A Hopeful Future Rides on the Back of Litterbugs

Blade Runner. The Matrix. Terminator 1, 3 and Salvation. Alien. Predator. Alien vs. Predator Requiem. Alien vs. Predator. My Girl 2. A Very Care Beary Movie: The Wrath of Lionel. The Fifth Element.

All of the above depict a very dystopian version of the future. Volcanoes go off at random, robots use the bones of man to power their Rube Goldberg devices, Chris Tucker annoys and trash litters over just about everything.

It is indeed a pretty bleak future, and this is probably why we refer to it as “dystopian.” But there is one glimmer of hope in all those bleak times. It comes from the final clause in the preceding paragraph (and also this paragraph), in the future, trash litters around on just about everything.

Just imagine a future littered with Terminator endoskeletons

If these movies are to be believed, our descendants have found a way to truly capitalize on our precious time. No longer must we walk upwards of 32 feet to find a trash receptacle. When we're tired of using it, we just drop it. Wind will blow it away, or acid rain will melt it. No longer must we waste time for trash management, because litter is the wave of the future.

This might sound horrible, like its aiding in our untimely demise, but just think about it, if you're eating a Twinkie while running away from a flesh eating zombie robot, you're not going to want to take time to throw away that wrapper. You'll want to drop it and keep running, replete with the power embued in you from the Twinkie's beef fat. We can fight the robot masses if we're not busy trying to figure out what to do with our garbage.

Another great thing, we don't have to pay garbage men.

I realize I've gotten ahead of myself. Why is littering such a phenomenal advancement in our society? Just keep in mind, if we're busy not wasting all of our times trying to figure out where to throw our trash, we can think up ways to save the world, like by instituting trash-throwing-away programs or curing AIDS.

Once the pile of trash starts dwarfing us, we'll realize this plan is working. It's a little known fact, but in addition to smelling like roses, trash also serves as an excellent heat insulator. By merely having a welcoming layer of old issues of Vogue and pork rind dust coating our homes, we are actually insulated much better and can turn down the thermostat, thus resulting in a happier ozone. And happier ozone results in less carcinogenic ways and less melanoma. Since cancer is bad, litter must be good.

Trash lining all the streets might seem like it has nothing but positives associated with it, and I'll admit, this is true. As I've said, we've seen how happy it made everyone in those dystopian movies. They were in awful situations, but they knew they had trash, they would survive.

We might even breed some rare form of super-plague some super-plague-antibiotic-resistant-strain of SARS or BARS or some other acronym word. We could then use these horrorific diseases to play fun games like “Who will die on Tuesday?” or “Jenga.”

As the saying goes, where theres' super-plague-antibiotic-resistant-strains of SARS, there's super-plague-antibiotic-resistant rats. I imagine a rat of this magnitude will be able to do cool things like Kung Fu and talking. And a radical rat like that can probably use its massively large brain to figure out a way to prevent the robot uprising and save our entire existence. Or, at the very least, it could karate chop off some of the robot's heads and take care of that problem before it becomes an issue... Splinter?

He just might be our way to survive past 2012. 

He is a radical rat.

Second Bedroom Leaves Room for Improvement

Several months ago, I moved into a two bedroom apartment. We had great success deciding what to do with one of the bedrooms (put our bed in it), but the other one remains an enigma of possibilities.

We planned on getting a futon and making a super sweet guest room, but the problem with owning fuel efficient cars is they just don't have the carrying capacity to super sweeten domiciles. Maybe they're capable of just plain sweetening, but that's a level of vanilla I do not want to contemplate.

So I'm left with a room that's basically empty.

Currently, the room exists solely to house our cats' litter boxes. While this fulfills a great need, for some reason I have trouble seeing guests hanging out in the “Room o' Poop”—although that really just might be a naming issue. I do have several possibilities for making this room awesome. The only problem with awesome ideas is they're too awesome, and deciding which one to go with is difficult.

Here's a couple of my ideas. If you have any suggestions feel free to leave a comment!

Also doubles as an 80s time machine

Laser Tag Room: You might say what makes Laser Tag laser tag is the lasering and the tagging, and this level of cool cannot occur in a 132 square foot room. And I totally agree with you, but keep in mind, nobody has dropped ecstasy yet.

Urinal Room: I figure the cats are already peeing up a storm, why can't I? I'm imagining a solitary urinal along one wall, a trough one along the 12 foot wall, and if I get really ambitious I'd mount one on the ceiling. Sure, I'd need to overcome some amount of fluid dynamics, but the ease of pee would make it well worth it. If I install enough urinals, we can utilize the room for familial bathrooming—my girlfriend might take issue with this, but in time she will learn.

Milk Dud Room: Everyone wants a room that has a lot of Milk Duds in it. I'm not talking about the insignificant 50 boxes the average person keeps in their bedstand. That hardly qualifies as “a lot.” I'm talking about “a lot.” What I'd like to do is literally fill a room floor to ceiling with Milk Duds. I want the door to open and wave after wave of Dud to stream forth. If it doesn't kill someone, the room has not done its job. Plus, once we remove the bodies, it would taste delectable.

M.C. Escher's Relativity room: Just imagine walking into a room and suddenly find you're walking along stairs on the wall, but is that the wall, or is that the ceiling? To walk among this room is to question one's sense of gravity, place, sanity and hygiene. It's so mind tripping, you don't even need to drop ecstasy (please though, no Laser Tag in the Escher room, it will not end well).

McDonald's Room: Remember in “Richie Rich” with Macualey Culkin, when Richie wanted to show he had really arrived, he took the kids he kidnapped to his own McDonald's in his own house. Well I'm apparently just one smushed circus animal and styrafoam container away from that level of awesome.

Toxoplasmosis Room: What's the one thing everyone comments “This house could use some more of.” Toxoplasmosis, of course. But not everyone can have an endless supply of the delightful disease that causes inflamation of the brain and neurological problems. I want the walls literally painted with this whimsically named disorder—thats is, unless its coloring is like a chartreuse.

And I don't want just the naturally occurring Toxoplasmosis floating around the area. The room will have massive amounts of it. Like splattered all around—hanging in bags from ceilings, smeared against the wall, located in “Break in Case of Emergency” reticules, basically everywhere I can put it. The room will be Toxoplasmosied up the wazoo! No longer will houseguests crinkle their noses at the lack of this parasite. Instead they'll remark “Well... well, that sure is a lot of Toxoplasmosis.”

Oh, and if any pregnant women would like to drop by... please don't. Really.

Kill Room: The plastic sheets, the gurney, the bathtubs of blood, the rolls of duct tape. It seems like a little bit of heaven right on earth, because really, a good kill room shouldn't be depressing, it should really be seen as a welcoming, heartwarming homestead for all the runaways, drifters and circus clowns of the world. I don't know how I've made it 26 years without one.

Above: The ultimate plan for the ultimate room

With so many good ideas kicking around, I'll probably just end up combining them into some sort of urinal-filled, gravity-defying, laser-bending, blood-curdling, diabetic coma-inducing, McRoom of disease that my cats can still use to do their nasty business. The best part is, this paragraph can serve as the pitch to convince my girlfriend we need a Relativity Urinal Milk Dud Cat Poop McD Laser Tag Disease room! 

UPDATE: Since writing this article, we got a futon. My cat has pooped on it three times.