Poop and the Big City

Someone shit in the stairwell that leads to the storage room of my apartment. I was putting my bike away the other night, and I heard my roomy yell from the balcony that I should be careful not to step in the doody. Sure enough, there was a messy turd on the concrete floor of the stairwell. I know it was a person, as opposed to an animal, who "dropped it on the deuce," as Whitney Houston would say, because there was toilet paper all around it.

How do I justify this on a Chicago blog? It's simple: Homeless people will not shit in my stairwell if I lived in the burbs. Sure it stunk to high heaven for the next couple of days I had to get my bike, and the flies circled around like, well, flies on shit. But, that's a little treat you don't get in the burbs: Authentic, urban, homeless, poop.

Today, I saw three of my hot neighbors in their kitchen as I was going upstairs, and one threw me the extended smile, like the, "Maybe you should come in and talk to us, dumb-ass" look. I had nothing worth opening the glass door to tell them, except, "Hey, I hosed down the poop in the stairwell. Don't all of you thank me at once."

I opted to just smile back, and go upstairs. When I have an opening that's not poop-related, I'll give it a go.