thing), leaving them unprepared for the teenage world of epic violence that is trotting on down the road toward them--through video games and movies to their school lives, and then swirling out to encompass most aspects of this big blue marble.  by sanitizing so many dimensions of our lives and those of our children, we are, ultimately, creating a distance from some very real elements of our world.  for our kids,  we are creating an absence of experience which would inform the choices that they alone are going to have to make--and which are going to come their way.

i realize this list is limited, biased, and probably reflects much more strongly an urban tendency toward self-insuffiency, than a rural pattern of behavior.  also it is probably all old news.  also probably i sound hopelessly nostalgic and naive.  but call me those things:  i am not sure i like it when "self-sufficient" means "able to dial the phone".  because although we are in a world where technological advances (thank you, Steve Jobs--and that isn't sarcasm)  are making the impossible a smaller and smaller possibility,  we still are, after all, upright animals facing the need to survive in a world with others of our kind, if not of our ilk.  and though ironing is not diplomacy, and is a drag, and showing up at the round table neatly pressed will not help us make terrific decisions or take the time to reach positive outcomes, the ability to sit patiently and work through sweaty, potentially burning, tedious, mundane, rote and boring stuff--because it must be done--with some modicum of skill and/or grace, kind of is.

(i will not go into the general but stunting effects that current distancing trends in art--which lean toward censorship--have upon our development of an ability to discern, to form independent aesthetic sensibilities.  controls or attempted controls upon the literature we read, music we listen to, and films we see--and at what age we are allowed to do these things, make at least some realities far, far away, or even invisible--they are mind-molding and true constraints.  and i will leave off about how these blinders, as well, damage the up-and-coming from having a reasonable expectation for diversity, and reasonable ability to decide for themselves what they will find acceptable for themselves, and to be that, actively.) 

so:  a pox on those doodie duty people.  not least for making me actually think about and write the word "doodie".