7358/19878
Why does God punish people for doing good deeds?
I took the doing on a long walk this morning, trying to ease myself back into movement as my hip is feeling a bit better. Wolfie did a solid poo early on which was by the side of the path so I diligently cleared it up and carried it for 20 minutes to the bin. But towards the end of the walk she did another poo, this time one with a fairly liquidy top to it - it was still possible to pick it up, but a bit more troublesome. Also it was well off the path, in a field, where no one was going to step on it. But should I clear it anyway? I always err on the side of picking up unless it’s a very wild poo. This one was probably fine.
But the poo was almost in a hole and there was loose soil around so I went to have a look at it to see whether it was a picker upper or one that I could kick soil over. I had taken off one glove so I could retrieve a dog poo bag. Even though I didn’t have to, I was pretty much set on retrieving the faeces. As I looked at the dog pat, my glove fell from under my arm, where I had conveniently stowed it and straight into the wet dogshit. I had shitted up my glove, even though I was doing the honourable thing. Had I just walked away my glove would be shitless and the shit would have bothered no one. Now I’d got shit on my glove I felt I had to pick up the shit or the whole sacrifice would have been a waste of time. I gingerly carried the bag of shit and the shitty glove to the bin (I didn’t bin the glove) and then washed the shit off the glove.
Punished for being a potentially good person. There is no God.
Tonight I went to London to talk about my bollock at a place called Tortoise. It went pretty well and got some proper laughs for some of the story of my treatment, which made me think again about doing this as a live show. But then again I am also thinking about doing nothing but podcasting this year and playing with my kids and walking the dog and getting shit on my gloves some more. Not feeling any huge compunction to get back to full time work anyway.
As I was leaving I realised that I had forgotten to bring my keys with me and Catie wasn’t very well and wasn’t responding to my texts so I thought she might have gone to bed already. I feared that after the whole sitcom glove in the dogshit fiasco that I might have to spend tonight sleeping in the garden (though if the back gate was locked then I might just have to sleep on the doorstep. Or worse I’d have to wake Catie up and get her to come to the door and then experience her wrath at my stupidity. I thought I’d probably sleep on the doorstep.
There was a light on when I got home so I risked using the doorbell and luckily Catie was awake so the crisis was averted. The sitcom writers of my life had let themselves down.
