Madden Mischief

Poor pathetic plastic bottle caps!  How many of them do you pick up each day?  I betcha I gotcha beached!

Yet they’re taking over the world.  You find them everywhere, divorced from bottles, some brazenly sticking their plastic tongues up at us as we walk along otherwise clean and tidy public streets or laying there sadly downtrodden yet still cluttering pathways to pricy homes in otherwise immaculate neighborhoods. 

You’ll see bottle caps boldly littering many other places we traverse and treasure, where some look like rude, crude renegades so out of place. 

Spots where they especially congregate and collectively despoil are our pristine beaches in front of otherwise beautiful beachfront resorts in Florida!

Marital discord

When moving from inland to beachfront, while the air is fresher and the ocean inspiring, you inherit something not so pleasant to tread upon, the residue of marital problems now landlocked on beaches strewn with not just silky sand, but bottle caps divorced from their late tubular husbands!

Why can’t bottle caps stay married to their plastic bottles?  Why are there so many separations, divorces between plastic caps and bottles? 

Does anyone happen to know some good marital counselors who speak plastic?

Everyday walking along the beach we’ll come upon these poor discarded plastic bottles, naked and capless.  Okay, we’ll pick them up, but mostly it’s just the plastic caps we come across on our beach walks.  They just seem to be waiting there for a pickup while divorced and bottle less in the sand.

Making beaches less blithesome!

Since I sold my home in nearby stately Royal Palm, I moved about a dozen years ago ambitiously and deliciously seaward.  Today we live in one of the majestically towering twin beachfront condos, comprising the elegant Chalfonte, a luxurious oceanfront community in Boca Raton, FL featuring stunning views of the Atlantic Ocean and Lake Boca Raton.

On our daily beach walks I collect on average at least three plastic bottle caps a day, which adds up to well over a thousand a year and since I’ve moved to this beachfront palace that’s adding up to more than 14,000 plastic bottle caps I’ve rescued and placed where they belong, in recycling bin, hopefully to live again, married to another plastic bottle and undoubtedly destined for another divorce. 

I pray they’ll live happily together after quenching thirsts and keeping us humans healthfully hydrated.  All I ask is for drinkers to let bottle and cap stay married so I can enjoy my beach walks without being a pall bearer of just plastic caps only occasionally still married to their empty bottles.   Thank you!

Here we are living in a dazzlingly beautiful heaven’s gate to exercise and pleasure for my beautiful Brazilian wife Rita and me.  Here, we so love to walk together every day up and down our palatial beach.  Yet, every day I see and must collect those miscreant bottle caps.  As they stubbornly refuse to decompose, I’ve appointed myself to dispose of them, to place them where they belong, into recycling with the rest of the plastics we humans continually use and then abuse by discarding them wherever, making them someone else’s problem. MINE!

When not collecting plastics from the beach, Tom Madden is writing books, blogs and press releases as he is CEO of the PR firm TransMedia Group serving clients worldwide from its headquarters in Boca Raton, where his industrious daughter Adrienne Mazzone is the firm’s resourceful president.