Out the window goes my garbage

Whenever I have guests in my car, they remark about how clean I keep the interior. It’s not rocket science. Whenever I have any trash, I just chuck it out the window.

Paper wrappers, empty coffee cups and wads of unpaid parking tickets can create a real mess in the front seat and reflect badly on my character. So I just roll down the window and say good riddance as that stuff floats away.

It’s not just paper either.

After finishing a beer, I promptly toss the bottle or can out the window, too. This not only keeps my car clean and smelling fresh, it also gets rid of the evidence of open alcohol containers. Police can be such sticklers about an empty beer bottle or two.

I know a lot of motorists think just like I do. It is estimated that one-half of all the containers found on road shoulders once held alcoholic beverages.

Cigarette butts? Not in my car. I love the way a hot butt sprays a shower of sparks as it hits the pavement in the dark. It’s like July 4.

I read recently that smokers discard several trillion cigarette butts each year and that they are made of plastic that is not biodegradable. So? When I stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon, I imagine it would take eons to fill that up with cigarette butts. Maybe highways can’t hold as much stuff as the Grand Canyon, but I’m sure they can carry a bigger load than they do now.

For example, I was recently trying to figure out how I could get rid of an old mattress when it dawned on me that I was ignoring the obvious. In fact, freeway crews find several mattresses every single day.

Turns out that there are a lot of really smart people in California.

So I roped my old mattress to the top of my trusty Buick and cut the cord in the No. 2 freeway lane. Then, I tuned my radio to the traffic report, and sure enough, 10 minutes later I heard a SigAlert announcing a mattress in the lanes. All because of me.

I am so tired of being told not to litter. Without littering, my personal life would be a big hassle.

Of course, I never litter in front of my own house.

I used to live in Virginia, where I had the trash picked up twice a week, but here in Southern California I only get once-a-week pickup. So, when my trash cans are full, I haul a 30-gallon bag out to the Santa Ana freeway and toss it.

Caltrans advises me that some portions of Interstate 5 hold more trash than any other road in California, so it’s probably a good place to litter if you want to keep the garbage all in one place. And anyway, it’s such an ugly freeway. How could a pile of paper and plastic make it look any worse?

As I watch in my rearview mirror, I see that my trash is pulverized very quickly. Big-rig trucks are really good trash smashers. We’re lucky to have so many here in Southern California, and now with Mexican trucks coming in we’ll be in even better shape. I’m sure the shredded trash blows into the bushes and mulches into really good non-chemical fertilizer. That’s good for ocean water quality, isn’t it?

I have heard that littering is illegal. Well, please. I value my personal freedom.

Surveys show that most of the litter is dropped by single males in their late teens and early 20s. So, the fact that I litter shows I’m cool and young at heart.

And like a young guy, I bet I’ll never get caught. The California Department of Transportation’s Adopt-a-Highway program collects 2.9 million pounds of litter on highways each year. And the California Highway Patrol issues 10,000 littering citations annually. Let’s see

In fact, highway littering in much of the country is up sharply, which proves that more and more people are keeping their cars cleaner these days. Besides a bunch of knee-jerk liberals, does anybody take littering laws seriously?

After all, without litter, what would the government do with probationers in those stunning orange outfits who bag trash along the freeway?

We have so many convicts in this country that they have to do something besides sit around in jail all day.

Ralph Vartabedian can be reached at ralph.vartabedian@latimes.com.