Stuff it

Believe it or not, I could hear the tongues clucking, and even wagging, after reading my last post. Don't I have anything better to do that worry about a little trash along the highway? Sure I do, and I would certainly like to have the opportunity to devote my full worry-attention to it, but there is a fairly good number of people out there who are screwing up my schedule.

I don't think that places should necessarily be clean enough that you can eat off the floor. Nor do I believe that there isn't a certain bohemian charm to a certain level of chaos. And I'd be the last person to think that everyone should be as prussianly tidy as me. But what's the point? I don't get it. I have tried, I really have, but I don't understand the fascination with littering. Apparently a lot of people do it, too (at least judging by the roadside). So, I wonder, then, just what does it look like in their homes? Do they just drop empty boxes and wrappers on the floor? And if they don't do it there, why do they do it somewhere else?

The point I'm trying to make is that the mere fact that you do it says something about you that speaks louder than anything you may think you're saying otherwise. Actions always speak louder than words. Not just sometimes, always.

There are obviously a lot of things that I just don't get. So maybe this is just another one. But I don't think people who get caught doing it should be fined. You shouldn't be able to buy your way out of it. That's become our favorite form of punishment and it is quite obvious that that doesn't work even a little bit. No, they should have to go out and clean up the roadsides: first offence, 10 lbs; second offence, 20 lbs; third strike and you get a couple of kilometers assigned to you that you get to keep clean forever.

The stuff is spreading

One of the things that I've always liked ... no, admired ... about Germany has been its Reinlichkeit. For you non-German speakers, the word means something akin to "cleanliness", but it's more that orderly tidiness of things to which attention is paid, to the orderliness of one's surroundings. This isn't big on some cultural agendas, that's for sure, but though the Germans have often be made fun of for this "compulsion", everyone I've ever spoke to who has visited the place has remarked on it. You just can't help but notice.

And, I can't help but notice that it's slowly, and, I'm afraid, surely being beaten down. That's sad. Now that winter's more or less passed and it's only intermittently raining, I've noticed too many stretches of road on the daily commute that are littered. Now before you get all huffy about another tree-hugger or another pushy pedant, I'll tell you straight up why litter is bad: it's unnecessary. Not only is it unnecessary, it's thoughtless, and above all, it's ignorant.

It's unnecessary because we've come up with a wonderful series of inventions called the wastebasket, the trash bin, the trash receptacle, the dustbin, the garbage can, the dumpster. What is more, they're literally everywhere. So why does the trash have to go out the car window instead of where it belongs? It's thoughtless because it is evidence that whoever is doing it cannot be possibly thinking any further than his or her own bubble-like existence. It's ignorant because it presumes that someone else has nothing better to do than to clean up after some self-centered slob who is simply too lazy to put their stuff where it belongs.

I wish I knew how to get this to stop.

More stuff

When I was about 10 or so, the family went on one of our last vacations, to visit friends of my parents who had recently moved to Florida. I had been there once before, but I was too young to remember, but there are a couple of scraps of memory from my last time there, even if it was some time ago.

I remember we drove to the highest point in the state ... I think it was around 300 feet above sea level, and being from the foothills of Western Pennsylvania, I wasn't all that impressed. Unfortunately, I was just too young to be impressed by flatness. I did have an awareness of the relativity of what amazes or excites us. I'm sure Floridians were really proud of their highest point, just like I was impressed by our highest ridge, even though I knew that somewhere out west, people, both local and visitors, were impressed by real peaks on real mountains.

My brother and his family went to Florida on vacation last year. He told me about it while I was visiting recently. He told me that Florida actually has a mountain now. Hmm, I thought, if Arizona can buy a bridge that's just for show, maybe the Floridians were onto a new tourist idea too. No, he told me, it wasn't a tourist attraction, it was a literal mountain of garbage: it was big and it was long and it stunk. Apparently garbage and heat and humidity are a poor combination for tourist attractions.

Stuff. Too much stuff. Too much packaging. Too many people somewhere there were never a lot of people. Stuff we use, stuff we can't save, stuff we don't want, stuff we can no longer use at all. And in the end, it becomes a mountain where there were never mountains before. I was a bit surprised, though, when my brother told me no one was capitalizing on it in any way. How un-American is that? The highest point in the state was an attraction when I was a kid. I wonder what it is now. Probably just another memory.

Spring is springing

It's that time of year again. How often do we hear that? But it is, nevertheless. One of my favorite times of year, too: spring. Yep, for meteorologists, it has already sprung. For the rest of us, well, we have to wait a couple of weeks, but it's in the air. You may not be able to feel it yet, but I can. The days are getting noticeably longer; it's a bit warmer and wetter; the pace of everyday is starting to pick up; you start getting that feeling that you need to get a few things sorted.

Well, that's how it goes for me at any rate. Spring is the time to clean house, not just literally ... you know, to get rid of that winter grime, to air the place out ... but to make some semblance of a fresh start. This is a good time to think about throwing away all that stuff that has been accumulating, stuff you have no idea why you have or what you're ever going to do with. Most of our stuff in fact.

Let's face it, we in the so-called Industrialized World (and by the way, don't we need to change that label now that we've entered the Information Age?) have way more stuff than we need, and if those I've been talking to lately are being honest, way more than we want. I'm amazed at how much that really is. Oh, I know there are collectors out there. You know, people who can't have enough, keep enough, show off enough. But it's not really helping us, is it? No, too much of what we do really doesn't do a lot for us. For all the information flowing around, for all of it that we have at our fingertips, it is not really helping us all that much. No, we just tend to hang on to a lot of old stuff.

Well, now's the time. Spring is springing, and there's no time like the present to make a fresh start. Chuck out all that old crap, especially the crap in your head. I'm going to. It's time for Spring.