 |
| Good size, good strength, not a bad little resource for something you find in a bathroom garbage. |
* Warning to all of you that are sensitive to things that are pretty gross, this business coming up here is pretty gross. *
If you go on you have been warned.
Kids don't have an innate understand how gross stuff is. That is why educating children on the finer points of hygiene and cleanliness is at the forefront of secular and religious instruction. If you remember, my mom taught us to dig stuff out of the trash and reuse it. In that context what we did was not bizarre, gross still, but not bizarre.
My brother and I were always looking through the garbage for things to reuse in building stuff. I liked to build cardboard box houses and cut holes out of them and then put in little plastic containers for skylights. I also built portals, windows and guns, lots of guns. When my dad would deliver a fridge we would get a big refrigerator box. I would take old two-liter bottles, cut them in half and then put them through the wall holding them in place with tape. Bam, skylights!
At one point in our scavenging, we found little interlocking white tubes that were perfect for everything. We made bombs with them by cutting the bottom out of shotgun shells and packing the powder in tight and using a fuse from our firework stash to set it off. When we were not making bombs, we pretended they were cartridges for our makeshift bandoleers. We would even, and this is the really gross part, pretend they were cigars, and played it up like 1920's gangsters 'We were wise-guys, See?'.
We felt like we had hit the second hand gold mine. Then my mom saw what we were playing with. She kind of freaked out a little bit which took us by surprise. She ripped them out of our hands and started ranting about how disgusting it was. Our windfall happened to be tampon applicators and we were forbidden from scrounging them ever, ever, again. To her great credit, she didn't tell us exactly why it was so nasty.
Years later I was horrified in retrospect, but yet and still, they were good for all sorts of stuff.
