Miles is the captain of the Litter Committee.  Whenever we’re in a park or something and he sees garbage on the ground, he immediately makes hairball noises and wants to find a garbage can to throw it in.  We encourage this in spirit, though sometimes in practice we don’t want him touching that stuff.

He’s been an influence on me.  As I waited for the bus this morning, I saw a card with a magnetic strip on the ground.  I thought maybe I’d dropped my bus pass, so I checked for it in my bag.  My bus pass was secure, and when I looked around a little more, I saw that there were many cards sprinkled around the area.

Normally I would have just left them, but Miles’ little glottal hacking noises were ringing in my head, so I decided to beautify the neighborhood and pick them up.  They turned out to be those membership rewards cards you can get at casinos.  I know about them because the first/only time I went to Las Vegas, my friends and I thought they were required to gamble in the casinos, so we wasted a ton of time setting up accounts at every place we went.  Eventually we figured out that they’re not necessary, but only after I’d opted into something that generated a lot of spam email.

In the case of these cards’ owner, I like to imagine that she has suffered a crippling gambling addiction for years, facilitated by her family’s wealth and power (the cards carry a locally-illustrious surname).  After a weekend of debauchery, she woke up early this morning with renewed vigor and tossed the cards into the street in a purge of all that was wrong with her former life.

Or maybe they just expired or something.