An Open Letter

Rot, Esq.

Enemy of Life and Goodness

1111 All Over Everything in the Kitchen Rd.

9 May 2011

Dear Rot,

I understand that you are responsible for certain things that I enjoy, such as blue Stilton cheese and a planet that is not shoulder-high in undecomposed carcasses. You’re also the inspiration for the words “putrescence” and “fester,” both of which are eminently satisfactory. But my appreciation for a small selection of your oeuvre does not mean I want to invite you for a sleepover and stay up braiding your hair. Your hair is gross.

Actually, all of you is gross. Just look at yourself: Spores. Fungus.* Mildew. Smut. Aren’t you disgusted with your way of life? Do you really think people want to meet someone like that when they break the skin on an orange or dig down to the bottom of the grapes? This is no way to make friends.

Also, do you have to affect every single thing in my kitchen at once? It’s jarring to go from “Don’t you want another pound of cantaloupe with your grapefruit?” to “I guess there’s still canned peaches.”

And the fruit flies were really uncalled for.

While we’re talking here, I do not find it clever when you sneak into bananas in the guise of “overripeness.” I know those soft, brown patches are your minions making way for your arrival. Could you rein in their enthusiasm a little bit? These bananas were so green when I bought them that I wasn’t even going to try eating them for another three days, and now you have them looking like a stack of old boots. I do not appreciate this behavior. My coworkers are refusing to eat any more banana bread.

Furthermore, isn’t the produce enough for you? Why do you have to attack my bread, too? I even find you sneaking up the corners of the fiber muffins I made, and no one else I know will touch them. It’s like you are the personal enemy of my bid for healthy eating. Everything wholesome I bring into the kitchen falls into your rapacious clutches before I can say “avocado sandwich.” If you could find a way to make water decay, I'm sure you would do it.

I would stay and insult you some more, but I have to go find the EZ Cheez and Oreos. I hope you’re happy.

Your victim,

Clara

P.S. I’ve just learned that you are now residing in the ceiling of my hall closet. If I have previously said anything to make you feel welcome, please hear this: STOP VIOLATING MY POSSESSIONS AND GO BACK TO THE COMPOST HEAP WHERE YOU BELONG!

*Note to humans: Do not do a Google Image search for this unless you are fond of Lamisil ads. I threw up in my mouth a little.

Parking Lots

This is me in the wee hours of Saturday morning, running laps around my car in the Wal-Mart parking lot.

From what I hear, the party I had just left continued for three or four more hours, though I can’t imagine why because the cheese crisps had run out. My ability to sit still without falling asleep had also run out, which is why I pulled in to Wal-Mart for some crash-prevention calisthenics.

This negligible energy boost did not last me all the way home, though, and I ended up mumbling memory drills out loud like Hawkeye Pierce with a concussion.

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This is me on Saturday evening, dashing furtively across the dark grocery store parking lot with a glass bottle of amber liquid stuffed in my coat.

I had rushed into the store for something legitimate like orange juice and emerged with a bottle of hazelnut flavoring syrup instead. Plastic bags will likely play into the coming apocalypse, so I just swept out the door clutching my prize. I really wanted to taste it on the way home, but I really didn’t want to explain to the cops that my big weekend plans featured an instant Folger’s latte and four hours of sci-fi TV on NetFlix in my kitchen.

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This is me after work on Wednesday, flattening other people’s moist cardboard boxes to make room in my apartment complex’s recycling bin for more than just a single-family supply of Orange Crush cases.

This is the concerned citizen who pulled up behind me to monitor my suspicious activity.

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NOTE: Those of you who follow me on Facebook may recall a statement I made about this week’s post not containing butts. Looks like I was wrong on that one.

Do Not Chop Me With An Axe!

My 7th grade English teacher insisted that we skip lines when we wrote on notebook paper. I was unreasonably incompetent at this.

The rule made sense for someone who has to decipher student handwriting all day, but all the wasted space caused me physical pain. I think she even made us use only one side of the paper, and with every blank sheet I shed the sap-sticky tears of endangered forests. I even wrote her a melodramatic poem about the tragedy:

I came by this resource obsession naturally. Both of my parents spent years in the conservation-oriented National Park Service, and the combined forces of nature and nurture stopped just shy of turning me into a compulsive hoarder.

