No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

So, there I was, minding my own business and getting my errands done like a good little Bat, and, as I was in line at a red light, I noticed something on the ground up ahead: an empty water bottle, discarded on the street by some careless felon. Okay, those of you who know me, or who have even glanced cursorily at my body of work here on AC, know that I am an inveterate tree hugger, and it is in that spirit that you will not be surprised to hear that I hold people who litter in the lowest esteem. When I see someone casually discard an item onto the street, sidewalk or greenway, it actually foments in me a desire to perform violence on the wayward oaf.

I tend to restrain myself from actual fisticuffs, although I have on a couple of occasions called, "You dropped something!", thinking I could shame the misbegotten individual into picking said something back up while also giving them an excuse of ignorance, however feigned. Would you believe this has never worked, mainly because the malformed weasels who litter in the first place do not possess enough of a conscience to rescind their evil deposit. I guess gravity is too much of a challenge, let alone responsibility.

Now that you have been fully schooled on my disdain for those who litter (well, perhaps not fully, but I sense that your patience to hear me rant has its limits), imagine how it irked, ruffled and agitated me to see that the piece of litter in question was recyclable. What kind of cretin from the bottom of the slime pit would litter something recyclable? Oh, this was a double-dog sin, this was.

Fortunately, I was in position to rectify things, as the bottle was within reach. I could just stop next to it, open the car door, and pluck it off the pavement, turning it from harmful eyesore into potential parka stuffing with a simple trip to my recycling bin. One small pluck for a woman, one giant hug to the planet!

The light changed. I put my plan into action, drifting up to the bottle and swooping down like an Environmental Avenger to retrieve it. The people behind me, who must have been mindful of my good deed for the universe, kindly refrained from leaning on their horns to explain to me that the green light means 'go'.

Well, that's when the best-laid plans gang oft aglay, as my buddy Bobby Burns used to say. For as I triumphantly lifted the bottle carward, with it came a stretchy, gooey tendril of melted blue bubble gum that tethered the bottle to the street. What the hell; was this some sort of evil improvised device designed to terrorize responsible environmentalists? There was no way to break the bottle free-the warm, gloppy gum continued to stretch. Not willing to surrender and fling the bottle back onto the road, I grabbed a paper napkin from the glove compartment (and I have plenty of those, believe me-fast food restaurants are awfully generous, and I throw NOTHING away unused) and swabbed the gum from the bottle.

I now had not a bottle tethered to the street by a strand of stretchy, globby blue bubblegum, but a paper napkin tethered to the street by a strand of...you get the picture. Again, I was powerless the snap the tendril, which continued to stretch and was now being blown by the breeze into the immediate and threatening vicinity of my car door. In terror of lacing my door-or, worse yet, my upholstery-with the disgusting blue gunk, and with the ever-looming awareness of the line of cars behind me, who had still been nice enough not to honk but whose hands were probably creeping inexorably into the position, I flung the napkin out of the car in disgust and shame. It landed on the road, looking EVER so much more like trash than the clear bottle it replaced. I was half-expecting someone to call, witheringly, "You dropped something!"

As I drove away, marveling at just how true that thing about hell and good intentions always proves to be, I tried to comfort myself with the thought, "At least the napkin is biodegradable." ...So says the Wayward Oaf.