Why you gotta make me go "grrrr"?

So, I was all determined to write a happy post today. I had a good weekend. I got to spend time with my favorite boyfriend, got to sleep in, got to have dinner with my friend Sheila at a great little SoCo restaurant I'd never been to before. I did my nails. I finished my Christmas decorating. It's all good, right?

Then I went out to lunch to do some Christmas shopping, and right in front of me at a red light, the guy in the car ahead of me opens his driver's side door and empties his entire nasty-ass car ashtray in the street! Just dumped his trash all over the road! Boy, that ticked me off.

The street is not a Dumpster. If you want to live in a nice place, you have to treat where you live nicely. You can give some people the nicest car on the lot, and they will have it banged up and smelling bad before it's off the lot. You could give them a nice house in a nice neighborhood, and they will park on the lawn (I know because I used to see it all the time in my neighborhood when it was BRAND NEW). You could give them a beautiful, clean city, and they will spraypaint graffiti all the over the walls and break bottles and throw their cigarette butts in the street. And then you know what they'll do? Complain because the place is a dirty and run-down - it's somehow the world's fault instead of their own that they're vomitting in their own bed (and I chose the nicer term there, just FYI).

I hate litter. I hate graffiti. I hate destruction for the sake of it. This is a beautiful city. And it's a privilege to live here. If you want to throw garbage on the ground/floor/street, do it inside your own house, and admit that you don't think you deserve anything better. But don't ruin the beautiful atmosphere here for the rest of us, who actually appreciate our lovely city and make an effort to preserve its beauty. Like our lungs, we like our streets clean.

Grrrr! (This is not to be confused with Mike Straka's GRRR! column on FoxNews.com. But "Grumble." didn't have the same impact.)