Disc golf with computer disks

Monday, March 10, 2014

Saturday, I was cleaning up litter in Riverside Park after cleaning the Caveman Bridge, and started walking the disc golf course.  I had earlier seen pieces of floppy disc near the sidewalk and now I started finding whole floppies here and there along the course.  I suddenly realized what I was seeing: someone had been playing disc golf with computer discs.

Now, this is not your ordinary habitual littering of fast food trash and cigarette butts.  Some disc golfer, likely a teenager, got the idea to take a batch of old computer discs down to the disc golf course to play with them and then left them as litter.

Litter cleaning, if you have an active imagination, can be pretty forensic.  You see strange things, and you start to weave a story about how they got there, trying to get inside the head of the perpetrator.

It’s not easy.  I was raised to keep things neat and clean.  And yet, being lazy, I didn’t want to carry my gum and wrappers to a trash can, so I would roll my gum in its wrapper in a little ball and drop it discreetly.  Now I bend over and pop squashed wrapped gumballs off the pavement with my knife, paying for my youthful laziness.  At least they are easier to move than gum without the wrapper.

One summer, I met a man by the river in both of my favorite sitting spots, and talked to him when I did.  He would sit there, talking to himself, drinking wine, smoking rollies and little purple-wrapped cigars and leaving his trash all around him, which I picked up as we spoke. 

I started gently admonishing him about his littering ways, and he responded by breaking his wine bottles after I left, obviously to irritate me and make me work harder.  I picked up every little bit every time and got so angry that I didn’t talk to him for a while. 

One day, I told him at length and with great heat that I could tell where he had been just by his trash, I knew his habits so well.  I knew his wine bottles, his cigar wrappers, his rollies and papers.  This apparently creeped him out, because he stopped littering my part of the river.

One man told me he used to throw his trash to the wind, saying “The adventures of Litterman!”  Talk about youthful rebellion: he was his own anti-hero.

What started as rebellion hardened into habit and became unconscious.  He outgrew much of his rebelliousness, but it’s harder to stop dropping trash because he doesn’t see it when he does it, even after becoming a janitor and picking up other people’s trash at work. 

The really funny thing about picking up litter for donations is that, for me, it is addicting.  I’ve been trying to figure out the source of the addiction.  There is a certain pleasure in seeking and finding anything, no matter how worthless, but like all pleasure, it palls as soon as one is confronted with too much of it.

Most addictions are about relief from pain.  Pleasure palls, lest we eat ourselves to death.  But pain goes on unless the cause is removed or it is dulled in some way.  Relief from pain is, in itself, a pleasure.  Life is suffering, as the Buddha said, while pleasure is transitory.  We are really motivated by pain avoidance and relief, in the short term and the long, sometimes in shorter terms than others. 

I started picking up litter because I couldn’t stand to see the same trash lying around, day after day, while walking my dog.  I couldn’t stand the pain anymore; I relieved it by removing the source. 

But spending too much time at it without getting compensated for the service was a pain in itself, once it started to interfere with my gardening work.  I started avoiding walking down Greenwood Avenue with my dog and drove him to the dog park, once a week instead of every day, just to avoid having to pick it up every day.

But now, wearing the vest, I get the pleasure of cleaning up an area with the prospect of being paid.  Besides relieving my pain, the work appeals to my OCD and my ADHD, as I allow stuff glimpsed out of the corner of my eye to stop me in my tracks and turn to get it.

But like all addictions, it builds on itself.  I see litter all the more from searching for it so much, and it pains me any time I cannot pick it up.  I know that I will get to pick some of it up on particular days and times, but there is so much I cannot get.

Fortunately, I have the pleasure of knowing that, when wearing my tunic, I draw attention to the litter I am picking up.  The rest of you get to become conscious of litter; feel my pain, and perhaps pay me to relieve you of some of your pain, or at least clean up your own place yourself. 

There are many reasons why people litter; there is really only one reason why we clean it up or pay for cleanup; to avoid the pain of seeing it lying around, messing up our world.