Tonight I went to roll my garbage bin out to the curb, and it was weirdly heavy. I had just thrown a bag of trash in and noticed there wasn’t much in there, so I was mystified.
I went back to my truck for a flashlight, and what did I see? A cornucopia of beer. Not beer CANS, mind you, but unopened cans of beer.
I hadn’t put it there. It wasn’t mind. (I drink regular Bud, but not Bud Light.) I knew my son had come to the house earlier to do laundry, so I called him and it wasn’t HIS beer. And it wasn’t mine. My wife doesn’t drink beer….
I fished one of them out to examine it. It was kind of grubby — gritty feeling, maybe a little sticky. There were white patches where the aluminum seemed to be oxidizing. The “born on” date was October 2009, which it getting up there for beer.
Yes, it occurred to me to put it in my beer fridge to save until Lent is over, but it didn’t seem like an entirely safe bet to me. So I put it back in the garbage, which wasn’t easy for me. It seemed such a sinful waste. I mean, it was light beer, of course, but still… actual beer of a kind. It hurt to close that lid.
And it also occurred to me that I should pour out the beer and recycle the cans (can you recycle cans when they’re full of beer — it would never, ever have occurred to me to wonder about that before this moment). But I didn’t know what kinds of botulism, or virus from the planet Venus, or what might be in there. Where do you pour out beer that might be a biohazard? It seemed best to leave it contained.
I wish I knew how it got there, and why…
There’s only one good place for unopened beer, and it ain’t in the garbage! It would have taken some mad scientist-type with a sophisticated canning operation and a grudge against the Warthen’s to have tempted you with poisonous beer. Clean the cans, pour the beer into glasses, drink the beer with friends, and if you live, you could still blog about the experience.
Ah–you must tell Neil White–another case of spontaneous beer generation. He cited the first known instance back when a certain Lexington County prosecutor somehow managed to have part of a cold one in his car one hot August night, but no knowledge of how it got there.
I’m thinking beer in a can is safe to drink, if not its tastiest, for years.
The Beer Fairy! Keep it down, or my neighbors will be mobbing you!
This just gets weirder… After the garbage truck had come and gone, leaving the huge blue roller bin with its lid open (and why do they do that; leaving it to fill up with filthy rainwater as often as not?), I looked in it and found that half the beer was still there.
Not only that, it was joined by an unopened two-liter bottle of Coke.
For the life of me, I cannot concoct a credible theory for how this stuff ended up in my trash…
In de big city, our rollcart trucks are mechanical–the big arms pick up the rollcart, turn it upside down, and empty everything in.
If they do that out where you are, that has to be new beer. The Beverage Fairy has visited you again.
My first theory was the some kids had been de-stashed, but this second round is just plain weird.
My neighbors easily hooked up a security camera to the front of their house on Greene St. Maybe you need a trash-cam?
Y’know, if those beer cans formed a picture of the Madonna or Jesus, you could solve all your problems.
Just sayin’