Shannon Wunderlich: Micro/Macro

So, I was the weirdo that decided to make one of my three walks without any shoes on.

Having decided to trek barefoot, my experience was a much more tactile one, one that forced me to confront the state of the ground that I walked on. Instead of allowing my eyes to glaze over the smaller details that comprised my environment, my feet called their attention down to the ground to reckon with the filthy state of our streets. I specifically mentioned the overwhelming presence of cigarette butts littered literally everywhere I looked and stepped. And so, for my intervention, I chose to do something with them.

Almost half of my route was comprised of alleyways, in which I stumbled across a few funny little break area benches, like this one. It seemed that the key element of appeal for these back alley getaways was the fact that you could sit down and have a smoke. Actually, that seemed to be the entire reason for these 'spaces' being brought about. Again, cigarettes affect the ways in which our space is utilized.

It's weird, right? How much is dictated by this fix that has become so engrained in our culture. It's also weird to me how acceptable it is to just throw your butts on the ground, even when there's a designated receptacle within arms reach. And it's not just weird, it's kind of annoying, right? I mean, we never really think about them all because we're so removed from our environments via cars and shoes and such, but it's actually a pretty gross thing to have assimilated into normalcy.

I sat down on one of these break area benches and looked around me.

Within the few feet surrounding the bench, my eyes were met with a considerable amount of (cigarette) butts strewn across the ground. I looked to my right and noticed the receptacle within arms reach. Dumb. You don't even have to get up to throw away your cigarette.

So, the spiteful bratty part of me wanted to fire back.

I collected every (cigarette) butt within my seated line of vision and piled them up on the bench.

Here's hoping that the next time Jimmy comes out back for a smoke break, he's confronted with the filth he's helped amass and feels inspired to extend his arm to his right the next time he's had his fix. Sometimes it's easy for the reality of a situation to lose its poignancy when distance comes into play. As the (cigarette) butts are distributed throughout the area, the actual amount of litter is lost. I guess my intent was to illustrate the degree of the issue by compressing the evidence and turning it back on to the offender.