On my commute to work, I take a crisscrossing path of side roads, highways, and interstates. There are times that I can get to work and back and not even remember what I listened to on the radio, if it was raining, or what I passed. I enter a sort of hypnotism but there is one thing that always jars me back into reality. Big splotches of paint, splattered in the road. These oddly placed ‘Roadway Rorschach’s’ always make me think. How did that get there? Was there an accident? Did a bunch of paint fall from the sky? However they got there, there had to be a story. Someone had to of done something really dumb. Obviously, we know where this is going.
When we moved into our house the previous owners did us the favor of leaving the paint cans for every single room that had been painted over the previous twenty years. Little cans, big cans, half full, half empty. They were all stacked up in a nice little arrangement in our garage. I’m sure they meant well but if they knew who was moving into the house they would have disposed of them. My wife and I have lived in many places over the years and like clockwork, every single time we move, she has to change the color of the rooms to make them hers.
In order to change the color of the room, we learned long ago that simple paint swatch is not enough. You need to paint some test areas to make sure that a particular shade of white stays white in all lighting conditions. Lucky for us there is a hardware store within walking distance of the house. Long story short after we had the rooms painted to our liking (her liking - I could live in unfinished drywall if it meant not painting) we found ourselves with a serious collection of paint cans in our garage. I would say thirty or more in addition to the previous tenants’.
My wife and son go to Michigan in the summer to visit her parents for a while and I stay back because I don’t have that much vacation time. Usually, she leaves me with a short honey-do list which would be extremely simple to complete if I spread it out over the few weeks they were gone. Unfortunately, when they leave I immediately drop trou and find myself in a blur of frozen pizza and video games.
One of my tasks this particular summer was to dispose of the paint cans and mulch some flower beds. Easy peasy. Although, I had never been presented with the task of getting rid of so much paint. I knew you couldn’t pour it down the drain and since I have a creek in my backyard it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to dump it in the yard and have it spill into there either. I called the hardware store and they said they didn’t take it but what I should do is put cat litter into all of the paint cans, seal them up, and throw them in the trash. The cat litter was to turn the paint solid and it wouldn’t be a hazard when it got thrown away. Easy enough.
A few days before my family was to come back from their vacation I remembered my list and snapped out of my coma. I started mulching the flower beds as I had been instructed, but then I remembered that the trash pickup was the next day. If I didn’t get rid of the paint right then, it would still be there when they got back. That was not an option for my long-term survival.
Naturally, I forgot about the cat litter advice and put all of the paint in the trash can. It was so heavy that I almost gave myself a hernia rolling it out to the road. I was curious if the metal arm on the garbage truck would even be able to lift such a heavy load so when I heard the truck roaring up the street I watched and waited from my door window. The garbage truck pulled up. The little arm went out. Picked up the trash can and dumped it in the big dumpster in the front like nothing. Awesome. Scratch that off the list.
Then the garbage truck started lifting the front dumpster part in the air to dump it in the back. When that happened about twenty gallons of paint splashed down onto the front of the truck and on the road in front of my house. My stomach sank. I was certain the truck driver was going to get out and give me the beating I deserved. But he didn’t. Didn’t even faze him. He lowered the bin and drove on down the street. The tires got coated in paint and left a trail about two miles long through the neighborhood which dried instantly in the hot August sun.
For the next few days, I stood out in the road and used the soles of my shoes to rub out the paint epicenter by doing a little twisting motion with the ball of my foot. I wore a hole straight through two pairs of shoes. In the end, nobody knew that it was me that was the lazy neighborhood graffiti artist. But now, every time I see a paint splotch in the road it snaps me back to attention and reminds me that I’m not the only idiot in the world.