A few Fridays ago I took The Gus to Memorial Park for our weekly Happy Hour run. This is the ceremonial start to my weekend and it makes me feel good about myself to get out there and get sweaty and then wash everything down with a cold, golden libation. Gus loves it because it give him a chance to commune with other dogs and be outside in the sunshine and get lots of attention from suckers who think he is cute.

I park by the pool. This parking lot is small bit of a walk across a grassy, tree-studded lawn to the 3-mile gravel loop where I run. When I run I ALWAYS carry poop bags (in a handy leash clip thingy), and I always pick up my poop, even in the grass in front of my house, because it drives me crazy when other people don’t and as Gandhi once said, we must be the change we want to see in the world.

So there I was, walking from the car to the loop when suddenly Gus has a major scatological accident. It is foul, explosive and watery and there is a lot of it. Like, a whole lot. I kind of try to drag his macaroni-curled body over to the nearest tree to at least get it out of the way of where someone may walk but I am happy for the fact that we are not yet on the running trail. Most of what he has to eliminate comes out in the beginning, but he still spends a good five minutes curled up, trying to squeeze what little remains out. I see that he is making no progress and so I try and coax him to give up. “Come on, Gus, let’s go little buddy.”

As he’s straining I consider how best to proceed. For as you may have surmised, it is literally impossible to pick up a puddle. I look for some dirt I can kick over the shit to at least absorb some of it but there is none nearby. I try to pull some grass to throw onto it but the grass is too short to do much good. I give up and continue to attempt to coax Gus along, and as I’m waiting for him to unclench I look up and see a woman about 50 yards away, stopped in the middle of the drive, starting at me out of her car window. She has a five-pound fluff of white fur sitting on her lap. I wonder if I know her, she is staring at me so intently, wonder if she is a member of my running club who I don’t happen to recognize.

Gus finally heeds my calls and heels up next to me so I continue my path across the drive and towards the loop. As I begin to run the lady in the red car follows me and pulls off to the side where I am running, rolling down her window.

“Excuse me,” she says. “Is there a reason why you aren’t picking up after your dog?”

It is at this moment, friends, when I make the crucial mistake. I should have ignored her, told her to mind her own business. But instead I feel the overwhelming need to explain myself to this stranger.

“I would,” I say, “but he has an upset stomach and it’s, uhhh, un-pickup-able.”

“Well I just think that’s disgusting. Maybe you shouldn’t bring your dog to the park when it has diarrhea.”

Again, I feel the need to explain. “It *just* happened. Look, lady, I have bags,” I hold them up so she can see. “I always pick up, I just couldn’t this time. It’s not like I brought him out here knowing he was sick!”

“This park is for everyone, you know, and I just can not believe people like you come here and let their dog shit all over where other people walk. Maybe you should just go home!”

And so it went, for about 10 long minutes, her basically screaming at me in view of everyone and me stammering in vain to defend myself, explain myself to this stranger because for some stupid ridiculous reason I do not want to be seen as an irresponsible pet owner in the eyes of someone I have just met and will never see again. Seriously, this lady was *yelling* at me, and the only thing that could end the standoff was me telling her to STFU and running away. Literally. I ran away.

But at that point I was so worked up I was almost on the verge of tears, which is how I manifest stress, and which makes things pretty inconvenient during confrontational situations. My heart was racing so fast and my limbs trembling with such verocity that I couldn’t even run anymore and so I had to sit down on a park bench and chill out for another 15 minutes before I could get up and run again. During that time a nice, sane woman, also with a dog in her car, pulls up next to me to say “Don’t let that bitch ruin your day! You have him on a leash and you have bags. Accidents happen!”

When I finally do finish my run I find my friend Diana and some other people gathered around the picnic table and I relay my story to her. “Fuck her!” Diana says but it still doesn’t make me feel better. “Think about what kind of life that woman lives. She’s probably going to go home and sit on her couch and think to herself ‘I did the right thing today.’ How pathetic!”

“What did she look like,” Diana asks.

“She was young, actually, and she was driving a red sports car and she had a little yippy dog on her lap. In fact, she was kinda pretty.”

“No, what exactly did she look like? What color was her hair?”

“She was white with long dark hair, straight. She looked tall and skinny.”

Diana disappears in the direction of her car. A few minutes later she returns. “I have something for you,” she says, and this is what she thrusts towards me:

It’s a voodoo doll. An effigy of the Poop Patrol, made out of dog poop bags and random paper towels floating around in Diana’s car. And it made me feel better immediately.

Tom Jones, curator at the Houston Art Car Museum, was killed early this morning, just a few hours after the annual Art Car Parade wrapped, after he was hit by a speeding car while sitting on the curb outside the museum.

So sad. The parade is one of the things I love best about Houston. I spent all afternoon taking pictures and had an excellent time, as usual, and part of that is due to the hard work Jones lovingly put into the museum and the parade over the years. Truly a devastating loss for the Houston art community.

Above is Jones riding yesterday in a car called Swamp Mutha. Click the image for more pictures of the parade. To quote Jones: “Keep America’s roads weird — build an Art Car!”

“Her childhood was sort of desolate,” he says. “Orphaned, alone, she had been sent away (from Ireland) to America to live with a rather forbidding maiden aunt. She had no conscious memory of the first five years of her life. No memory of her mother, of Ireland, of home.” Mrs. O’C confessed to Dr. Sacks that she had lost all conscious memory of her mother. “She had always felt this as a keen and painful sadness,” he says.

A touching NPR story in honor of Mother’s Day.

Best line: My husband would not let anybody see him not made up. I was his hairdresser, trust me. He had to be fly, okay! All the time!

(Via Dlisted)

I know the 40th anniversary of the assassination of MLK was roughly a month ago, but above is an amazing video of James Brown performing in Boston the night after the shooting, and here is the accompanying story of how JB prevented a massive riot from happening that evening. (Via AskMe)

When Nan Goldin was there I did manage to eat lightening-fast lunches nearly every day so that I could spend my remaining 45 minutes sitting in the velvet-dark, cold gallery, watching her disturbing slide-shows. I first heard of Goldin when she was referenced in a passing comment on MetaFilter, and since then I’ve been borderline obsessed with her work. There doesn’t seem to be anything special about it, and that might be the draw. Each photo alone is a glimpse into her strange and sad life, but look at them as a whole and you get a very vivid and complete picture of who the woman is, who her friends are and what her life has been like. After sitting through one of her slide-shows I leave convinced that I know this person, that we are friends. I get this feeling from other creators too, people who seem to have selflessly invited us into their lives, no matter how superficially, and who address us with the kind of familiarity with which one would address a sibling.

It might not surprise you to learn that two of these people are bloggers. It’s the nature of the medium.

Art and music and movies seem to have synchronistically melded into my life lately. There is a scene in CQ (which we just watched again) where Paul is talking with his French girlfriend about the film he’s trying to make. Frustrated with his own pretenses, he tells her he just wants to make something that is real and honest. Marlene turns right around and says to him, “But what if it’s boring?” Could there be a greater comment on our self-obsessed narcissistic blog-addicted generation?

Later in the movie Paul meets his father at the airport. Dad tells Paul that his grandmother used to believe dragonflies would come in the night and stitch up one’s mouth if one told lies. Dad finishes by saying “Maybe you can use it somehow. You never know when some little overheard story or image can find a place in your work.”

When my Inprint instructor Randi found out that Christopher and I met through some scootering buddies she was fascinated by the story. She said to me, you don’t think there’s anything special about that because it’s your everyday normal life, but to me that sounds like a great beginning for a story.

Which leads me to Barton Fink, another movie we just re-watched. Throughout the movie Barton is surrounded by inspiration and muses and he remains willfully ignorant of them. Thus the beginning of his self-imposed writer’s block.

Not sure where I’m going here, just a few things I’ve been thinking about lately.