Detritus

A passing glance to my right while walking down the street brought my mind back to something in which I had outsized interest as an adolescent. There in the dirt on the opposite side from the street was some very ordinary trash. Trash of just that kind captivated me once upon a time. Here in LA, the streets commonly are lined with points of interest, and not just the most prominent ones to which tourists and others flock. As I walk along such thoroughfares, I see plenty to keep my mind occupied should it seize upon nothing else. Back home, comparatively few streets are so stimulating. It's just block after block of subdivisions which do little to differentiate themselves. There can be miles in between retail groupings of any significance.

That would leave me staring at the ground as I walk. There the only thing to stir me was trash discarded from past motorists. As you can guess, the bar was rather low as to what I would grant my attention. Scrutinized were scraps of paper, empty liquor bottles and badly damaged cds. I don't know that I can recall anything fitting those last criteria. The sun renders most things non-functional rapidly in Phoenix, and a fairly high percentage of things to be found on the sidewalk have been run over. It has always seemed sad and senseless that it should be there. Why any of it ended up where it is rather than being deposited in a proper receptacle by someone patient enough to hang on to it for a few minutes I don't know.

Though I tended to leave the trash as it was when on my own time, I did have to pick it up when at any Boy Scout function. There was a particular occasion when we cleaned up some kind of park owned by a church. It seemed more like a vacant lot, and seemed to have been treated as such. For any afficionado of trash, it was a motherlode. Found there was everything from cutlery to lingerie, and we young boys were not mature about any of it. It was the only thing to liven up the drudgery of tedious, arduous work on a hot weekend day. I still would have preferred to spend the day playing the video games which then monopolized my free time.

I find that underpasses are a magnet for trash. One might only really get that impression by walking through them rather than driving. I imagine it all gets there by industrious vagrants who make a home of said underpass. As they say, one man's trash is another man's treasure. One thing they must be grateful for is the furniture. I don't believe I ever saw it back home, but here the practice is to dump furniture out on the sidewalk when done with it. It's probably the most tempting trash of all, but one must resist on account of the bed bugs who undoubtedly inhabit a high proportion of them. I suggest you leave them alone as well, but do pick up a few pieces of trash when the opportunity presents itself, won't you?