I'm generally against the death penalty. 

There is one exception I’m willing to consider: people who let their dogs poop in other people's yards and walk away.

Many cases deserve clemency. Maybe you grabbed one bag instead of two. Maybe your dog had an unusually productive morning. Planning errors happen. And I'm happy to let it slide as long as it's corrected swiftly.

If nobody saw you, walk home, get a bag, come back, pick it up.

If somebody saw you, tell them you ran out of bags because you grabbed the wrong leash and then hurry home, and I mean hurry, a walk-run gait that tells everyone watching that making this right is your singular focus and you will not rest until it's done. On the way back, hold the bag out in front of you so the neighbors can see it. Sort of shake it a little as you lightly jog. Signal your purpose.

I've heard there are HOAs that DNA test every dog in the neighborhood, so that when a turd shows up on a lawn they can run it against the database and send the owner a fine. As a rule I'm anti-HOA and glad our neighborhood does not have one (although the pink and blue paint job a few doors down occasionally has me questioning that position), but I am extremely in favor of this kind of policing. Two of my three kids, upon discovering a poop in our front yard, would pick it up and have their fingers in their mouths and eyes in under a second and a half. 

Build the database.

Friday afternoon, a childless Gen Z walks his black lab past our house. The lab stops on our lawn and squats. The guy glances around. Empty yard, quiet house, no witnesses. He keeps walking.

What he didn't know was that inside the quiet house was my wife, a woman who has picked up more shit in the past fourteen months than anyone in the state of Oregon, watching from the kitchen island, through the hallway and out the thin glass windows of our entryway. 

The front door blasts open. She comes out yelling. 

With a mother of three bearing down on him, he completely whiffs his opportunity to escape her rage, and worse, he self-incriminates!

He doesn’t say, “Oh my gosh I’m so sorry, I am going home to grab a bag right now.” No, instead he goes:

"I ran out of bags.”

Silent daggers from my wife.

“… I'll gladly pick it up… if you have something for me to use."

If you have something to use. Are you kidding me? He wants her to go back inside the house, retrieve a shit-gathering vessel, and hand it to him? He might as well have said, “You’re going to all this trouble—do you mind just picking it up while you’re at it?”

I’m out of the house for all of this (and that guy should thank his lucky stars). My phone lights up. It’s a text in the group chat we refer to as “the 30-somethings with young kids on our street.”

I've never seen our block more unified.

The awkward part, as she pointed out, would be seeing him again.

Last weekend we had all three kids out on a walk when a black lab turned the corner at the end of the block.

“That’s him.”

I wanted to give him the Game of Thrones treatment. Me, a few paces behind, ringing a bell, following him home, "Shame… Shame…" every few steps until he reached his front door.

But as they passed, the guy had one of those green doggie bag rolls attached to his leash, and visible to all passersby.

In my experience, Millennials hold no power over Gen Z. They don't answer our phone calls. They think our appreciation of Harry Potter is cringe (oh, I’m sorry your childhood lacked a unifying epic that touched on every dimension of morality and the human condition). They make us feel old in coffee shops. But for about four seconds on that sidewalk, that kid showed us a sign of true rehabilitation.

So we let him walk.

Thanks for reading! Hope you laughed. See you next time.

-Will

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please consider forwarding it to your parent friends. If this email was forwarded to you, consider subscribing to Parental Advisory here. Outside of this newsletter, I run a financial planning firm that pretty much exclusively serves millennial families with 1) variable incomes from sales or sales adjacent jobs and/or 2) concentrated wealth (usually from a lot of employer stock).