The Attack of the Cones

Prior to the Open House for our home this past Sunday, I took the boys down the street for some good old-fashioned trash picking. As everyone knows, an empty box of Trojan-Enz lying on the sidewalk in front of one's home knocks a good 10 grand off the price, and this just could not be allowed. I brought yellow rubber gloves with me for the most offensive items. Each person got a plastic bag. It was like an Easter egg hunt, except amusingly different!

Here was some of our take:
Candy wrappers, assorted sizes
Cigarette boxes and butts
Assorted plastic bits
Three pieces roofing shingle
One Snapple bottle
One Taco Bell wrapper
Trojan-Enz box, empty
One pair ladies' pantyhose (black)
One large, matted clump of ladies' hair (black)
(I wonder if the latter two were related? They lay on the street in close proximity to each other.)
One large orange traffic cone

I didn't know what to do with the cone, as it was too large to stuff in the garbage can, so I promptly hucked it over the back fence of our property into the parking lot of the Post Marine supply store. (Well, what else was I to do?) I considered the matter finished, but apparently the traffic cones of Westchester did not.

They began to follow me.

On our way to Route 95 later, I glanced into the Post Marine lot to see a whole mess of orange cones: as many as 6 or 7 sat in the lot (the one I had thrown lay on its side right next to our fence, but seemingly at home among its brethren). Had they all gathered here to investigate? Some of the cones stared at us menacingly. They had seen what I had done to their kin and they didn't like it.

On the way up to Mahopac later, we spotted whole herds of the things sitting on their haunches by the roadside, staring at us malevolently. They were clearly breeding, and they had vengeance on their minds.

Once we got up in the country we continued to see them. Lone wolves (some battered and covered with reflective tape) sat here and there on seemingly bucolic country lanes. Their presence was disconcerting. We continued to see them lurking in unexpected spots.

I expect them to come for us shortly. They do not take lightly to ill-treatment of one of their own. We'll pull aside the bedroom curtain tomorrow morning and they'll be there, waiting in a row on the street before our home. Perhaps some of them will be clad in the discarded finery of street garbage: one bewigged with a matted clump of hair, another swathed in grubby pantyhose. God, no! They will be there. And they will begin to shuffle slowly, inexorably in our direction.

Gee, I'm sorry I've been so grumpy, but it really is all your fault

It has come to the attention of The Party Pony that some of my recent posts have been a touch, shall we say, mean-spirited? Perhaps a bit dark, obsessive, and madly brooding on ways in which to drive my enemies weeping and naked into the nearest body of water? Mayhap a titch too drenched in ire and ill-humor, and lacking that G-rated buoyancy which has at times--in the quite distant past--been my trademark?

Yes, all of these accusations and more are true. The Party Pony has been in a foul humor, but how can I possibly be blamed, besieged as I am by the malignant and stoopid Proletariat of the world? How I can I be even one iota at fault when, in fact, my sunny disposition has been marred by the existence of a lumplike creature who, when apple-picking, tosses a receipt, an empty Gatorade bottle, and a woman's flip-flop 'neath the tree? You would gnash your teeth, too.

We did go apple-picking today, and it was lovely (despite the disgusting record-breaking heat). The boys couldn't reach a single apple, but they loaded up the bag like champs. We got a whole 1/2 peck of apples or something in that vicinity. I have no idea how to eat all these apples, but what I really want to discuss is the deep, inner compulsion that drives someone to litter wantonly while picking apples in a serene, pastoral setting. I try to think of the best of humanity: Yes, when they were reaching high to pluck apples, some refuse just "spilled" out of their pockets onto the ground below! Or maybe, they were picking apples on their way to the dump and, attacked by an errant bird of prey, fled in terror with their garbage cascading out across the hillside as they went! An even more remote, yet possible theory: the garbage fell out of a small Cessna passing overhead, and scattered in small, neat pockets under each apple tree.

Sadly, after several experiments and much stealthy observation, I have determined that none of these possiblities can be true. I don't care HOW unedumacated you may be, there is simply no excuse for this type of nonsense. If I catch you at it, I'm going to pull out all the stops from Level 1 of my Self-Help course in Human Loathing. You will be beaten with plastic offal, besides.

All that aside, wasn't it a fine Sunday? (Yes, little one upstairs, there is no need to weep over the fact that your sippy cup has tilted over and that the sticker you stuck on it has unstuck itself and furled up.) The sky was blue, and there was a lithe wind over the apple downs. The smell of hot, roasting turkey legs drifted up from the parking lot of Outhouse Orchards (named after its founder, Johnny M. Outhouse), and crowds of happy harvesters clambered astride pumpkins. Doughnuts dropped into burbling, hot grease. Bees swarmed over fallen, trompled apples, and children shrieked and swung their arms to ward off the insects. The cars came onward, in a steady stream of insatiable pickers and hay-riders, all grinding gravel and kicking up clouds of dust.

Don't tell anyone, but I broke the rules today and climbed an apple tree. Climbing trees is the best darned kind of fun you can have. I didn't stay up long, just enough to feel that slippery, hand-scratching, unsurefootedness and then the drop down atop a pile of ankle-turning windfall apples. Next time, I will go higher.

3 Previously Unknown Facts, One Regarding Alec Baldwin

The book I am reading now, The World Without Us, is just mind-boggling. I would recommend its purchase. Do it! Do it now!

One of the interesting facts I have learned from this book is that something exists called the Pacific Garbage Patch, which is roughly the size of Texas. It's a gyre of human refuse and flotsam, spinning in a less-traveled area of the Pacific. Most of it is plastic, which has a half life of about 66 billion years. Don't it make you wonder how much plastic we are ingesting through the food chain, and what it might be doing to us? I estimate that I am .66 percent plastic already, and by the time I reach 5% my face will have frozen a la Nicole Kidman.

And also according to the book there are these crazy Caves in Turkey that are riddled with homes and secret underground caverns and even a hotel! I didn't know about these caves. Apparently they will last quite a while after Manhattan crumbles and topples and is overrun with weeds and flowers. Who knew? Have I been living under a ROCK?

But best of all was this quote I discovered today, courtesy of Alec Baldwin. (This was not in the book, but A World Without Us certainly includes no member of the Baldwin family.) Of his wife's divorce lawyer, he stated: "She's this 300-pound homunculus whose face looks like a cross between a bulldog and a clenched fist." How infinitely perfect and delightful is that quote? He can get as drunk and surly as he likes. Those words are worth 1,000 pictures of the awful creature. I wish I had said it. I'm a-gonna save it up and say it someone someday. I have a certain peevish coworker in mind, who may not have the requisite 300 pounds but of whom could be said "I've seen better legs on a piano." She is often sighted with a surly grimace, lumping around on those great, stodgy legs and dreaming of power-mad schemes to drive us all crazy. Her face? Perhaps an omelet with eyes and teeth, gone awry when it got tipped from the pan. With a wig slapped on it.

Grrrraaak! I challenge Alec Baldwin to an invective-off, during which I will threaten to wallpaper my latrine with my enemy's pelts.