Hi. Question for you: Are those cigarette butts yours? They’re mostly Camels, but there’s a lone Marlboro among them. Go ahead, click the pic to take a larger look. I’ll wait.
The reason I ask is that as part of my regularly scheduled yard work this morning — done because I take pride in my house and keeping it trimmed and swept and generally presentable — I found them. They were dumped presumably from a car’s ashtray into the street. Coincidentally right in front of said house in which I take the aforementioned pride.
Awkward!
Before I get all up in your figurative and hypothetical grill, I must commend you on using your ashtray. So many smokers don’t, choosing to keep the specifically developed devices spotless while just carelessly and thoughtlessly ashing out their windows and pitching their butts out of their cars one by one on the fly. Zing! Pwing! Fwing! But you, Huzzah! Rather than leave your filters infilterating the areas of the city you blithely infect and pollute at least you blithely consolidated your pollution in one place. Trouble was that place in this case was the street in front of my house, which adds to one of the great mysteries of urban life as to what exactly is it that triggers smokers unable to hang on to their butts until they’re near an actual trashcan and rahter makes them so egregiously and compulsively clear their ashtrays rightthatfuckingminute directly onto the road. My road.
What was I doing on that road wondering why some sociopathic shtupwad decided that and then would be the perfect place and time to litter so fucking heinously? Fair question. See, in addition to the house’s front yard, I have this wacky habit of sweeping the sidewalks in front of the place — and get this: even the gutter! Crazy, right? A touch compulsive even. I mean, who the fuck in this day of personally irresponsible entitlement actually gets all up in a street’s gutter with a broom and a dustpan without a hazmat suit or it being mandated as some sort of court-ordered community service? Certainly not the same assholes who’ll dump their cigarette butts out in the street, that’s for sure!
So anyway, there I was off the curb entirely of my own volition and sweeping the leaves and some styrofoam packing peanuts and an empty Starbucks cup down to my driveway apron when I saw one butt, then two in front of the car parked next to me.. Then I came around the driver-side quarter panel and found the scene pictured above, right next to the door.
Though I knew instinctively it was a dump-and-run — they all are — I immediately cased the adjacent automobile’s interior through its closed windows to see if I could find anything identifying it as a smoker’s sedan. You know: lighters, matches, a freshly emptied ashtray, burns in the upholstery, an unopened package of Nicorette, any residually exuding cigarette stank, ashy bits accumulated where the windshield meets the dash, or perhaps a telltale pack of Camels or Marlboros. Nothing. I even checked the rear bumper just in case there was sticker that read “I’m literally stupid enough to inhale toxic smoke into my lungs regularly and voluntarily and think it won’t fuck with me later on — and I’m so big an entitled jerkbag that I believe the world is my ashtray.”
Surprise: no bumper sticker. Couldn’t hurt to check though.
Had I found any connection between your buttdump and that vehicle, I wouldn’t be writing this letter. I’d’ve gained closure by duct-taping each and every motherfucking butt to the hood (and that’s only because I’m out of staples for my staplegun). I was tempted to anyway, but common sense and benefit of the doubt prevailed and instead I did what you couldn’t be bothered to do: I added your mess to the pile-in-progress, picked it up and put it in its appropriate trash receptacle, in hopes some day someone does the same to you.
Catch you later! Fucker.
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