scraping bottoms

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I now long for those sweet, innocent times when my dog Fredo eating my credit cards and $350 in cash was the worst thing he ever did to me.

Let's consider his year for a moment. His sister and entire world died in the spring. In an effort to cheer him up, I took him to the dog park, where he was viciously attacked by a pack of dogs, one of whom punctured his chest nearly to the lung cavity, resulting in terror, pain, and several weeks in a cone. Then I moved him across country. Then I spent every day getting fucked by the new house and town, making me angry and edgy and vibrating with stress. Last week, Fredo had enough. He stress-pooped in the basement bar area. I discovered this only after having tracked it around a bit.

"I want to kill you," I cooed pleasantly up the stairs, where Fredo was hiding from me. Several hours later, I was using a rental steamer and several gallons of Nature's Miracle to clean everywhere he'd pooped and I'd walked. The next evening, I could swear I still smelled it. Ditto a week later.

Would I really have to pay that guy to clean my carpet a third time in three months? Or could I just live with the smell, my house's odor now befitting the structure itself?

I got my answer when I went to clean my Roomba, one of those robotic vacuum cleaners. It was caked in dried poop and moist insects. Yes, Fredo had dropped that deuce during the one hour a week the Roomba is set to run, and yes, it "cleaned" my carpeting by smearing fresh dog poop all over every square inch of it. Here's a photo for the morbidly curious.

Having officially bottomed out, I'm looking forward to the ascent.