Littering: It makes me want to throw something--just not out the window!

I'm a walker. These days, I do most of my walking at the other end of a leash from a fluffy little white thing, but I was a power walker for years before that. The only entrance to the development where I live is via a fairly busy road we'll call Road P. This road parallels an even busier road that the tourists use to flock to our lovely little beach town. Unfortunately, many of them have discovered "the back way" using Road P. It's only a 1-lane-each-way road, but there isn't a stoplight for several miles, so you can make some time on it under the right conditions.

Neither my development nor the one immediately next to it has sidewalks. This can make walking, especially dog walking, a risky proposition. Additionally, I like to change things up and walk various routes to keep things interesting, so one of my routes is to walk along Road P (which has a bike lane) about a quarter mile to a development that does have sidewalks and then spend some time walking around in the development before heading home. I have trained the fluffy little white thing (we'll call her Missy--mostly because that's her name) to walk with me, mostly in a heel position on a tight leash, along Road P.

Being a dog, Missy likes to sniff at most anything, especially anything that smells of food. This brings us to the subject of littering (you knew I was going to get to the point sooner or later, right?). On any given day, I will see an astonishing volume of trash that has been thrown out of car windows littering the roadside on Road P. The most common items are empty plastic soda bottles and fast food packaging (top of the list: McDonald's french fry containers).

What's really lovely is when the big ol' mowers have come along to chop down the weeds along the side of the road and have turned all that litter into confetti. To make it even more appetizing, add water--like on a heavily dewy morning or after a rainstorm. Disgusting.

I never cease to be amazed by the things people throw out of car windows. One morning last year, I found a huge Outback carryout shopping bag with the receipt still stapled to the handle and all the styrofoam packaging still inside--everything but the food, basically. It's like they consumed their meal without even opening the bag. Freaky. Fringe-like.

Aside from the unsightlyness, probably the thing that cheeses me off most about litterers (especially as a dog owner) is when they hurl glass bottles out of a moving car. Boy howdy, nothing says Saturday night at the beach like riding down the road listening to some Skynyrd, sucking down Jack Daniels and then hurling the empty bottle out the car window.

WTF? Do these people even THINK? No, they don't, and even if they did, they wouldn't give a shit. People who hurl glass bottles out of car windows just don't give a damn about anything or anyone but themselves and havin' a grand ol' time. Idgits!

Makes me want to have super powers. Yea. My Spidey sense would tell me when a hurling was about to be committed and I'd don my stylish costume in a flash and be waiting behind a bush when the hurler was winding up for the toss. Then, in artistically beautiful slo-mo befitting The Matrix (the original, not those sucky sequels), I would leap out, catch the empty bottle in mid-air, stop time (and hence the car) and smash that bottle over the head of the offending hurler. But first, I would make sure he saw it coming and I would say, in my most deadly, small fluffy dog owner's voice: "Don't you EVER...do...that...again!!!!!!!!"

Hey, whaddya want. I'm a Libra. We have issues with justice. A girl can dream, can't she?