Juicycake!
Well friends, we've got ourselves a theme -- citrus!
"Juicycake" is some kind of chocolate orange cake thing, ostensibly imported from an eastern European country, as the baked goods Honest Ed charges 99 cents for tend to be. This milk crate littering is a new way of advertising, I think. Because right about now, I could really go for some orange chocolate packaged cakes. Mmmm...
Copycat Littering
Not 100 m south of our favourite milk crate sits another milk crate, attached to a bike equally as rusted as mine. This milk crate is red. This morning, passing by it on my way to vote, I looked in and to my surprise saw -- you guessed it -- orange peels, roughly the same size and shrivelled to the same degree as those in my milkcrate. I seem to remember an empty cigarette pack there as well, du maurier or some other red brand, but that might just be fanciful misremembering.
Oh, and
here's the competition!
The wonders of vitamin C
Okay, so the glare created by flash hitting bike rack might obscure today's treasures, but they're there anyway. One cigarette pack (empty), Belmont Milds. This one has the health caution of monkey see, monkey do and is accompanied by a photo of two particularly sheep-like kids looking out at the camera for a role model. Beside this sit several scraps of orange peel, slightly shrivelled.
And who will clean the milk crates?
Not me, apparently. This morning the milk crate was empty, the scraps of paper and 'Brush Ups' wrapper long gone. I'd like to think it was some kind of fairy in the night, under the cover of darkness and all that. Much like that shoemaker and those elves.
In other news, my roommate informed me that an actual garbage can has been installed half a block north of the milk crate. I worry that people will stop leaving things in the crate now that there's a proper garbage receptacle about, but I suppose we shall have to wait and see.
Looks like garbage but it feels like...
something of a little more substance?
The latest 'gifts' include an Oral B 'Brush Ups' wrapper and a note that appears to have had some kind of phone number (who knows, maybe even an address) written on it before it was meticulously torn into tiny scraps.
Looks like somebody forgot to brush his/her teeth before arriving at my next-door neighbour's all-night rager. And somebody else picked up the phone number of a potential date whose charm wore thin as the early morning got old. It's a theory, at any rate.
Where it all began
Back in the early fall, my milk crate began receiving some bizarre gifts. After weeks of being stuffed with nothing more than the banal waste of passing strangers (in the form of empty pop cans and crumpled fast food wrappers), a styrofoam take-out container appeared one evening. In it was a rather large piece of half-eaten cake. Chocolate with whipped vanilla icing. (This happened suspiciously close to my own birthday, but I refrained from indulging. If somebody had wanted to leave me a piece of birthday cake, the doorstep would have been a more logical place to put it. And if it was intended as a gift, it probably wouldn't have been half-eaten.)
Not long after this, on the morning of September 28, 2005, I arrived at my bike only to find an empty bottle of Dom Perignon in the milk crate. The bottle was accompanied by the gold-embossed forest green box it came in and a promotional booklet about 1996, which was apparently the "year of light" for our friends at the French vineyard.
The cork was in there too. The milk crate and bicycle must have had quite the night. Unfortunately I didn't think to take a photo of the post-party mess.
New gifts for 2006!
Today is Tuesday. It's only the tenth day of the new year, and already our heroic milkcrate has seen a lot of action.
Friday night, on my way home from work at around nine, I noticed a sack of what appears to be cat food placed in the milkcrate. It's heavy, and has caused the bike to become a little off balance. The funny thing about the cat food is that it's not just a straightforward bag of Purina cat chow. Its outer bag is a Purina bag, but inside this is what appears to be a sack of Equality (aka Dominion's version of the no-name brand) catfood. The presence of double sacks worries me, and I have the sneaking suspicion that this double-bagged parcel is filled with cat shit or something equally offensive.
Sunday afternoon, I noticed a half-empty 750 mL bottle of Absolut vanilla vodka that had joined the "catfood." In fact, it might have been more like two-thirds full, but I still abstained; the Absolut bottle is missing from the photographs only due to the spendthriftiness of someone else who absconded with the booze sometime last night.
