Campsite Cleanup #16: Taos Ski Valley, NM, Where I Found A Genie In A Bottle

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Well hello it's me again @otherbrandt, and I am happy to report that despite the best efforts of Mother Nature and Jack Frost combined I have yet to freeze to death in my sleep, which is good for me because it means I'm still alive but bad for my family because it means they will have to wait a bit longer to get their hands on that fat life insurance check, assuming I die before they do which is likely considering how much rusted metal and broken glass and used toilet paper I collect with my bare hands on a regular basis.

Now, if I'm being honest it would seem that my wild trashlust simply cannot be sated, and as you will have noticed from my previous post, my righteous inspired quest for that One True Campsite of Perfect Cleanliness unspoiled by the despicable litterbug scourge has now taken me away from my sweet home Colorado stomping grounds and across state lines.

Which of course brings me to the third paragraph, the one where I say that recently me and my hippily grifty and unspiffily wishy-washy Subaru, Yolo McFukitol, plunked ourselves down in the dead of night on a big gravel turnout right off 150 about halfway up the canyon to Taos Ski Valley, New Mexico and claimed the entire area for ourselves, and in the flickering light of a campfire that gladly sang to life at the snap of a finger we solemnly and ceremoniously planted our great and mighty orange flag of annexation, which bears a striking resemblance to an orange two-person Alps Mountaineering tent but it's definitely a flag not a tent.

Anyway. The next morning we woke up and I immediately got trashed on Ten High, Yolo got crashed on Irish car bombs, and then we both went drunk goose shufflin' our way around the gravel turnout that was now and forevermore ours, doing that Campsite Cleanup thing that we've gotten rather fairly average at doing over the past few months,

and would you just look at all this garbage we found:

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Bottle. When I picked it up a genie came out and said, "Hello and nice to meet you, I will now grant you three wishes. Anything you wish for will come true." And I said, "Great, nice to meet you too, okay so my first wish is for you to make it so nobody in the world ever litters again, ever." The genie rolled his eyes up to the sky and spat on the ground and looked a bit exasperated and said, "I offer you three wishes for anything you could ever possibly dream up in the wildest of your wild dreams, and that's what you ask for? Not untold riches, not exotic women, not universal fame, but a solve for the problem of litter? You might as well ask me to exterminate all of humanity by nudging the Earth a couple of light minutes closer to the sun, that would be a helluva whole lot easier. Keep dreamin' dude, that's some insane shit you're askin' for and it ain't never gonna happen. So yeah that's a hard no to your first wish, and actually you know what now that I think of it fuck it, after hearing that first wish of yours, you don't get any more wishes." And with that the genie flipped me off and called me a starstruck fuckwad and went back into the bottle. So I walked over to the creek dunked the bottle underwater and held it there till he drowned.

…

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…crickets…

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…crickets…

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…crickets…

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…crickets…

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…crickets…

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…crickets…

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…crickets…

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Whoa there,

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hold on now,

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STOP.

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Is that a full propane canister I see??

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Oh my gods yes indeed it is!! A full propane canister, either graciously or absentmindedly left behind for the taking, and I alone am here predestined for to take it! What luck, as I was just about to run out of propane! Mayhaps I can now prepare myself a respectably warm heated luncheon of panfried Spam and potboiled Ramen noodles, instead of the crispy Ramen noodle and cold Spam salad I'd been expecting! Is it strange that my second wish for our dear recently deceased friend the genie would have been nothing more than one full propane canister, if he hadn't gone and tragically drowned to death like that just a few minutes ago?

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🏕 😈

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11-28-21. I'd tell you what my third wish would have been but YMF is still within earshot so I'd better not.