Getting Trashed

I hate litterbugs. Hate them. Hate them. Hate them. I think they should be jailed in a dumpster behind a Slim Jim factory. There is no earthly reason to open up your car window and toss out trash. No matter how small. Cigarette butts included. Do you hear me, smokers? You're polluting our earth enough as it is with your carcinogens that I don't choose to inhale. Oh, don't get me started on how much I abhor smoking. Did you catch that, Mom? But I digress, as I so often do... I cuss like a mother fucker when I see people litter from their car (in my head, of course, my boys will out-cuss me in due time, but I don't need to be the one to teach them this particular habit).

Here are some things that I've spotted on the roadside and in the brush in the last couple weeks. I've been jotting them down in my blog fodder notebook (not while driving, only at red lights and in the car pool line). Note that I usually drive within a five mile radius of my house, and most of it does not involve a freeway. That's means that this crap is littering my neighborhood streets. And my water. And my soil. It is not only unsightly; it is unsafe (and not just because I am gawking at it while trying to write in my little notebook).

Getting Trashed gets a whole new meaning:

• a pair of boxing gloves
• one shoe, looked like a sneaker
• bag of apples
• ballet slippers
• pair of twisted up jeans
• stuffed plastic Hefty bag that I feared contained body parts so I did not stop for closer inspection
• small wooden crate...perhaps some woodland creature ate the clementines it once housed
  
• speakers, really big ones from back in the day that pass for end tables
  
• dog leash...in my head the dog once attached to said leash is perfectly happy and safe
  
• lawn furniture cushion
• various mega size soda cups and burger wrappers
• pillowcase
  
• baseball cap
• backpack (feared explosives were inside so I hightailed it outta there)
• strap of some sort that looked like a yellow karate belt
• malt liquor cans, really big ones
• velveteen Crown Royal bag
• tube socks
• sand pail
• something tangles that looked like pieces of a blow up holiday lawn Santa
• plastic milk jugs, liter bottles, cans
  

So I wonder what the story is behind all this lost/littered stuff. Did some fed up minivan mom toss out her daughter's ballet slippers when the whining reached fever pitch? Did the baseball cap blow off some dude's head when a double rig sped by? Did some party animals toss the malt liquor cans in haste when they spotted an under cover cop trailing them?

What do you think? Tell me a story about how one item ended up littering my path.