Sometimes I think about the histories of the bottles and cans that briefly pass and then move on to the next step in their afterlife journey toward reincarnation; who sorted them, how they got here, but mostly further back than even that, to before they were discarded, about the people who drank from them and the circumstances under which they did so. That may seem odd to you, and it probably is odd, to spend so much time thinking about something that warrants little consideration at all. When you do what I do you spend a lot of time in your own head, little mental stimulation besides the simple tasks you are performing, tasks that don't take up a whole lot of CPU. Your mind can travel down some pretty obscure corridors when left to its own devices, and the architecture of my imagination is like the Winchester mansion, vestibules opening into strangely furnished rooms, endless, winding hallways leading to nowhere, serving no functional purpose save to consume the minutes and hours spent wandering them. In the abscence of distraction a mind will grow weary of its own company and begin to bicker with itself, especially if you have a mind like a caffeinated jackrabbit.
    Some the cans are strays, bleached from their time on highway shoulders prior to being rescued by a bum looking for something to fill his belly or a bottle of something to warm it. Some have scraps of paper taped to them, names in large, wavy letters, written in a child's unpracticed hand. I wonder about the people who emptied them, if any of them are expecting a child or carrying a child they don't expect, if any of them are now deceased or will be soon, if any were drank by celebrities, people I know, people I haven't met yet, or even by me. About the secrets unconfessed by the throats that swallowed whatever was inside. How many of the countless bottles and cans that pass by me on their way to somewhere else, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, were tilted at the lips of rapists, pedophiles, murderers? I wonder how many of the vacant bottles of cheap liquor were stolen, tucked under coats or slipped inside sleeves, and if their contents granted temporary asylum from the demons the drinker was running from, or if they only made a bad situation worse.
    A million little histories, a million stories no one would bother to tell, converging momentarily, sifted through my hands and then gone, mysteries intact. I invent myself another corridor, another room, and I decorate them with all the things I'll never need to know.