Shortly after I was born, my mother made an agreement with God that, if she could only use disposable diapers with a clear conscience, she would recycle everything else she ever laid hands on. So far she has kept her word to the tune of several tons of plastic and aluminum, every item of clothing discarded in the household, and at least one entire toilet.

The impact on my personality showed early. My elementary teachers repeatedly caught me rescuing inch-long pencils from the trash can and integrating toilet paper rolls into my art projects.

I also picked up a habit of reenacting the Sesame Street sketch with Frank the Water Conservation Fish. It’s still hard to breathe when I watch that animated water gushing down the drain.

I keep coming back to paper, though, because it seems to be thrown away with more gusto than other recyclables. I, meanwhile, can get three or four birthdays out of a single piece of giftwrap.

I’ve also been known to tear Kleenex in half when the immediate mucus incident did not merit a full sheet. Then again, that’s probably more because I’m cheap.

I pay my credit card bills online, but the bank keeps sending me paper statements and return envelopes anyway. Like the proverbial Native American using every part of the buffalo, I file the statements, keep the outer envelopes in a drawer for grocery lists, and squirrel away the return envelopes against the coming apocalypse. Last month I realized that once the world ends I won’t need to send letters, so I took a stack to the bank for reuse. The teller said, “I’m sure we’ll find something to do with them” in the same way that your 2nd grade teacher says, “Our class gerbil went to live on a farm after spring break.”

My current crusade is the office, where we toss or shred truckloads of stuff that is still, by my standards, perfectly useful. You say this letter is going to National Headquarters? That’s no reason not to print it on the back of last week’s pizza flier.

Since we’re a nonprofit and always scrounging for money, I’ve tried using the financial angle.

Me: You know how pay raises have been frozen for years?

Coworker: Yeah.

Me: That’s because you keep printing out your emails.

Then I opted for the Merciless Enforcer, but that was problematic.

Me: DON’T THROW THAT OUT OR I’LL SPIT IN YOUR COFFEE Oh hi, Boss, wasn’t that a fun joke hahaha but seriously put it in the recycle tray I mean it only don’t fire me please.

Now I’ve enlisted some coniferous help for an emotional blackmail campaign in my signage.

If this doesn’t work, I’m going back to Frank the Fish.

(P.S. Yes, we used the movie UHF to study the Hero Journey archetype in English class. This experience probably explains a lot about my worldview.)

How I Did Not Save Christmas

I didn’t draw anything this past week because of Christmas. I did get to climb in a dumpster at work today, though. If this sounds like fun, you need a more stimulating job.

See, a couple of weeks ago I borrowed my roommate’s plastic Christmas platter to take a bunch of cookies to work. The cookies lasted about three hours, and the platter got repurposed for a swanky executive event in another part of the building. I figured it would turn up eventually. A single fried chicken thigh can spend six months in our office fridge unmolested, so nothing terrible could happen to a heavy plastic tray in the ten days before Christmas.

As it turns out, that is not the correct answer.

This morning at work I remembered that I should retrieve that platter before my roommate gets back from her Christmas vacation, so after a cursory but fruitless search, I sent out an inquiry to the staff.

Ten minutes later, a coworker came over to inquire how much the platter cost and where it was purchased.

Apparently, in a pre-holiday cleaning frenzy, the tray was mistaken for a disposable one and purged. And then the trash went out.

Luckily for me, the garbage truck doesn’t hit our neighborhood until Tuesday. All I had to do was fish around a little in the dumpster we share with a few nearby buildings. I was even a little bit excited, since my job does not include a lot of field trips.

The good news is that now I know what the neighbors got for Christmas. The whole top layer of the dumpster was Barbie playset boxes and sacks of wrapping paper, all of which I could reach from the outside. Last week’s office trash was farther down, though, so I glanced at my open-backed shoes and jumped in.

I knew that one of our neighboring businesses dealt with large, feces-rich birds (it seems they board parrots). I did not know that Monday is cage-cleaning day. The shoulder-high mound of discolored, dribbling newspapers convinced me to get out of the dumpster and call my roommate to confess.

She says the tray is not emotionally irreplaceable, so I will not be returning in the wee hours of the morning with hip waders. And my pants should be okay after a couple more washings.

Ultimately, I have emerged with further validation for my policy of never throwing anything away without watertight evidence that I will never need it again. Also, I’m pretty sure I don’t want a parrot.