THE LOWDOWN: Cleaning it up in 2012

Dear Diary,
How ya doin’? Here we are in the monster year 2012. The Mayans, Zulus and Pueblo Indians have dire predictions for this year. So I am told. Time to clean up our act.
Evidence of this just minutes into the new year. We parked north of Speightstown to watch the fireworks out to sea at midnight, then went for hot dogs at a nearby gas station.
While we were inside, the wife saw a fellow, hot dog in one hand, eating, doggerts in the other hand, peeing. Then he dropped the wrapper for the one, shook the other and went his way.
Two points here. We make sure food handlers get medical certificates and that’s right. But in those convenience stores, the customer puts on his own ketchup, mustard and what not.
Suppose, as is more likely, he has his pee before coming for his hot dog? Doggie hands all over those condiment containers. There has to be a better way.
And that dropped wrapper: rats. Lepto is on the increase. The part-time poppets who want to kill sugar didn’t realize that the sugar industry every year waged an organized campaign to keep rats under control.
Another concern. My family probably drinks more coconut water than regular nowadays. A picker comes; I lower down with a rope.
But I am frankly appalled at the numbers of rat-damaged coconuts, rat nests in coconut trees, live rats jumping out of coconut trees. Coconut vending is big business. I seem to recall a coconut picker dying of lepto.
Sanitizing a truckload of coconuts is no easy task, but we have to look at it. The knife or cutlass touches the outside before it cuts through to make contact with the water.
Did you see Nicole Garofano on Run For Your Money last week? Adrian Clarke lifted her up at the end. I believe he wanted to run with her. I would too. She’s done wonders for the environment here. And she can motivate.
She even got my good friend Ras Al to miss football and spend a day in the hot sun cleaning up a beach! And many more besides.
If it isn’t been done elsewhere, get her full-time on Clean-up Barbados, no one-off nothing.
You’d be surprised how many people drive down Morgan Lewis Hill and throw out drinks bottles and fast food containers. Someone has to take charge and fight this battle.
Sorry, diary, went overboard there.
Just a few more peeves. Our roads are getting more user-unfriendly by the day. Case in point: the Warrens Roundabout.
The police say motorists need time to adjust. But how about drivers like myself who only travel those areas once in a blue moon? Or tourists?
And how do you follow arrows in the road when there is a line of traffic covering them? Why was Bizzy’s excellent suggestion ignored?
Next thing, my recent statement “Linda looks possible” was construed as implying that she had gained weight. That thought never crossed my mind as the lady is as svelte as an untried gazelle.
I was referring rather to her “healthy glow”, usually associated with that condition. But apparently the glow is natural, Linda is not p******t.
She can testify, however, that a well endowed female Lowdown reader meeting me for the first time was awfully taken aback: “I had visions of this virile sex-maniac hunk doing it non-stop . . . . I beg you, never let THE NATION publish your picture. Too many young women would have their dreams shattered . . . .”
On that subject of dreams, young women, and doing it, last Monday night I dreamt just that.       
Unfortunately, in the middle of everything her husband showed up and I had to jump through a window and run naked from Fontabelle to Vaucluse. To make matters worse, the lady told me later in the dream how much she’d been enjoying herself.
I don’t go for this horning thing. But have a heart, fellows. You get full enjoyment of your wives in real life. If it so pleases her to give an old columnist a little action in a dream, have the common human decency not to butt in and spoil their mutual pleasure.
Sheesh, I say!