1. Trashy people. It’s an exaggeration to say I’ve picked up a ton of trash since I started my daily walks, but even so, every day I come home with pockets filled with bottle caps, cellophane wrappers and toting bottles, cans and all manner of trash that someone has thrown out in passing. We’re almost the end of a peninsula, so all this is likely coming from people who “belong” here – property owners or at least residents. Why the fuck they decide they want to trash their own spot is entirely beyond me. Even here, in the woods, and 500 yards from the headwaters of the Bay, people are simply infuriating in their inability to consider anything more distant than the end of their own nose.
2. Thanks Obama. I got a fundraising text message using former President Obama’s photo to plead for cash for the Democratic Party a few days ago. Boy, using the name and likeness of the guy who “led” me through years of pay and hiring freezes to send fund raising texts is really goddamned tone deaf even for the Democratic Party. I might have to vote for you jerkwads, but after the way their guy fucked with my livelihood for half a decade, there isn’t a single circumstance imaginable where I’d give a plug nickel in his name. Just consider my donation the non-existent and miniscule raises I received during the Obama years. The goddamned audacity of some people.
3. Chicken dreams. I had “chicken dreams” again last night. That’s how I’ve come to think of the goofy ass dreams I seem to have about one in three times I have some kind of chicken for dinner. Last night I was rushing back to Tennessee. Somewhere, somehow, I had inherited a dilapidated manor house in the woods and had to restore it. There was a series of oddball characters and charlatans equally set on helping or hindering the cause. I’m not sure where my subconscious was going here, but I do know I woke up grinding the hell out of my teeth, so something in there is percolating.
Tag Archives: litter
On litter and trashy people…
A few months ago, I kicked around the idea of starting up a weekly limited feature focused on topics that some people might consider controversial, unpopular, or otherwise not appropriate for polite company. Nothing much came of the idea then, but it has stewed in my head ever since. This is the next of what I like to think will be a recurring series of Friday evening contemplations. If you’re easily offended, or for some reason have gotten the impression that your friends or family members have to agree with you on every conceivable topic, this might be a good time to look away. While it’s not my intention to be blatantly offensive, I only control the words I use, not how they’re received or interpreted.
Any time I’m forced out of the house on such mundane errands as going to work or picking up groceries, I can’t help but notice just about every road I travel is hopelessly trashed with anything small enough to fit through the window of the average passenger car. There are a few predictable spots where a couple times a month you can count on finding a couch, a mattress, tires, or other large items that “feel off the back” of someone’s truck.
The average person seems to go out of their way to avoid actually using trash cans even where they’re readily available. They’re satisfied with throwing whatever’s at hand directly on the ground in the parking lot, on the sidewalk, or wherever they happen to be when they have something to discard.
That people can’t collectively be trusted to do something as basic as not throw an entire bag of McDonald’s wrappers out their car window isn’t surprising, but it’s a sad commentary on exactly how low the bar of expectation really is. It would make me wonder what the conditions are in people’s homes. Given that they can’t or won’t keep things clean when they’re in public, I can only assume they live in utter filth in private where there’s no one at all to judge them.
Based on the sheer volume of trash that’s piled up alongside the road over the winter, I can only speculate that it’s the result of a sizable minority of the population who just well and truly doesn’t give one single shit about anyone or anything around them. Since there are already laws that “prevent” littering, I don’t suppose we can legislate our way into making people any less slovenly. We could, however, enforce the hell out of the laws already on the books – fine people into oblivion, throw some of the worst offenders directly into jail, or hey, maybe even seize the vehicles that were used in the commission of the crime.
Until being an absolute shitbird is made prohibitively painful, I don’t see any other means of getting after yet another issue that stems from a complete lack of personal responsibility and non-existent consequences.
What Annoys Jeff this Week?
1. A plastic bag. There’s a white plastic bag in the top branch of one of the trees in my front yard. It makes me unreasonably angry. Mostly because even with a ladder I don’t have any implements long enough to haul it down. So, I’ll have this damned plastic bag stuck in front of the house forever or until I cut the tree down, I guess. Just another reason why I hate people. This bag belonged to someone but because they are an irresponsible asshat, now I get to look at it indefinitely out the front window.
