Trash as Tea Leaves

It was a cold morning a day after Biden was declared the winner and the Pandemic had yet again intensified across the nation. I wanted to take the pulse of rural Oregon so I walked along a remote county road and read the tea leaves (love those mixed metaphors), meaning reading the trash left behind in the shoulders by the miscreants. There is something thought-provoking and revealing in this trash, if only someone wants to notice it and compute some existential math of the people who would throw shit out the windows of their vehicles or discard as they ambled along the road.

I am that someone to notice.

The amount of trash was staggering, at least five times the normal amount. What accounted for that?

The usual suspects appeared but in much greater quantities: cigarette packs, beer cans, energy drink vials, vaping cartridges, bottles of cheap wine, coffee cups, batteries, broken glass, vomit, receipts, shoes, t-shirts, masks, gloves.

And wait, my old cherished roadside friend of the devil was there as well! An empty tin of Vienna sausage! The breakfast of champions or losers or the not-even-playing! When the Apocalypse truly comes, the last American meal will be a miscreant eating a tin of Vienna sausage he dug out of the rubble of a convenience store.

I kept walking and noticing. Something large and plastic caught my eye. I went over to investigate. A half gallon jug of Black Velvet! My body shook a bit at the prospect of a Black Velvet seduction or hangover in rural Oregon. Somehow I had to work Black Velvet and Vienna sausage into a murder mystery. Or suicide, as was much more likely if both were consumed together.

The sky darkened. The barometer plummeted like the morale of decent Americans the past four years. It felt like snow was imminent. I turned around and walked up the other side of the road for the rest of the story.