A daily pastime of mine is to walk our dog. She's just over a year old and has energy to spare, so the walks can be long - close to an hour on days when the weather's nice and I have the time. A popular part of our itinerary, especially on weekends, is the local high school. There are a couple of reasons for this.
[I think a good title for this picture is
"The after-high-school-walk reverie"]
First, it's a great diversion for the dog. The grounds of a high school are like a doggie smorgasbord. Why? Because high school students are not among the human race's most fastidious members. A random sampling of the grounds ordinarily yields smashed pizza, discarded fast food wrappers, a collection of half-drunk containers of various, caffeine-enhanced beverages, masticated candy bar remnants, etc. What dog, especially one that's half Lab, could pass that up? So, I let her sniff and, if she gets lucky and I get lax, she lands the occasional goodie. However, that isn't the only reason for our sojourning to the trash-rich campus.
No, the other reason is for loose change. You see, I've been a penny picker-upper since I was but a lad. I don't care if it's heads or tails; I figure finding a coin of any denomination is a good thing. As a result, our walks have purpose for both man and beast. Traditionally, the parking lots have been the best hunting grounds, with the concession stand near the playing field coming in a close second. Better weather means better hunting, too.
My best find in a parking lot at the school has been three dollars. That's right, three one dollar bills, neatly sitting there, waiting for my appreciative grasp. However, I'm no snob. I'm abundantly happy whenever I score a quarter. Best find ever? A twenty dollar bill on the floor of a store. Nobody was around, so there was no opportunity to ask, "Did you drop this?" Whew!
Over the past couple of years, though, I've noticed a distinct drop (no pun intended) in the coins to be found lying about the school parking lots. I firmly believe that this is because people aren't carrying cash (bills or coins) in their pockets as much as they used to. This is obviously due to the emphasis on the use of plastic, both debit and credit, in our transactions. We're being pushed into being a cashless society. I'm not sure I feel all that good about it, myself.
(Uh-oh, here comes the conspiracy nutjob argument.) Hey, not so fast, tool of the establishment. I wasn't about to go there; not yet, anyway. I have other things going on. One big concern I have is with privacy in general, and identity theft in particular. There's no anonymity with plastic, and the "cash rewards" cards offered by many corporate chains (I'm talking to you, CVS) are just another way to try to separate us from even more of our money. It also encourages over-spending, since we don't really have to part with anything - just swipe the card, or even wave it in the general direction of a card reader. Doesn't that strike you as somehow odd?
I live in a college town, and it's not unusual to see the students flash their plastic for a $1.49 purchase. Enough of those, and you have a leaky bank account. Such habits lead to a desensitization to the cost of things. Can you say "credit crisis"?
OK, NOW comes the nutjob argument. Plastic use makes it so much easier to track our habits, our purchases, our very lives, as everything we do is preserved in a database somewhere. The presence of data tempts the unscrupulous toward the abuse of data. Of course, this is done only so that the corporate offices can serve us better. Yeah, I'm sure that's the case.
Well, back out to the high school. The weather's good and the dog is antsy. Wish me luck.
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