One More Thing

When the fork in the road is a nail

Whenever there’s a nail on the road, or a screw on the sidewalk, if I see it and I can safely do so, I pick it up. My most recent pickup was an allen wrench left in the street by the Arhaus crew that assembled my neighbor’s sofa.

It’s a small habit. My personal ritual against entropy; a tiny, quiet action that maybe spares someone else from the flat tire that breaks their day. I’ve sarcastically referred to myself as the patron saint of tires, or maybe I’m trying to channel the spirit of vintage Bibendum glamorously knocking back a champagne glass of nails. I don’t even own a car btw, there is no self-interest here whatsoever.

As much as I pitch it as something I’m doing out of benevolence for the person who is totally overwhelmed and does not have the resources to deal with a flat tire ruining their day, there’s some this-is-why-we-can’t-have-nice-things annoyance that’s always an undercurrent for me too.

But the other day, someone said something that shifted my view completely:

“What if the person who dropped it was already at capacity, too?”

You mean like… I have to give some modicum of grace to the person who dropped that shit? And they’re probably right. Ugh. Okay, let’s take a look at possible indemnification-of-sorts for the potential puncture villains.

It Cuts Both Ways

Imagine you’re the one hauling broken fencing on an open trailer. You don’t want to spill nails. But you’re exhausted. You’re working two jobs and are already tired because you were out late delivering ubereats in your busted ass car overnight. And the crap you’re hauling now? You don’t even own the trailer, it’s your boss’s, and it’s also beat to hell. You didn’t mean to have a screw or nail or whatever fall out of what you were hauling. You just didn’t have the margin not to.

So now we’re here. A person who caused a problem they couldn’t afford to prevent. Hopefully, a person who finds it and quietly picks it up. And a third person down the line who might be spared a problem that would have been somewhere on the scale from minor expense to I-am-totally-fucked-and-will-be-late-and-get-fired-and-then-can-never-fix-this-damn-tire.

Entropy is Not a Moral Failure

The myth we’re sold is that everyone should just “do better.” Don’t litter. Don’t spill. Don’t break. But that assumes we all have infinite capacity.

We don’t. Systems fail at the margins, where a lot of people live.

So no, maybe the person who dropped the nail couldn’t help it. Maybe they did their best, and their best still leaked chaos. That doesn’t make them the villain, nor does the “never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity” adage work here, because they’re not stupid; they just don’t have the agency to tell the person who told them to haul an open trailer full of scrap metal panels full of screws across a series of bouncy railroad tracks that it’s not the best idea.

One more thing

L7’s One More Thing is a spare, exhausted song. It’s not rebellion. It’s not rage. It’s resignation. It's that moment when you’re not sure you can take one more thing.

We all get there.

Sometimes it’s the screw in the tire. Sometimes it’s the pressure not to drop it in the first place.

And sometimes, the only kindness left in the system is someone else doing one small thing to stop entropy from rippling further.

Pick Your Thing

You don’t have to pick up nails; if you can’t look at them without thinking “tetanus has entered the chat”, I get it. So maybe your thing is emailing the person everyone keeps forgetting to include. Or pulling a few weeds out of someone’s planters as you walk by, or picking up an extra pile of dog poop when you walk your dog when someone neglected to pick up after theirs. Or even the restraint of not reposting an intentionally inflammatory hot take on some issue even if you know it will get you likes.

It won’t go viral. It won’t get you paid. But it’s an act of resistance against the idea that everything must break, and everyone must fend for themselves all the fucking time.

If you can stop the cascade, do. Somewhere, someone’s “one more thing” won’t happen because of you.

You’ll never know it, but that’s fine, because we aren’t actually going for sainthood here.