The Trash

I often wonder where the garbage comes from. I know that each individual piece has its own testimonial.  The streets are riddled with an onslaught of trash every day. Walking downtown has become such a journey for me. My mind races with the thousands of possibilities of origin for these guttered vagabonds.

I believe the McDonalds cup that I kicked today was once filled with Coca-Cola, but how long ago? Who bothered to throw it in the street? What was their name? I wonder what they had as a compliment to the soda. All of these variables are part of a story that only the cup could spin.

Perhaps the cup didn’t start out on this street. It could have started out in another state. Some eager young man on a cross country road trip could have made this street where I found it his destination. With no intention whatsoever to give this cup a free ride. The cup was the farthest thing from his thoughts. As far as he was concerned, when he had drunk it to fruition, his only want was to get rid of it.

Suppose the cup had spilled onto his lap prior to him finishing off the liquid inside. He would have gotten upset with it, or if he was a man with any intelligence, gotten upset with himself. He would have thrown it out the window of his vehicle in disgust and annoyance. Pants sopping and sticky from the sugars in the cola, he rolls down the window and gives his once beverage a good heave for the opposite side of the road. Drips that remained in the container would have spiraled onto nearby travelers, affecting their lives in ways that the original purchaser of the cup could not begin to conceive or care about.

I imagine a stray drip landing on the door handle of a passing taxi cab. Over the next several minutes it transforms into a sticky residue patiently waiting for some unsuspecting victim to keep it warm. That victim could be the new guy in his office with two strikes on his record. He gets the substance on his hand and surreptitiously tries to wipe it off on the cab’s seats without drawing too much attention to himself from the driver. This only exacerbates his problem at hand. Every little fiber that he touched on the seats is now sticking to his hand. Each little piece also has its own story, but I may digress.

This man’s new primary goal is to get his hands clean. No longer is getting to work on time his objective. He assumes that he’ll have enough time to get to his office and to the bathroom before clocking in and still be considered on time. He is wrong. The extra seconds in the bathroom in the morning before work are his undoing. He is dismissed from his position for his third strike. If the cup’s original owner had known that these events would have transpired, would he have ejected the cup onto the street?

I still would have.