I'M FEELING SAD TODAY, FOR SO MANY REASONS.

 

I'm feeling sad today.  I picked up 4,171 pieces of trash tonight, and I should be really happy with my number, but tonight was very hard.

Last night, I picked up a great big mess right on Main Street.  I left the tires, the wood and two very heavy bags of trash on the sidewalk for Keep Akron Beautiful to pick up on Tuesday.

Well, when I was driving north on Main Street this morning, I only saw one bag, and it was ripped up.  All day, I imagined that somebody ripped open the bags and scattered all the trash for me to pick up again.  

Who would do something like that?

So tonight, my first stop was here.

The first bag was shredded, and a bottle of pee was sticking out of one of the rips.  So disgusting.  I had to pull out half the garbage and put it in a new bag so I could get it to my car.  This means I can't ask Keep Akron Beautiful to help me with really heavy bags anymore.  It's hard enough to pick it up once, I can't stand to do it twice.

Do you see the second bag?  It was very heavy, and somehow they managed to pull it across Main Street, across four lanes of busy traffic!  

What a sick sense of humor.  It makes my heart hurt to think people could do stuff like this.

I got all that in my car and headed for the nearest dumpster.  I found one a block away, and oh my goodness!

I also found the biggest, most disgusting mess I ever saw, right off Main Street!  How is this okay?  

I wanted to venture into new areas, because my neighborhood is clean, but not like this.  

It wasn't really secluded.  People were walking by, trash lining the sidewalk, food containers in all the bushes.

But this?  It was in a category all its own.

I wanted to pick up a lot of pieces this holiday weekend, but not like this.  There's nothing fun about thinking how disgusting human beings can be.

I did get it all cleaned up.  A dozen trips to the dumpster, but I won't ever go back.

Under all the garbage . . . 

I found these.

I left there feeling so sad.  And my knees were shaking.  If the people who played tricks with my trash bags saw me cleaning up this mess, who knows what they would do.

I noticed the Aldi Store across from McDonalds was a mess again, so I headed there calm down and clean around the parking lot and along the sidewalk.  

I picked up 1,063 pieces of trash.  I knew there was a lot, but I never would have guessed there would be that much.

I was picking up the trash around Aldi, on the Main Street sidewalk, and I saw two obviously homeless people coming my way.  The guy was pulling a grocery cart full of bags. There was a bag with a styrofoam container in it laying in the mulch, obviously take out food that was not wanted, or spoiled.  The guy quickly grabbed that bag and looked inside, and put it in his grocery cart!

I thought I was going to throw up.  Had I found that bag before he did, it would have gone into the dumpster.  

Everything about today made me sad.  I'm not sure I want to live in Akron anymore.   

There are so many problems here bigger than litter.