I was talking to a Claremont Colleges groundskeeper, who was describing a rather stressful weekly scenario. He likes groundskeeping. He works hard every week, and then he gets the weekend off. When he arrives back on the job on Monday, he finds the colleges littered with party trash. Plastic cups, confetti, streamers, cigarettes, etc. Especially distressing to him are the multitude of broken beer bottles.

Now, if you haven’t noticed, broken beer bottles are very annoying to pick up. It takes a while to pick up the tiny little shards, and if you aren’t careful you’ll get some stinging (or not so stinging) cuts on your fingers. The larger shards are deceptively easy to pick up. They’re large and friendly looking, but they have razor sharp edges. Ouch! They also hurt your feet, as I noticed the other night. I decided to empty my trash basket into a bin across the courtyard, and I made it all the way there without wearing any shoes.

As I turned around to return to my room I found that, (O horror!) I had just walked over a huge bed of tiny bottle shards. Perhaps I invoked some sort of magic by not noticing the shards (just as, according to Douglas Adams, you can fly by throwing yourself at the ground and missing), but I think I was just lucky. Fortunately, I made it back to my room without getting tetanus.

I think, by my own party experience, that beer bottle breaking is a commonplace experience. If you are a person who throws beer bottles, or if you are a clumsy drunk for whom beer bottles, after the tenth or twelfth one, suddenly become slippery-wet bars of Irish Spring, then I suggest that you give some sort of consideration to the people who bear the consequences. If you care nothing about my feet, then you can at least care a little about the groundskeepers and housekeeping staff who spend their Monday mornings cleaning up after thoughtless students. Or, even better, you can, the morning after your drunken binge, shake off your hangover and return to the site of your drunken binge, trashbag in hand, and relieve the ground of your droppings and smashings. It’s all a matter of cleaning up after yourself. You know, like when you have a horrible nasal infection and coat your sleeve with thick yellow phlegm. Just suck it up and clean, goddammit!