True courage is following your heart, other people’s opinions be damned. In the case of Reno Peterkin he discovered his true calling in the collection of nuggets of excrement. If he came upon some scat in some lawn or park, he would immediately kneel down next to it and carefully transfer it into his pockets, before resuming whatever it was he was doing at the time. At home he would put his catch in his oven, and bake it for a good while until it was entirely solid, before putting it in a special box in his bedroom. It started as a statement, Reno explained, a protest against his mother not letting him get a pet because she thought he couldn’t handle the responsibilities of cleaning up after it. Well, she was certainly wrong about that – over the years he had amassed a veritable treasure trove of all manners of feces: rabbit pellets, horse mash, green goose tubes, you name it (his greatest prize was a great mound of bear shit he found from a hiking trip). Unfortunately his mother remained unconvinced that a pet would be a good addition to the family, rather, she got it in her head that her son was mentally unwell and gave him all sorts of hardships because of it. She kept trying to rid her house of his collection whenever she thought he wasn’t there, but whether by luck or ingenuity, he was able to thwart her every time with surprising finesse for many a year. But can we take a minute to talk about what a nasty woman his mother is? To refuse to support your child’s hobbies is questionable enough, but to actively attempt to curb it? Absolutely disgusting behavior. Anyways the real eyebrow raiser came when the Peterkin house was mysteriously burned down in a terrible case of arson – the smell of burning shit was so great that it completely overwhelmed his neighborhood for over a day. Mrs. Peterkin was taken into questioning but nothing ever came out of it for lack of evidence. Reno was emotionally devastated, and committed suicide a year later, but his family maintained that it had absolutely nothing to do with the loss of the treasure he valued so much.