Knees

Hey Chucklehead,

I understand what you were saying before about ageing...You get older and it seems like the laws of physics change. You stand directly over a plastic bin at work (just as I just was this morning) and you drop an ordinary, balled up sheet of A4 paper (the first hopeless attempt at the quarterly report) into the bin. The bin in the corner of the room, by the photocopier. And somehow you manage to miss!

What happened? Your fingers opened, releasing the ball of paper. It fell as it should, straight down, pulled by gravity towards the centre of the earth yet somehow it bounced off the rim of the bin or swerved off to one side at the last second, its path altered by some unforeseen office draft perhaps? Or some aerodynamic anomaly which could be attributed to the object itself? Anyway, it ended up on the floor. On the carpet. In other words, disposing of this wretched piece of paper has turned into a two-step operation. A. The first failed attempt and then B. the bending over, the retrieving, joints creaking because elasticity has faded, grunting in an unseemly way, to pick up this defiant ball of paper and place it back in the bin.

It now seems like 4 out 5 times I miss the target. I am talking about dead drops as mentioned above, casual tosses, victory spikes, rebounds, deep three-pointers...in short, every way there is to dispose of waste paper, used teabags, scrunched up receipts, screwed up Post-It notes, orange peels, apple cores, cellophane packaging from food products I have just eaten, stickers, folded up envelopes, empty paper coffee cups, banana skins, dental floss, used condoms (not at work of course), instruction manuals, snot clotted tissues during the cold season, old magazines, used up prescription drugs packaging, shopping lists, old airline boarding passes.....all of these items and more. 4 out 5 times they end up on the floor next to the intended target-the garbage receptacle.

And if they don't swerve off at the last minute, their trajectories mysteriously altered by god knows what, then they will happily bounce out of the bin, ricocheting off some other item, even when thrown directly and decisively down into the bin. The point is, this simple task now inevitably involves extra bending, stooping and lifting. Meaning there is extra strain put on my joints. Extra twinges in the lower back, displacement of blood from the torso as it suddenly rushes down into my head. Black diamonds spinning in the corners of my vision when I straighten up. Ligaments stretched in unpleasant ways. Bones grinding. You get the picture.

Now I seem to spend half my time bent over my own gut, trying to touch the floor as I pick things up. After sixty-three these kinds of callisthenics are demeaning and like I said before....unseemly. What I don't understand is....why? Why do these malicious pieces of garbage refuse to cooperate? Refuse to make their way to the landfill? This is the reason I have decided to become an unapologetic litterbug. If you will excuse the pun, I have given the proper disposal of these items my best shot but now, in the name of preserving my knees and my dignity, I must littler.

Andrew Myers.