2. The days of the week. The only real trouble I’ve had in this long stretch of working from home, is that the days have a real tendency to bleed together. Monday is a lot like Thursday which is a lot like Saturday and on, and on, and on. Hey, I’m a creature of habit, I’m not really complaining… but it does lead to a lot of minor moments of crises that start off with “Oh shit, that was supposed to do that today.”
3. r/wallstreetbets. The Redditors of r/wallstreetbets were mad geniuses last week, executing a classic short squeeze and costing at least one hedge fund a couple of billion dollars. Everyone likes it when the scrappy upstart scores one against the big guys. I get it. The fun part was once things started happening the broader world thought, inexplicably, that everyone could ride GameStop shares to the moon. Now there are posts awash with disbelief that people have the audacity to sell shares and take some profit. Maybe the folks over on Reddit play by different rules, but expecting anyone to ride a stock as wildly overvalued as GameStop had become and then hold it there at its highs indefinitely as the knife started falling back to earth, feels like exactly the kind of wackiness I’ve come to expect from message board people.
What Annoys Jeff this Week?
1. Douchebags who litter. Driving through the historic summer tourist trap of North East, Maryland I was following a SUV towing a jet ski who eventually turned into one of the local marinas. There’s nothing unusual about that this time of year. Also not unusual, because people are mostly awful, was the fact that the passenger kept throwing cigarette butts and trash out the window. I assume, because of the jet ski, that these people enjoy being outside and on the water… which is about 50 yards away from where the last butt fell. That’s the head scratcher, for me. Where exactly to asshats like this think their ash and trash is going to end up the next time it rains? Then again, that question implies that they’re the kind of people who bother thinking at all and that’s probably a poor assumption on my part.
2. Online marketing. I brought home my newest pup over a month ago. While I appreciate the mission of the several dozen rescue organizations I looked at prior to that, I don’t now need to see the animals that are currently available… every time I log in to a social media account. It feels like the algorithms should take into account that the average person, regardless of how much they’d like to, is not going to adopt ALL the animals. Rest assured when the time comes I will seek these organizations out… but just now you’re wasting their marketing dollars by targeting me.
3. Panic as management strategy. I assume there’s a time and a place for panic. I’m not entirely clear what that time or place would be on an average day, though. Losing your head and making shit decisions as a result doesn’t feel like a best management practice. Especially when there are stacks and stacks of paperwork that tell you how to respond to almost any conceivable situation. I haven’t read them all… but I’ve read enough of them to know that flailing your arms and calling all hands to the pumps isn’t usually featured prominently as a how to recommendation.
Gotcha…
Hard as it might be to believe, seven years have passed since I brought home a diminutive chocolate Labrador puppy that had spent the first weeks of her life in a Millington, Tennessee garage. Mama didn’t make it through the birthing process and the room full of pups was bound for the local shelter sooner rather than later. Hand feeding and the constant upkeep of the small herd had proved too much for the resident humans to manage any longer.
As these stories so often start, I wasn’t planning on getting another dog. Actually I was, but I wanted to get through Christmas before starting the search in earnest. Dragging a two month old dog on one of my transcontinental road trips wasn’t high on my list of things to do. Or it wasn’t until a colleague of mine at the time posted a sign offering “free to a good home” and then proceeded to tell me the backstory.
In one of the better snap decisions I’ve ever made, I told the boss I was going to have a look at these dogs and I might be late coming back from lunch. Even at that I hadn’t planned to come back with a dog that day. I really just wanted to look things over. It was supposed to be a start to the “looking” process, not an acquisition. That’s what it was, or rather what it started out as – right up to the point where the door to the garage opened and an army of wagging tails charged out.
There was a lone chocolate in that sea of black. Unlike the others, she didn’t rush out into the room. While her litter-mates sought to occupy every bit of space simultaneously, she hung back – not quite cowering in the presence of the unfamiliar, but in no hurry to greet it either. She was satisfied to find a quiet spot away from the maelstrom and observe. Maybe that’s why the tumblers clicked home. I scooped her up for a closer inspection. With a sniff she seemed satisfied and promptly fell asleep tucked under my arm like a fuzzy football. Some decisions are made for you.
My lunch that day ended up taking a bit longer than planned, although the boss didn’t seem to mind since he went home with a lab of his own later that afternoon. All told, I think my office ended up taking in four or five pups from that litter, but I’ll forever think that my girl was the best of them.
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