I see them here, I see them there. