How to be a Good Community Person and Stop Letting People's Dogs Chase You (You Stupid, Selfish Jerk!)

I was running in Prospect Park one morning when, in the distance, I heard an angry female voice yelling something I couldn't quite make out, over and over again. Slowly the the voice got louder.

"Sparky!" it implored over. "Sparky! Sparky! Sparky! Goddammit!"

Eventually this chorus changed to, "Stop!"

It was getting louder, closer. "Stop!...Stop!...Stop!.."

Wow, I thought. This person is annoying. "STOP RUNNING!" the woman finally yelled. At about the same moment, a small-to-medium-sized mutt had suddenly almost entangled itself in my feet as I ran, and I saw this crazed, angry woman with an empty leash booking it straight toward me.  

She was yelling at me? I thought. That's weird. It hardly mattered, though, because at this point I had stopped running -- merely to keep myself from tripping over the spaz of a dog.

The woman roughly grabbed the mutt by the collar and muttered "Goddammit!" over and over again.

I looked at the dog. Poor little Goddammit, I thought -- and what an unfortunate name.

The woman, now out of breath, gave me the look of death, and I went back to running. But after a few minutes another woman with her own unleashed dog looked at me as I was running toward her and beckoned me to stop. "Excuse me," she said.

I looked at her quizzically, slowing to a stop. "Yes?" I said.

"Can you do me a favor?"

I shrugged, a little confused, and gestured for her to continue; I was listening. "When someone's dog is chasing you," she said, "could you just stop?" I squinted at her --  really, really confused now. "You shouldn't let people's dogs chase you," she explained patiently, as if to a child. She held her Park Slope Food Coop travel mug smugly up near her chin.

"What?" I said, looking at her like she was from another planet (since apparently she was).

She immediately got impatient. How had I failed to get the memo that everyone else obviously had read? "I mean, can't you just be a good community person?" she demanded.

So...I was trying to wrap my mind around this one.  Apparently I "wasn't being a good community person." I was "letting" someone's dog chase me. (I.e., I was going for a run before work in the morning and minding my own goddamned business).

I was stunned. I passed the death stare that the other woman had given to me on in her direction and went back to running without responding.

All this talk about how crazy we "cat people" are -- but at least we keep that crap behind closed doors, you know? Just...a personal matter between each of us and our half dozen felines.

Now I'd heard it all.