Don't Take Me Seriously - Book - Page 57
ESCAPE Weekly
April 24 - 30, 2009 – 4
Green with compost confusion
Onions, compost; plastic, recycle — but what do
you do with a used paper napkin on Earth Day?
I
Jim Walker/The Signal
At the Earth Day Festival, you were supposed to sort your trash into "Compost" or "Recycle" bins (the regular trash cans were covered). For at least one man, this stirred up a lot of confusion and "deep" thought.
But, as they say, he needed it.
celebrated the very first Earth Day
(Well, I have been to Texas.)
as a high school senior. We sat on
But the dark side could only hold me
the school lawn and made posters,
intermittently (littering, not Texas).
talked the good talk and dreamed of
And so we come to Earth Day 2009,
how we were going to change the world.
or at least the Saturday before Earth Day.
(Well, someone was going to change
Last Saturday the Earth Day Festival
the world, and I was going to at least be
was held at Central Park. And I
there so I could say I had been there.)
stopped by just to see how
It was a new and
far we’d come since the
heady concept, saving the
first Earth Day.
planet. Before that the
And, in the spirit of
only ecological thinking
nostalgia, the first thing I
prevalent in society that I
did — was eat.
was aware of was the antiI had a planet-sized
littering campaign.
hunger, so I picked up a
Remember the Litterbug?
bratwurst from the Sausage
However, that campaign
King booth. I found a seat
worked, on me at least. Or
Jim Walker
maybe it was my dad who
Don't Take Me Seriously at a park bench near the
sandbox and began, as we
worked on me, and that
used to say, scarfing.
was when “working on”
While I ate, two young ladies at the
someone really meant something.
other end of the table discussed whether
In any case, I grew up with two forsure “do nots:” Do not litter, and do not or not you needed pre-calculus to get
into calculus, and I was transported
point a gun, any gun, at anything you
back to high school.
do not intend to shoot.
Now understand, I only heard
(And, no, I didn’t grow up in Texas.)
To this day pointing even a toy gun at people talking about such things back
someone (or vice versa) makes me cringe in the day. For myself, I had to get a
— and so does watching people casually papal dispensation to skip the second
toss trash (and cigarette butts, yeah I saw half of algebra (after three tries) and
you) out their car windows. I won’t even take geometry. But it worked, so it was
a right angle.
get started on gum on sidewalks.
While my reverie was going on at
However, I must admit, I have
the picnic table, my paper napkins kept
littered.
getting free in the breeze and wafting
But I did it delinquently and
into the sandbox.
deliberately, not casually — and I did
Mind you, the napkins thought this
it because, at the time, I was trying to
was very funny. I did not.
show the world just what a really tough
Call it a testament to my ineptitude
guy I could be. Yeah, um-hum, that’s
right. No car theft or drive-bys for me, I at securing the wayward wipes, or to
my ingrained distaste for littering — or
can litter!
maybe I just wanted to look like a good
And, fine, since we’re admitting
guy — but I retrieved napkins from that
things here, I did my share of gunsandbox no less than three times before I
pointin’, too.
finished eating.
I shot my older brother a few times
with a BB gun.
See CONFUSION, page 16
