Cup That Haunts Me

Hello, my name is Mark, and I am obsessed with a cup in a street gutter.

To catch up anyone who didn’t see last Friday’s post, the cup with the blue straw has been lodged there since at least as long ago as June 2006. It has survived many hard rains, which led some readers to believe the engineers didn’t do such a good job of predicting water flow at this intersection.

The debris indicates that something’s getting washed down that hole, so there must be some cosmic force holding the cup in place. Its being plastic no doubt increases its chances of surviving (did everybody notice no apostrophes in that sentence? Good. Bonus points, too, if you caught the gerund.).

Incidentally, the Styrofoam cup on the left has been there for at least a week, but without anything more than a sprinkle of precipitation. I don’t think it will last through a downpour.

Crop of the Cup

In this crop, we can see that a banana peel rests against the cup, along with the disgustingly ubiquitous cigarette butts. The latter raises the question… are smokers more prone to littering in general, or just when it comes to smoking? Are they getting rid of the evidence rather than using the car’s ashtray? Smokers who do this (and I know not all of them do), let me give you a tip.

We don’t want your damn used cigarettes any more than you do.

On a loosely related note, our company’s location here chose yesterday as the last day smokers could light up inside the building. The windowed room used for this, in view of the downstairs break room TV, was the smokers’ last vestige of hope for avoiding inclement weather while puffing their bodies into submission. On a day that has a normal high temperature of 60, the mercury never rose above 35. They can still do the slowly killing themselves part, but without benefit of climate control.

But back to the cup. The cropped, enlarged version above also reveals that the lid is askew.

Last comes the irony. I’m leery of using that word to describe it, because I’ve never fully recovered from using it incorrectly once. Plus, there’s that whole Alanis Morissette song that popularized its use by those who had no business wielding such a tool.

I had to know the cup’s origin, so here is a detail of the picture in its full resolution. It’s from a Jack in the Box fast-food joint. Notice the message above the logo.

Cup Detail

Is this cup flying in the face of expectations, or what?

I suspect that my next post on this cup will include video of my climbing out of my car and pulling it free. Somehow this common piece of trash has sentimental value for me. It’s a catch-22. I want to see how long it can last, but that would require losing it forever.

Thanks. See you at our next session.

Now! Follow along (and enjoy the video) with the next post.