"That ledge was just asking for it."

From my response — in the "Wreckage" post — to those who'd blame the University for not providing more trashcans.

Wreckage.

Post-game:



This was the scene at the base of the pedestrian bridge crossing University Avenue near the football stadium yesterday, here in Madison. Alternate view:




IN THE COMMENTS: Some people attribute the problem to a lack of trashcans, and I say:

As for the lack of trash cans, it seems to me that if people are going to tailgate before the game and appropriate a public space that isn't designed for picnicking, they need to carry out their own trash.

There are parking lots adjacent to this space, and anyone who partied at their car ought to have had their own trash bag at the car, left it in the car, and driven home with it.

But this place I've photographed is on the walk from their car to the stadium, so what happened here is, I assume, people didn't want to leave their containers at the car. They wanted to walk and drink, and then they didn't want to keep carrying the container, so they set it down on this ledge, which seemed convenient. Perhaps they sat there for a while, finishing their drink, before attempting the arduous haul up the steep stairway that you see in the picture.

That ledge was just asking for it.

But you'd like a trashcan there too, like an invitation to stage an entire party right here at the base of the bridge, where hundreds of people squeeze through during the prime times of going to and from the game. (Meade and I walked in the opposite direction both pre- and post- game, as we chose to walk downtown to the Farmers Market and in search of protests, and we could barely walk across, going single file, such was the crowd going to the game.)

And even if you can forgive people for setting their drink containers down on the ledge, in the absence of trash cans, do you not see the broken glass? There are shards of brown glass all over here, including some big curved points, here where hundreds of people, many in flip flops, many of whom have been drinking, will need to walk.

Sorry, this is wreckage.

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"But English people throw everything out their car window, and the roadsides are carpeted with rubbish.."

"... so that's what I do with my life now: I pick up rubbish on the side of the road. I do it on my bike. I do it on foot. The local council has given me an outfit and a grabber."

Says David Sedaris, who now lives in West Sussex, in a "Fresh Air" interview, promoting his new book "Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls."

From the book:

When I mentioned the trash to the neighbors, they agreed that it was a disgrace. “It wasn’t like this thirty years ago,” said the woman in the house to the right of ours. She couldn’t tell me why things had changed. It was just part of a general decline. In that regard it was like graffiti, something that had inexorably spread until people lost the will to fight against it. Then, to make themselves feel less powerless, they decided it was art. I tried looking at the trash that way: Oh, how the light plays off that vodka bottle! Look at the bright blue candy wrapper, so vivid against the fallen brown leaves. It didn’t work, though.

"Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York..."

"... every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves."

I warned you I was going to do this. Come on. Play along. (And, no, I wasn't thinking about Andy Kaufman when I dreamed this up. It was all a riff on that Baz Luhrmann trailer for the new "Great Gatsby" movie.)

So, now, let's talk about oranges and lemons. The phrase "oranges and lemons" appears twice in the sentence, unchanged, even as the oranges and lemons themselves are changed. That's the whole action of the sentence, the transformation of oranges and lemons in one form into oranges and lemons in another form. Here they are on Friday, in crates, and here they are on Monday in "a pyramid." That is, they have become, in that alluded-to time period  — the weekend — a pile of garbage. But the pile is called "a pyramid," A pyramid! We're called upon to think of the grand erections of pharaohs, in comparison to crates from the lowly little character with the silly-sounding occupation "fruiterer."

Are the crates even stacked up? There's the absurd and obviously false notion that the fruit has been improved by whatever it was that went on in that house over the weekend. That absurdity calls upon us to think about the people who arrived and left, the people who ate all that fruit. But of course, they didn't eat it. They drank it. The pulp was extracted for use in alcoholic mixtures, and if the fruit emerged from the weekend as "pulpless halves," then, we may infer, so did the people. We don't hesitate to keep calling them human, yet we see the inaptness of calling the mere rinds "lemons and oranges." Even if you could conceptualize the big pile of rinds as a pyramid, you'd easily perceive it as garbage. Since that perception is easy, we have energy left to think about what is more difficult. Who are these people?