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BeagleBlogging: Shitbagball

One of the lesser joys of owning a dog is dealing with shit. I don’t mean figurative shit, of course, I mean literal shit. This is unfortunate. The thought of trailing behind a dog with a leash in one hand and a bag of crap in the other has never appealed to me, on any level. When I agreed to the acquisition of the demon beagle, many years ago, it was with the understanding that I would never be stooping down to collect reeking piles of crap. Ever.

Well, you know how understandings go. Most evenings find me trudging listlessly through the heat/cold with a little satchel of shit dangling from my puckered fingers. It has been thus for five years, and there’s no end in sight. The little bastard just keeps crapping.

Happily, I’ve found a way to ease the icky mortification of it all: a new sport that I call Shitbagball.

The rules are simple:

1. Acquire a dog, preferably a large one capable of producing prodigious amounts of fecal matter on command.
2. Acquire a shitbag. The bag must have a capacity of no less than one cubic foot. It must have tie handles. It cannot be deodorized.
3. Locate a trashcan. Ideally, this is a neighborhood trashcan in the epicenter of the community’s dog-walking nexus.
4. Walk your dog.
5. When you see someone else walking a dog, stop and make the universal shitbagball sign (an imaginary stoop and scoop, followed by a strangled stork-call).
6. If the other owner responds in kind, the game has begun.
7. Command your dog to crap.
8. When your dog has finished crapping, collect the fecal matter.
9. Run toward the trashcan while twirling the bag over your head and ululating the theme to Three’s Company (or any late-70′s sitcom featuring two scantily-clad women and a man pretending to be homosexual).
10. When you have reached a distance of no less than ten feet from the trashcan, stop and hurl the shitbag.
11. If the shitbag successfully lands inside the trashcan before your opponent has manged to do the same, you score a point.
12. Repeat.

Games of shitbagball can go on for a very long time.I have scored 37 points over the course of three years, which makes me far and away the neighborhood champion. My closest competitor has four points. Four! And that’s only because his dog, a doberman pinscher, has a tendency to attack and maul me as I’m ululating toward the trashcan.

I have recently ascended to the rank of Commissioner of the Shit Bag League (the SBL) and am in the process of signing a contract with ESPN 4. It’s just a matter of time before I’m doing shit bag commercials and designing my own fecal collection devices (FCDs).

This sport is taking off. It’s going places. And I’m going places with it, shitbag in hand.

Just this morning I saw a man walking three mastiffs down by the river carrying a big black Hefty bag. I shit you not.

They should show SBL games on ESPN Outdoors, right after “American Gun Dog”.