A Good Walk Spoiled

I used to be one of those nutty, daily runners. You know the type—always worrying and wondering when he/she will squeeze in a four-miler, meanwhile disrupting everyone else's schedule.  Insufferable, really. All that changed about five years ago when I (mis)diagnosed some mild but constant hip pain as sciatica. Naturally, another year went by before I visited my doctor (the last time I've been to a clinic, as I recall). He took an x-ray and drew some blood (no doubt because I had insurance) and concluded that I was arthritic in my left hip. You could have knocked me over with a shoelace. "You're going to have find some other form of aerobic exercise," he commented nonchalantly, completely misreading an obsessive runner. "Like what?!" I replied, much too harshly. 

"Have you tried walking?"

The transition to walking wasn't as bad as I'm making it sound. A grudging acceptance eventually took hold—an acknowledgement that I was no longer ten feet tall and bulletproof. Fine, so be it. I'll walk. But the daily escape running provided is still missing whenever I take a solitary stroll. The world doesn't fade away, just the opposite. It gets in my face with a stunning immediacy. What, you may wonder, am I talking about? 

T-R-A-S-H. What are we, Neanderthals? Actually, apologies to Neanderthals. I'm sure they never left their garbage lying around wherever they felt like, what with saber-toothed tigers and other large Pleistocene Era predators lurking. And if you think homo sapiens were the first hominids to bury their dead, you'd be wrong. Neanderthals were doing it long before we came on the scene. Religious ritual? Doubtful. They just wanted to keep hungry carnivores from picking up their scent. Neanderthals may have been big-browed and a little dense-looking, but they weren't dumb.

Back to trash. My daily walk—in a relatively nice neighborhood—is littered with it. In fact, it seems like I can't walk 50 feet without passing half a dozen big and small wrappers, plastic bottles or empty cigarette packs. Yes, I know spring means more trash, but the season never seems to matter. Don't we get it? Everything EVER created by humanity NEVER goes away. It may take another form (solid to gas, solid to liquid, liquid to gas), but it's here to stay in the air, water, or ground. 

Before I wrote my first blogpost seven years ago, a veteran blogger warned me: don't rant, no one likes reading sour posts. I am who I am so I largely ignored that wise piece of advice. But true or not, I just need to get this off my chest and throw it in the ditch like so much trash:

Humanity! Pick up your shit! Spaceship Earth is not your bedroom! For pity's sake, why is throwing garbage into a proper receptacle less appealing than chucking litter out the window of a moving vehicle? Someone please explain that to me like I'm a four-year old, because I just don't get it.

There, I feel better. Now that I've gotten that out of my system, I am off to see Avengers: Endgame, the sequel to Infinity War, a movie in which the "bad guy" wiped out half of all life in the universe, no doubt the littering half.