There’s no delicate way to say this, so please pardon my indelicacy.
The moment I set foot outside my building this afternoon, I stepped in a fair amount of shit. I’m guessing — or at least hoping, I suppose — it was from a dog. But of course you never know, given that there is a rather tattered gentleman who fancies the sidewalk on this block as his personal toilette. So, anyway, yeah. I stepped in it. I even, dare I say, slid a bit, even though the soles of my boots are thick rubber with sturdy treads. (Bless the almighty gods for a high in the 70s, which led me to forego sandals.)
When a girl steps in shit, and when she slides a little having thus stepped, the best thing for her to do, rather than get mad, is to laugh and say, “Oh shit! Literally!” So I did. As I tried to scrape the boot against the sidewalk, I looked up and saw a sullen, dough-faced girl not eight feet away, reading a pamphlet outside the ground-floor yoga studio. I was still laughing and scraping.
She looked at me. I looked at her. I smiled at her and said, directly to both her and my boot, “Shit! Literal shit!”
I was hoping for some form of commiseration. Some sort of acknowledgment that what had happened was rather funny, but she just looked over at me with an expression of utter vapidity. The only explanation I could come up with is that she didn’t know what “literal” meant.
Stupid shit for brains!