THE BORN LESAR
Ya know, a garbage can ain't that difficult to use
A McDonald’s McGriddle sandwich wrapper. A half-empty Diet Pepsi can. A crumpled and yellowed paper plate with a dried ketchup stain. An empty pack of Marlboro’s.
That’s a partial listing of the contents of a 13-gallon tall kitchen garbage bag I filled one evening last week while taking a short walk on the street on which I reside. It’s disgusting, really, disheartening, depressing even, the things people chuck out of their vehicle windows. I swear, when I am finally named Grand Pooba of the Civilized World, littering will be punishable by death and those convicted twice will have to watch Dancing With the Stars -- in slow motion!
Two bottles of Bud Light, a plastic Lunchables tray (bologna and cheese, I think), three empty packets of Burger King mayonnaise, a plastic Wal-Mart sack, and a paper napkin onto which someone apparently wiped their oily dipstick.
Since the winter’s snow melted in the past few weeks, the refuse of a season has begun to show more evidently on the roadside past which I travel each day. Maddened each time I glanced sideways to see a foam drink cup tossed selfishly askance, I decided I would pick it up when next me and my beagle, Buckshot, would walk.
It’s roughly one-third of a mile, I’d say, from my driveway to the nearest intersection, and from the east side of the road as we ambled southward and then the west as we came back north, Buck and me collected enough garbage to pack our trash bag tightly. All this stuff, from a one-third mile stretch of an average road in an average town. Just think, if you’d extrapolate that out -- 13 gallons of litter times a third of a mile times every mile of road in this United States, you’d get, well, let me see here -- some really gi-normous number, I’d bet. Incredible, what pigs Americans can be.
A Hardees wax-coated paper drink cup (super -sized), half of a plastic ball-point pen casing, a slightly crushed Coors Light can, a foil bag of Lays Classic potato chips, a plastic 6-ring beer or soda can holder, and four whole bananas.
Few things ram a burr under my collar like littering, don’t ask me why. Ever since I was a kid roaming the dusty ditches of Gorman Avenue near Willard, whenever I’d find an item lazily tossed out of some doughhead’s window, I’d stick it in the pocket of my knee-worn blue jeans and take it home to throw away. I think the neighbors noticed, too, ‘cuz they’d say as they drove by, “Wow, these ditches look fine, except for that ugly kid.”
A Dominos pizza box (deluxe, from the look of the grease stains), a 4-foot length of plastic pipe, two empty plastic Mountain Dew containers, and a knotted and stringy piece of orange twine.
Based on my keen observations and CSIlike deductive skills, I concluded that somewhere between 96-97 percent of the litter I collected last week had been tossed out a moving vehicle window. Had it not, I deduced, it would have been scattered willy-nilly across the entire landscape. I bring this up because it was the only way I could come up with to work the term “willy-nilly” into this week’s column. Hey, you think it’s so easy, let’s see you try.
A Taco Bell napkin, an unlabeled clear plastic bottle half-filled with a liquid slightly resembling overused deep-fry oil, an inside-out sweat sock, a 20-amp fuse, one sheetrock screw and a plastic coffee container neatly packed with a soiled napkin and a spork (some folks are thoughtful enough to organize their litter before they pollute the Earth with it).
I suppose it’s silly of me to think I made some sort of difference in the ecological wellbeing of the planet by my feeble attempt to rid one tiny stretch of road of human garbage. The next evening, Buck and me strolled north from the house instead of south, only to find this route even more obscenely littered than the one before. And, as I’ve been driving this week, I’ve glanced into some ditches only to see downright profuse tonnages of crap, and on Sunday afternoon, I happened to pull out of a parking lot behind a car just as two occupants tossed two wrappers onto the boulevard. Ggggrrrrrrrr. It’s a good thing there are laws against people taking petty criminal matters into their own hands, otherwise those two litterbugs may have found themselves begging some crazed Rambo-dude (me) to at least let them live after they were done licking the street clean with their tongues.
A Peanut Butter Twix foil wrapper, a Milwaukee’s Best Light can (you mean somebody actually drinks that stuff?), a smashed Texas Poker soft drink cup, a Copps grocery store circular (Hey, top sirloin for only $2.77 a pound!), and an empty plastic party snack tray.
Obviously, there is not ample deterrent in our existing laws to prevent boneheads from flipping their stuff out the window as they pretend to drive while they talk on their cell phones. Therefore -- assuming that all good legislators stay attuned to topical issues by reading this column -- I propose that we immediately (or sooner if possible) implement new littering codes containing the following penalties for desecrating our planet with trash. 1.) First offense -- Either spend a year in state prison, or eat everything they find along a 1-mile stretch of Interstate. 2.) Second offense -- Lifetime probation backed up by a 10-year withheld prison sentence, or a solid year of crawling through the nation’s highway ditches picking up cigarette butts with a Tweezer. 3.) Third offense -- automatic life prison sentence or 25 years of unpaid labor sorting through landfills for loose change to donate to the Adopt-AHighway litter control program.
A Russell Stover strawberry creme egg wrapper, an 18.5-ounce Fuze Slenderizer strawberry melon beverage container, a Sour Cream ‘n Onion Pringles can, and a 15-stick Doublemint chewing gum Slim Pack.
C’mon, people. Take it home and throw it away. It ain’t that difficult.
