[sic]

That’s how much space this magnificent orb weaver above our backyard would span — maybe even a silva dolla. It’s so big, notice how the abdomen is out of focus compared to the legs (click to anachrophobify):

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.

These two like to share naptime on the sofa after dinner. And when I found them last night positioned like so, it brought to mind the symbol for the interconnection of opposites, and it brought out the camera to capture it.

When last seen, our annual Halloween frontyard spookification featured little more than our graveyard. In the days since I’ve been adding other evildoers one by one and here’s where things stand at present (click to montsterize):

There was a great opportunity missed to kick some serious momentary ass in last night’s mostly comatose and soap-operatic premiere of AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” but given how overwrought and overacted and frankly over-tedious the 90-minute episode was to watch, it isn’t a surprise to me that the chance escaped  the series’ dimwitted block of writers.

The bulk of the decidedly drag-assed second-season starter yielded the above tweet about midway through an episode that went the little girl lost route, centering on a search for a lass who gets lost in the woods after an encounter with an apparently migratory zombie “herd” that — thanks to the crappy writing — literally materializes out of nowhere. Seriously: the extra large group of undead come shuffling up behind the survivors on the highway out of Atlanta they’ve just driven up. What did the ghouls do as the caravan of survivors motored on past a couple minutes earlier, hide? Play dead?

Stoopid. Stoopid. Stoopid. But I digress.

Anyway, the search ultimately brings the group to a church, where –shocker! — they don’t find her.  The girl’s mother then seeks solace in the sanctuary, praying before a statue of crucified Christ, and I was soooooo hoping the scribes might’ve grown a backbone and made it a daring scene, instead of a flat and cliché “please let my daughter be safe” speech. But of course they didn’t.

See if I were the one writing it, I would have given it some shock value. Mom would still be in the church, still desperate and begging for the Lord to spare her daughter’s life. But then I’d have her look up at Jesus on the cross hoping for a sign, followed by a shot from behind Jesus’ head back at her. Then I’d come back from the mom’s POV for a low-angle close up of Jesus’ face… only this time for a split second something’s different. Something’s not quite right. Then — bam! The sonofagawd suddenly rears his head up gape-mouthed and crazy-eyed and hissing at her and straining to free himself. Cut quickly back and forth between close-ups of her eyes going wide with fear and Zombie Jesus struggling crazily. Finally he wrenches a hand free from where it’s nailed and he reaches out grabbing a handful of her hair and woosh: she wakes up. Screaming, if you’d like.

A cliché in its own right of course, but one far more entertaining! Sacrilegious and certain to anger Kirk Cameron followers the country over? Absolutely. But it’s a series about zombies and apparently it’s being written by zombies, too. For Christ’s sake.

Just fine, thanks! Remember when it looked like this on August 20? And then like this on September 22? Well it’s continuing its march toward backyard domination and today it looks like this:

Even better there’s a bunch of fine specimens of butternut aka “not a pumpkin” squash growing strong, including the leader of the pack:

Well… it’s not every day that you come back from a predawn dogwalk to find three FBI vehicles that weren’t there when you left suddenly double-parked and left unattended in front or your house.

So of course I tweeted their odd visit:

The even bigger unanswered mysteries were why they were there and for whom of my neighbors they were interested in, but for the duration of the even the agents were nowhere to be seen or found, and when I glanced out the window the trio of Fords (two Fusions and a later-model Taurus) was gone without a sound. As if they were never there [cue eerie music].