The Slice: Peanuts, get your %&/# peanuts

I haven’t been to confession in about 40 years.

But back when I did go through that ritual on occasion, I didn’t have much to report. I was a child, after all. But I figured I had to confess something. So I would concoct a short list of sins.

One of my staples was “Said bad names.” That meant that I cussed a bit, like any normal kid who had recently learned a few choice words and phrases. The priests never seemed all that shocked.

Well, the other day, I said bad names. With gusto.

Like so many disasters, it all started with cleaning the garage. To make room for bicycles, a flotilla of boxes was evicted to the driveway.

The idea was that I would gradually whittle away the cardboard mesa my wife and I constructed there. And eventually it would be gone.

But before that happened, there was an incident.

One of the larger boxes tipped over. Out spilled an ungodly number of polystyrene packing peanuts.

Have I mentioned that I hate those things with a white-hot intensity usually reserved for tailgaters and other perpetrators of the most heinous acts? Well, I do.

It’s not just the environmental issues. I can’t stand how they cling to you and seem to multiply like “Star Trek” tribbles. Only they aren’t cute.

When I open a package and see plastic peanuts, I’m tempted to immediately reseal it and just do without the item they surround.

The creatures in the “Alien” movies were easier to get rid of. And once these foam pests are out and skittering around free-range, mercury is probably easier to corral.

So anyway, the box fell over. Then there was a gust of wind. Then another gust. Then another.

In practically no time at all, we had managed to pollute half the neighborhood.

It was like a litter bomb had been dropped on my street.

I might as well have been the drunken captain of a supertanker that had run aground on the South Hill.

My wife and I spent a long time going from yard to yard, picking up the devil-spawn legumes. That’s a lot of bending over.

Just when we’d think we had 99 percent of them, we would look up and spot a new infestation. It was during this harvest of shame that I used the penance-grade language.

The next day, I phoned the Peanut Hotline operated by the Plastic Loose Fill Council. I got a recording.

OK, a lot of people phoning me get a recording. But I don’t refer to my number as a hotline.

Whatever. I’d already used up my quota of bad names for the week.

•Today’s Slice question: OK. I’ve had my turn. What are your thoughts about polystyrene packing peanuts?