Every time some high-profile person dies I get like this. Annoyed.
Not generally at the person who died or the fact that they did. That’s not usually their fault. And let’s face it, sometimes their, uh, absence isn’t such a bad thing for the world. Of course it depends.
No, what annoys me are all the damn flowers. Folks started doing it last night, probably as soon as word went out that Steve Jobs had died.
I was irritated because I knew that outside each and every Apple Store, outside headquarters and outside any house where an Apple-product fan lives, there would be flowers. And each and every damn bouquet would still be in its plastic sleeve.
Now I think Steve Jobs was a great guy, truly. And Macs are absolutely the way to go. If I could afford one, well, that’s what I’d be working on right now.
But the fact that folks go to all the trouble to get flowers, take them to memorials, take them to places of quiet contemplation and remembrance and LITTER, well, it makes me nuts.
When I see someone doing that I want to toot my car horn and shout “Litterbug, beep, beep” like we did as kids. I want to get that crying Indian from the 70s to ride after them (on a diapered horse, of course) and make them pick up their trash. I want there to be a 2011 advertising campaign to stop people from throwing plastic down on the ground and leaving it there, even if they mean well. Even if there is something pretty still inside.
I can still remember that when Princess Diana died, there were so many £5 bouquets of flowers wrapped in plastic outside of Kensington Palace that they declared a public emergency and brought in bulldozers and backhoes to remove the mess. They asked people to stop bringing flowers.
To my mind, a plastic-enclosed bunch of flowers is just not a very good way to say good-bye. Well, maybe to the chairman of the Hefty Trash Bag company, but not to Princess Di and not to Steve Jobs, and not to anybody else I can think of unless there’s someone out there who routinely wraps him or herself in plastic. And I’m pretty sure you won’t be getting a lot of hands up in the crowd from folks who admit to doing that.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t like flowers. I just don’t like flowers left in unseemly piles of plastic crap. It is environmentally, politically and humanitarianly incorrect. It’s bad for Mother Nature. And it is damn ugly.
Lovely Flowers for Princess Diana
So, I would like to tell you, my enormous fan base, years from now when I die tragically here at my computer from Blog-itis, and when my die-hard devotees simply must, MUST memorialize me with flowers,
TAKE THEM OUT OF THE GOD DAMN WRAPPER
FiftyFourandAHalf 
I agree. (Duh — obviously cause I wrote the piece). It also really bothers me in those roadside memorials, where people just leave the flowers in plastic until someone else picks them up. If they took them out of the plastic (or as you said, didn’t put them in it to begin with) they could decompose naturally.
Thanks for the comments!
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I always thought the plastic wrapper was a bit tacky too. If you took the time to buy the flowers and walk to the memorial, how much longer would it take to just remove the plastic? Better yet, don’t wrap them in plastic at all.
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WONDERFUL Post.thanks for share..more wait .. 😉
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Well, at least I have one convert. That’s a start.
But really I hate litter, and it always struck me as such an amazing contrast — the beautiful princess and the mound of garbage. She deserved better — she started as a vapid Barbie and ended up doing a whole lot of good things. She surmounted the image most of us women hate. And then she was buried in plastic crap. There is no justice!
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Never even thought of it but you had me laughing so hard and that picture is truly so ugly, I will never GD forget to dispose of the wrapper! LOL
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The Litterbug, beep, beep campaign was very effective. As a really little kid it was common to see people throw stuff out of car windows. An ad campaign suggested that whenever you saw a “litterbug,” you’d hit the horn twice. It made a difference. Of course, then folks started complaining about noise pollution…
Thanks for the comment, Lisa!
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I’m with ya, and I say we should start a LITTERBUG, BEEP BEEP movement. It’ll catch on, just watch.
Love this, so funny: So, I would like to tell you, my enormous fan base, years from now when I die tragically here at my computer from Blog-itis, and when my die-hard devotees simply must, MUST memorialize me with flowers,
TAKE THEM OUT OF THE GOD DAMN WRAPPER
Great post, Elyse!
Lisa
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Terminal, yup. Numb-butt will be the symptom that finishes me.
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Blog-itis: symptoms include lack of sleep, carpal tunnel, and arranging your day around finding a blog topic. Incurable.
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