Observations in My New Home
Monday, August 6th, 2007I live across (literally) the street from a 10-acre city park. My dog and I love it. It’s surrounded by ancient sycamores that a VW bug could drive through. Old pictures of it from the 1800s show shadowy men with top hats and canes admiring its enormous fountain (now gone).
When I head out for the walk in it, I take two bags with me (one for trash and one for my dog’s poop). I enjoy picking up garbage–I really do. I know that when I come back tomorrow, the same shitheads will be back and will toss more of it into that beautiful stream. That’s ok. It’s a struggle that I will always lose. I just wonder why they choose to toss the things they do (enormous tubular cans of Budweiser and Styrofoam sandwich cartons; glass bottles; empty dime bags). Someone has to physically throw that shit onto the ground. They have to think about doing it; then they have to walk away from it. What are they thinking? Some idealistic dumb ass who cares about his neighborhood will pick it up, that’s what they are thinking.
Still, it’s a good sign that I’m picking up the trash in my new neighborhood. I used to do it in Vermont on all my constitutionals. I stopped doing it when I lived in Bethel, Connecticut and Sucky, McWorld.
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Still on the subject of my wonderful park, I have taken a liking to reclining on my front porch with a beer in my hand in-between moving boxes of shit hither and yon and admiring its scenery. Like for example, her. She’s a woman who speed walks every day. She speed walks around and around the park. I’ve counted 10 laps and have left to go do other things and then seen her do more. She carries a phone and talks to someone while hauling ass. I’m impressed. I’m always impressed at people doing things like this. Since we are all creatures of habit, we may as well make them good ones. Speed walking versus littering: Take your pick.
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On the subject of littering, Jesus are we a messy country or what?
The runners know that.
Anyone who’s been to Switzerland or Japan knows that.
We are a discarding-happy country; it must be that manifest destiny mentality still wedged into our heads. If d’Tocqueville were alive today, he’d be writing this down in his little notebook. He’d pull at his long sideburns and note how much shit Americans throw onto and into the ground. Maybe he’d conclude that we are used to having so much empty land and that we can throw whatever we want wherever, because there’s bound to be a big patch of green space a few miles down the road that nobody’s got to yet.
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I got stuck watching a biography on Joan Crawford this weekend. My only takeaway is that her last movie was Trog.
