Friday 3/8/24
Yesterday, having gotten off my ass, I ran some stairs--3000 of them--at City Hall, just as I'm about to head out shortly to run some more.
As I was coming up the stairs on one of my passes, a man was coming down, eating pudding from a cup with a plastic spoon. This was the morning, so I guess that made it his morning pudding.
Before I had passed him, he finished off the last of the pudding, and licked his spoon with obvious relish. Then, maybe five feet from me, he threw the plastic cup and spoon to the stairs. Just threw both to the ground.
I said, "What the fuck are you doing?"
Look of shock on his face, right? Shock and confusion. So I clarified.
"You seriously just threw your fucking trash on the stairs?"
You know what he said to me? With a greater look of confusion on his face, as if the most normal thing in the world had just happened and no objection could be made?
"I was done."
Well, in that case, my bad. Don't let me rob you of the richness of the experience of being finished. Why don't you pull down your pants and take a shit right on the stairs and really get your money's worth from the whole being done experience?
This fucking world.
Look, I'm not being literal here--that's a disclaimer you have to add--but if I learned that from now on, litterers would be executed, I wouldn't ponder what I could do to be part of a protest movement.
Anyway, I continue to run the stairs, and then as I was leaving, who do you think I saw around the corner having himself another cup of morning pudding?
How much pudding do you need in the morning?
There is everything now, and we make up more things that aren't really things every day, so for all I know, there is a pudding addiction epidemic, and there are puddingaholics who attend Puddingaholics Anonymous meetings and this fellow really needed a PA meeting and wasn't going or his sponsor died after suffering a pudding relapse and that set him back in his own battle with pudding.
I try to be sensitive to such things. But littering? There's no excuse for littering. You are trash yourself if you litter.
"I was done." What the fuck. And you weren't even done. You were just done with that cup. You were moving on to other cups and no doubt more littering.
