Today I want to write about garbage. It was Earth Day this week. Every day should be Earth Day. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Good motto. But here's a forgotten aspect of environmentalism. Yes, scrap, waste, trash, rubbish, litter....the stuff we produce so much. Some of us, it seems, forget where garbage goes.
In the locker room at the gym I noticed that someone had left an empty water bottle on a table and an empty chewing gum wrapper on the floor under the table. The thought occurred to me that I had seen an empty bottle and a gum wrapper in those precise locations a few times before. They must have been left by the same person!!!! Was an alien life form studying the customs and rites of the human exercise nut? Were these items left by an anthropologist hiding somewhere in the locker room as part of some government-sponsored research to determine what people would do when faced with these extraneous objects? Was there a hidden camera and at any moment a host would jump out and say Candid Camera? Naw, I decided, it was just some goofball who thinks someone else needs the exercise of bending over and picking up the gum wrapper.
I have just one thing to say to the unknown litterbug...the gym is in the process of developing new technology in which garbage will deposit itself in the correct receptacle. But they are still working out the bugs. In the meantime those using the locker room as their own private garbage can are requested to use the old technology of PICKING UP YOUR GARBAGE, WALKING THREE STEPS AND PUTTING IT IN THE CAN. Sadly, chances are the unknown litterbug will not be reading this blog...
It's the same story around the front of my apartment block. Ever since the store fronts have been finished and the bus company installed a couple of benches, people waiting for the bus have been leaving cigarettes on the sidewalk. Some of those butts, granted, are tossed on the sidewalk by bus drivers feeding their nicotine addictions during their breaks but most of them are left by people lounging around on the bus benches. Every morning when I leave for the gym the sidewalk is littered with newspapers, coffee cups, paper wrappings from hamburgers and sandwiches and plastic containers of all sorts and sizes. Yes, it's a dirty world we live in and some people are making it dirtier.
You are probably wondering: did the ranter pick up any of this garbage and deposit it? No. I talk a good talk, but do I walk the walk? I figure it might be considered a bit OC if I started picking up trash in my neighbourhood. Although, when I lived in Winnipeg, I used to carry a garbage bag whenever I walked the dog, a little one for the dog detritis, a large one for all the other garbage. I guess I have developed new priorities or perhaps new eccentricities. But I do put my own garbage in the garbage can.
Just one small plea for Mother Earth...don't litter.
Gotta get some sleep. Catch up on the sleep I've been missing the last few days. Have a good week. Keep Earth clean.
Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.~George Carlin
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Musings of a new Vancouverite
