So today was the day for the Adopt-a-Highway litter pick-up.
The sign says “Freethinkers of Central Arkansas,” but that group was one of several that merged with the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers a couple of years ago. Somebody in charge of the organization really ought to do something about getting the name on the sign changed. Somebody? Somebody? Oh. Wait. That would probably end up being me. Therefore, it’s fine the way it is – for a little longer, anyway.
We do our highway clean-ups on Sunday mornings, because, well, it’s not like we go to church. It’s the one time in the week when people in our group are apt to be available. We met at 9:00 a.m. today, before things got too blazing hot. The mile we adopted is in downtown Little Rock, on State Highway 10 near the state capitol. It’s part of LaHarpe Boulevard where the highway crosses a railroad and becomes Third Street, then crosses the railroad again a couple of miles before it officially becomes Cantrell Road. Little Rock’s primary roads don’t tend to keep a single name for long distances. Don’t ask me why.
Litter along this street doesn’t tend to get too out of hand. I don’t know if that’s because the property owners along this stretch tend to be conscientious about keeping their sidewalks clean. (I’m especially giving you nods of approval, Dillard’s Corporate Headquarters and Episcopal Collegiate School.)
In the years that I’ve participated in the highway cleanup, I’ve noticed one thing to be consistently true:
Cigarette smokers are some trashy, nasty, litter-bugging sumbitches.
And I don’t mean just a little trashy, either. If you count the actual number of things picked up today, far and away the most numerous were cigarette butts. If I’ve counted correctly, there are about thirty pieces of litter in the photo to the right. Twenty-six of those are cigarette butts. I circled the litter butts in red so you could see them better. The non-butt pieces of litter are circled in blue.
Do cigarette smokers realize that their butts are not biodegradable? Do they understand that when they throw their butts out of the car window they are really and truly littering? Do they know that the rest of the world really doesn’t want to look at their trash?
I guess not. I may be a little sensitive to this, seeing as how just this morning I spent an hour and half with about 15 other folks on the side of the road picking up mostly cigarette butts discarded by thoughtless smokers. Cigarette smokers litter butts like breadcrumbs through the forest paths of their lives. Why?
I don’t smoke. I am allergic to cigarette smoke. My throat closes up when I spend to much time around it. I can’t breathe. So I am grateful for the modern courtesy of people going outside to smoke when they are in my company. Smoking indoors caused me lots of unpleasant breathing issues before it became customary for smokers to go outside. I will provide ashtrays for my guests who want to smoke.
Smokers who come over to my house and toss their nasty butts in my yard are pretty friggin’ rude, in my book. Do they think no one picks up after them? Do they think I want their ugly butts to just sit there, waiting for some archaeologist to come along in a couple hundred years to dig them up and think that I lived on top of some trash heap? Damn litterbugs.
After I got home from the highway cleanup today, I went out through my son’s basement bedroom to the patio. The photo to the left shows what was on the steps outside his door. I circled the cigarette butts – five of them, and those are the ones I didn’t have to look for. They were just thrown, or carefully placed, right there on the steps leading down to the yard. I didn’t circle the matches in the photo on the left, but I was pretty appalled at the collection I found, and the photo on the right shows more matches that were apparently used to light those cigarettes. The matches were tossed onto the stoop. They are wooden, so they are biodegradable, but that doesn’t mean I really want them littering my damn deck. and we’ve got a serious drought going on. I don’t want my house to burn down, either.
I have a couple of family members who occasionally smoke at my house. I suspect that one of them left those butts outside the basement door. Another of them is my favorite youngest male first cousin, who I’ll call Paul, because that’s his name. Paul doesn’t litter cigarette butts at my house anymore. There’s a reason for that.
Paul came over one evening, and we spent a pleasant few hours chatting. Paul has spent many hours at my house, and he knows I can’t handle cigarettes inside. Off and on throughout his visit that evening, Paul would go out onto the deck to smoke. He took a can with him. I don’t remember if it was a can of beer or of soda, or if it was empty or full. He did not ask for an ashtray, though, so I assumed he was using his can as his ashtray.
“This pot is kind of cool,” Paul said. “But why does it have a hole in its side?” He was standing on the deck looking at the hanging plant that graced the door to my living room.
“A what?”
I looked at the pot. Sure enough, there was a hole in the side of the pot. I had just bought the flowers in that pot a couple of weeks before, filled the empty pot with a coconut coir potting mixture, and planted them. For a moment I was confused. I didn’t remember it being the type of pot with holes for strawberries or herbs to grow out of its sides. I reached for the pot and turned it to see if there were more holes on the sides, which I had just missed because of a psychotic break or something.
“That’s weird. It’s smoking,” said Paul.
“Shit!” I dashed for the water hose a few feet away.
After playing Fire Marshall, I looked at Paul, who looked very sheepish.
“Um,” he said.
“I guess you weren’t using that as an ashtray,” I said, nodding toward the can.
“Yeah. No. No, I wasn’t.”
“That pot didn’t originally have a hole in its side,” I said, because at that moment it dawned on me that the hole had just materialized. Or dematerialized. The plastic had melted, mysteriously.
“No, I guess it didn’t.”
“Paul, we’ve discussed smoking pot,” I said gently. Because we have, lots of times.
Pots really shouldn’t smoke.
(Paul, you know I love you. Don’t hate me for telling this story.)
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