WHY is every beach in this city a goddamn bio-hazard? Even the relatively remote lake beaches that you have to hike in to are littered with cigarette butts. Do you people think that shit’s not garbage? Do you think the world is your ashtray? Do you think the “government” has an obligation to provide you with conveniently located ashtrays, and also to pay someone to come out and clean them on the regular? FUCK YOU. Take your effing garbage out with you and dispose of it appropriately. By all means, enjoy your cigarette. But when you have sucked all the pleasure out of it, put the butt in your pocket and take it with you. What’s that? It’s dirty? Are you shitting me? You won’t put it in your pocket but you’ll put it in your MOUTH? Fuck you again. It’s so much a part of your life that you have no concept of how dirty, nasty, and gross it is. You don’t want to walk back to your car with a few butts in your pocket, but you think I should be fine with walking through them and sitting on them and putting my belongings down on them. Fuck you yet another time. Take your butts with you, you dirty motherfuckers.
—Miss Anthrope
This article appears in Jul 5-11, 2018.
Can we just shove em up your ass instead? It would be like a eco-friendly ‘Butt Station’
Mr. Yickityyack would like you to know that he does indeed consider the world his ashtray, and that he intends to continue to use it as such.
Imagine! The effrontery of suggesting that people refrain from throwing their garbage on the ground!
Well ya got rid of all the ashtrays in your crusade against smoking, which is dirty, disgusting and gross, true! But the fact is people are going to smoke whether we like it or not, so leave the ashtrays on top of the trash cans, The crusaders did this, not the smokers
Lack of ashtrays at beaches and parks is a pretty flimsy excuse. You know there are no ashtrays where you’re going. You know you’re going to smoke while you’re there. Plan accordingly. Society is not making an unreasonable demand on you in expecting you to take responsibility for the litter that you personally produce. Also, I took my granddaughter for a walk in Long Lake Park last weekend. We walked for about an hour but saw remarkably little garbage; a Tim’s cup, some sort of plastic wrapper, and a bunch of bottle caps stacked artfully on a rock (“Now the people will know we were here.”) This despite the fact that the only garbage cans are at the entrance to the park. But when we got to the little rocky beach on the Eastern shore of the lake, there were butts EVERYWHERE! So the problem is not the lack of ashtrays, but rather the entrenched attitude that cigarette butts somehow “don’t count” as litter. People who wouldn’t dream of dropping a food wrapper on the ground think nothing of flicking a butt into the gutter. That needs to change.