OK, so I know that on Tuesday I promised I would give you a li’l something the next day. And then, that very next day, and for several days thereafter, failed to do so. But hey. Promises, like rules and hearts and camels’s backs, are meant to be broken. Also, as we all know from the weary adage, it is a woman’s prerogative to change her mind, and given that evidence, forensic and scientific, has proven that I am indeed a woman and have a mind, respectively (if not respectfully), I felt it was my right — nay, my duty! — to womankind — to go back on my word.
And now having said all that, here we go!
So. If, say, you’re moseying along the street, minding your own beeswax, whistling yourself a happy little tune and pondering the meaning of cheese, and you come across a piece of another man’s trash that you think has potential to be your own treasure (like, for instance, one of those pieces of paper that looks like a dollar-bill folded in half but is really a super duper clever piece of eye-catching advertising), and then, upon picking it up with the special retracting spike-stick you carry in your pocket just in case, you decide that one man’s trash is not the treasure you’d hoped it would be, what is the proper protocol?
Do you drop the item back onto the very spot where you’d found it? Do you fling it into the air like confetti, jubilant and festive, a la Rip Taylor? Or do you keep it in your possession until such time as you encounter a proper place for its disposal a/k/a a trashcan or a billy goat’s maw? And if you do, indeed, return the trash to the spot where you found it — because of course there is no question that it would be wrong to keep the trash for a period of time and then, once in a completely different location, litter anew — is there a two-second (or five- or whatever your parameter/limit is) rule, like the one for food falling on the floor? (For the record, I have a 30-year rule for that, and the last time I was at my mom’s house, ate a Necco wafer and two Funyuns that skittled under my beanbag chair back in ’76.)
I invite you to discuss.
(P.S. Yes, I’m encouraging your comments once again, in a renewed spirit of online community. Take advantage of this offer, though, because you never know when I will squash that spirit.)