This Is the Best Yard Sign I've Seen in Seattle Lately

You almost can't see what the sign says from the road. Very discreet.

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Because you have to love dogs to be a person/live in Seattle/make friends lately, this sign, above, outside of a locksmith near Broadway, makes me smile. What's good about this sign is that it cuts against the dog worship one encounters everywhere else, from bars and taprooms explicitly designed for dogs to the dogs people bring on airplanes and to the silent-reading party. Not to mention all the "MUST love dogs" profiles on Tinder or Bumble or Grindr or Scruff.

Can't see the sign? Here I'll zoom in.

"Pick up your dog shit," it commands.

Now, before you freak out or get the wrong idea, you should know that I love dogs—or at the very least, I have loved dogs, and that love abides. I loved them more than you love your dogs. Sorry, but it's true. My parents had a black lab when I was little, named Cookie, and that was my first word, because I heard them saying "Cookie! Cookie!" all the time, and because Cookie was my sun and moon and stars. She was happy, energetic, and death-defying. She once jumped out of a car on a camping trip, got run over by an 18-wheeler, and survived.

Many years later, it was my job to clean up her poop in the living room when her legs didn't work like they used to and she could no longer get to the back door in time. I cleaned up her living room poop daily, without complaint, because she was the best. She was better than your dog. These are facts. When Cookie was getting up there in dog years, we got another dog, a golden retriever named Jessie, so we would be less devastated when Cookie finally kicked it, but having Jessie didn't make Cookie's death any easier, much as we all loved Jessie, too. Jessie was obsessed with riding in the minivan with us whenever we went anywhere.

Anyway, if I sound defensive here (WHICH I'M NOT) it might be because, out of all the things I've written at The Stranger in the last 15 years, the number one thing, the thing people seem always to remember, the thing that got more readers than my piece about killer whales or my piece about how they build underground light rail stations or my piece about the woman who jumped out a window or the piece about Club Z's building during World War II, is a short, short-tempered, silly, photo-based post about dogs in grocery stores. That Slog post provoked more letters than I've ever gotten about anything else, all absolutely outraged.

If you're just joining us: Dogs don't belong in grocery stores.

Also: I don't hate dogs.

Can you still not read that sign on the lawn? Let's zoom in farther.

There we go.

Can you read it now? Can we all help this locksmith by not treating their front lawn as a dog-feces fertilizer factory? They don't actually make fertilizer here; they carve keys that allow people to open doors, lock up belongings, retrieve their mail, etc. Also: You've mowed a lawn before, right? You know how disgusting it is to accidentally step on or mow over a pile of dog poop hidden in a patch of tall grass, right?

It's even grosser than dogs in grocery stores.

As for dogs in the bedroom during sex? That's a question on The Stranger's 2018 sex survey. We're going to have to let the popular vote settle that one.