not in front of Lady and the Tramp topiary, but on my bike
and to keep with the Frank Miller reference, the image of me on my bike should be in black and white, with one significant color not in grayscale. My bike helmet is black with some blue, so we can pick the blue from that.
There is, however, no actual significance. Get over it.
Also in keeping with the Frank Miller, or more specifically, the Sin City reference, Bruce Willis can be around somewhere if you like him. I'm rather meh about him myself, but it's your imagination.
So now that I am on my bike and in black and white save for the blue of my helmet, with Bruce Willis there or not, let me give you the background: July 5, 2008, 6:15 am. I take my bike out of my apartment, carry it downstairs from my second-level walk-up, get on, and bike to the nearby park, which is within walking distance. Scratch that. It's within crawling distance. If my apartment suddenly lost access to water, leaving me enervated, dehydrated, and desperate enough to ingest the non-potable water that is to be had at the park, I could crawl there. It's not that difficult a ride. But I'd gone bike-riding the day before, since it was July 4 and I was off work and I could. So I didn't want too strenuous a ride. But likewise, it was Saturday morning, my customary bike-riding morning, and I like me my schedules. So I rode to the park.
My first clue was the amount of cars in the parking lot. At 6:20 on a Saturday morning, the parking lot is never that crowded. There were at least ten when the average is two or three. Then, it hit me. Oh yeah. They're probably the cleaning crew.
They would be returning the park it its normal beauty after the Fourth of July day-long party. No problem; I'd weave gracefully between them as they used their pokey-stick-thingies (professional word, I know) to pick up the odd piece of trash. We'd wave to each other, smiles of joy on our faces.
And then I got on the path around the small lake. And then the smell hit me, a nastified combo of vomit, dog poo, and rotting food. This was my park? And what was with all the pop cans scattered across the grass? And, dear Lord, what had happened to the grass? Vast patches of brown dotted the landscaping. A mere week ago, there had been no brown. Gentle hills of rolling grass had graced the park, with bright spots of fuschia flora. Now, it looked liked there had been sporadic grass fires. Not even the concrete path was clean. Spilled and smeared food, the vestiges of hotdogs and potato chips and whatever snacks people had brought from home, made me curl my lip at my wheels having to touch the ground. Stupid gravity. But better the wheels than my feet.
How could people be so inconsiderate? wondered I as I rounded the bend. There were trash cans around; maybe not always within twenty feet like at Disney World*, but present. Didn't people respect the park enough, which was there for their enjoyment, to attempt to keep it clean? Evidently not.
My city park screams.
As I turned off the path to bike down by street, where the stench couldn't get to me, I then felt guilt over my reaction. Sure, if I'd been at the party, I would've thrown my trash away in the provided recepticles. But did I hop off my bike to help with the clean-up? No. I left it to the paid city workers. Or volunteers; I honestly have no idea who was cleaning up the park, only that there was a dedicated team doing so. And from there, it wasn't too difficult to conclude that maybe degrees of laziness don't count for much; it's still laziness, the idea that "it's someone else's job" to clean up. Which makes me wonder if the premise of Wall-E** is so far-fetched. We let things get so nasty that we actually get on a spaceship to escape it, leaving behind the robots we created just for the sole purpose of cleaning up after the humans, the ones who screwed everything up.
That is, of course, if we haven't killed ourselves before we get to that point.
*twenty feet supposedly being the limit of how far people will walk to throw something away before they just drop it
**an excellent movie, BTW; go see it if you haven't
No comments:
Post a Comment