Given that we bloggers are always boasting about how self-correcting we are, I have two corrections I need to make to this post, about the dog park near my apartment.

1) The three-legged dalmation I mentioned that frequents the park is not named “Togo,” as I wrote, but “Pogo.” Makes a hell of a lot more sense, when you think about it.

2) I wrote, “it is impossible to be unhappy at the dog park.” I was wrong. It is possible. Today, for example. Today I left the park quite annoyed.

Today I was forced to listen to two aging baby boomers cling to the last, desperate strands of “hip” left in their upper-income bracket lives by one-upping one another about who did the most drugs, and who hung out in the trendiest, hippest, happenin’est places in various summers of the 1960s.

“I was in San Fransisco in ‘67,” the man said.

“Ah, but were you in Berkeley in ‘69?” the woman asked.

“Man, after your first [acid] trip, a row of blossoming spring trees never looks the same,” the man said.

The discussion then turned to politics.

“It’s all about oil,” the woman said.

“We should invade Colombia,” the man said, “then we could get all their coke.”

They shared a laugh about this.

“I can’t believe I voted Republican,” the man said. “I mean, I met Hayden sophomore year.”

“I find myself swinging both ways,” the woman said, flirtatiously. She paused for effect. “I mean in my politics, you pervert!”

The woman was clearly coming on to the man. Her body language said “yes, I’m married, yes I have kids, but let’s have a torrid affair to prove that there’s still some seeds of the sexual revolution in us.”

The man, while striking me as a guy clearly up for an affair, also clearly wasn’t interested in an affair with this particular woman.

By the look of them, I’m guessing that when they left the dog park, they stepped into their vehicles (I’m guessing his was a beamer, hers a Pathfinder), and, I’m guessing by the look of them, picked up some Chicken Out or Baja Fresh on the way home for dinner. And maybe one or both had to pick up the kids from some sort of sports practice or music lessons.

I was scoping the park for a doberman — or perhaps a rottweiler — to chew the still-beating heart from my chest, and end my misery.

So I hope you’ll accept those two corrections.

Now, a word about dog park politics.

Every dog park has the designate dog-park shit Nazi. This is the guy (or guys — and it’s most always a guy) who has taken upon himself the task of zeroing in on every shitting dog in the park and, as it is “taking a cat” — as we dog-lovers sometimes say — he finds its owner (me, let’s say), taps said owner on the shoulder, and, before the dung hits the turf, says the following:

“Hey, buddy, your dog is taking a dump over there. Be sure you clean it up.”

“Sure thing,” I always say.

At my particular park, there are two dog shit Nazis — Jim and Barry (not their real names). Jim’s the one with the ponytail and bushy mustache. Barry’s the one with the sunburn, the permanent three-day beard, and the shoulder-length brown hair. On first impression, they’re the kind of guys who you wouldn’t be surprised if you happened to bump into them as they were enjoying their lawn seats at an Allman Brothers concert. Also, they will let you know very early upon meeting them that, though they live together, they are not lovers.

I’ve been to my dog park about a dozen times in the last six weeks. Every time I’ve been there, Jim and Barry are there. And they’re always doing something important, such as watering the new trees Jim — after much bureaucratic fenagling — finally managed to get the city of Alexandria to pay for, or they’re spreading bales of straw about the park after a rain to soak up the mud, and protect the grass seed that Jim and Barry recently spread all about the park a few weeks ago, or they’re pointing out which dogs are “taking a dump.”

Barry’s pretty quiet. Jim, on the other hand, will tell you that, why just this morning, he and Barry must have spread about eight bales of straw over there where “a whole buttload of water collected after that thunderstorm last night.”

I actually once thought that Jim and Barry were hired by the city to take care of the park, and that the Jimmy Buffet sweatshirt Jim always wears and the flannel shirt and black baseball cap Barry always wears were uniforms provided by the city.

In fact, they aren’t paid at all. The spreading of the straw, the sodding of the turf, the ordering of the trees, the pointing out of which dog is shitting — all are labors of love for Jim and Barry.

These guys just really dig the dog park.

I make fun of Jim and Barry, but actually I like them quite a bit (unlike the very sad and nostalgic baby boomers).

Jim and Barry know the name of every dog that’s a “regular” — and probably the names of half the owners. I just find them really comical.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 6th, 2003 at 7:03 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.