Apr 8 2021 [Sedgley Drive]

Weathersunny, light breeze, just about perfect
Temperature72F/21C
Moodtaking the good with the bad, the facts of our lives
Restoring nature2 hours
My trashabout experience

Guess what? I’m a little coo coo. Yeah, I am coo coo for Cocoa Puffs right now. Hey, I pick up litter to distract me. Today it worked great. You just can’t get much better weather than we have right now to be outdoors after winter. My mouth is burning, like I just drank something super hot. Its intensity waxes and wanes throughout the day but it is making me a little crazy. Scratch that – it’s making me a little crazier (than usual) 🙂

Yesterday my wife and I took a nature walk. I intended to pick up litter, but it resulted in a Aldi supermarket walk through Fairmount Park. I saw so much annoying trash on Sedgley Drive. It is opposite Waterworks Drive for those that have a rough idea of the Philadelphia area. My “garbidar” was signaling a red alert at spots.Despite my mental and physical hurting, I kept my mind off my problems for a couple of hours today. I cannot clean up my body issues, but I can clean up the litter. And I did. Two big loads of litter. I say it was one 30 liter trash bag full in total. I got many thank yous. One guy looked at me with complete disgust, but I’m trying to forget him. His facial expression was how my gut feels fifty percent or more of the time over the last couple of years. I have been reminding myself, we don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.

It was nice seeing dogs playing and lots of trees still in bloom. I am proud of myself that I am starting to recognize some of our flora: planes, cherry, cypress, juniper, and weeping willows. I ran into the thorns of an invasive multiflora rose vine. A month ago I wouldn’t be able to tell you that vine is an aggressive local troublemaker despite its beauty when bloomed. I found a long rope dog toy and I couldn’t throw it away. It was pretty cool. I hope a dog owner claims it. I found an ATM card of a woman named Faith Smith. I tried to find a Faith Smith on Facebook to contact her. Nope, no Faith Smith’s on Facebook in our Philadelphia area. I called the bank. They gave me three options: 1) take it police station 2) drop it off at the bank 3) destroy it. My principle of least effort says to destroy it. We’ll see, maybe I’ll take it to the bank tomorrow.

Thanks for spending a few minutes with me. Please send some good karma my way. I feel like a dispirited mess despite the fact that I would do my absolute best to hide this from you completely if you were seeing me in real life. Pain is: 1) a powerful motivator 2) debilitating 3) mentally and physically taxing. Please be patient with those struggling. Pretty much everyone is in pain right now to various degrees. You are not? I call bull. I hope we can all heal up to some extent. Thanks for reading – now onto my visual storytelling if you care to continue 🙂

Welcome to my trashabout April 8th. I started here by Lincoln. It’s kind of cool to know four civil war generals stood in this spot after this statue’s completion. Lincoln’s head is cut off in my picture. It’s there – really!
Most annoying trash of the day: I must have picked up 75 or so bag ties. Trash or sandwich bags ties – these white five inch (12cm) ties with a thin wire in the middle of each were spread all over the grass. Why?
The lost art of the written love letter – littered, but still beautiful. This woman writer misses her love. They definitely had a fight.
Worst litter: rotting vegetables. I kept seeing that lettuce in the middle. I thought it was a diaper from a distance. There were lemons, garlic, and red peppers left to decompose on the ground. It was bad for me to pick it up. I almost called it quits here. Rancid trash juices got all over my litter bag and my nausea got worse. I emptied the bag right away and stayed my course though. It took awhile for my litter holder to become tolerable. Ugh, why am I sharing this – please reconsider leaving fruits and vegetables for compost in busy recreation areas.
I dropped my darn glove under the trash I gathered. Those vegetables were foul and distracting. I am not proud. I found my work glove deep below and stayed my course.
Feel free to follow my sample trail of today’s trash. I would guess there’s about 20 pieces of litter in this picture.
Two hours later I was back at Abe with a big bag of litter. I emptied my litter bag a couple times to save my wrists and hips. It was heavy at the end of the trashabout, but I wanted a good final picture. My scooter handlebar did a great job of lugging it back here.

Thanks for checking out my visual story today. Do the best you can out there and for yourself in our wild times.
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Posted in Trashabout Stories

event_note April 8, 2021

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