Super Entropy Sunday

The morning dawned perfectly clear and bright, beckoning Your Boulevardier to walk. A crisp morning such as today's portends a wonderful day, but occasionally -- and unfortunately -- our fellow citizens can get in the way of its enjoyment. Today was one such day.

Entropy -- the inevitable tendency of a system to move toward chaos -- appeared to have been in full force overnight. Indeed, it seems to have been aided and abetted by persons with an excess of time and a shortage of common sense. A two-liter liquor bottle and a spray of beer cans sat on one street corner; shopping carts were abandoned far from their homes; three of the heavy concrete trash receptacles along Redwood Road, provided by the able Castro Valley Sanitary District, were toppled. A bicycle was abandoned in the BART parking lot. Trash rode on the morning breeze.

Your Boulevardier did what he could to rage, rage against the entropy. Two shopping carts were returned to their respective lots -- one from the Rudy's parking lot to Longs, and one from the Longs lot to Albertsons. (Your Boulevardier felt a mix of civic pride and embarrassment to be pushing shopping carts along the street; thank goodness for sunglasses.) The abandoned bicycle and overturned trash bins were reported to an impressively uninterested BART Police officer reading his Sunday Chronicle in his cruiser. Your Boulevardier even made an attempt to right the receptacles, but they proved too heavy to budge. Your Boulevardier, he is embarrassed to admit, did not deal with the liquor bottle, though in writing this he is tempted to return to the scene and dispatch the container. (After all, a bottle on the street is soon, often as not, a bottle broken.)

Why the rash of trash, on an otherwise perfect Sunday morning? Your Boulevardier is at a loss to explain it, but is trying not to let it spoil the day.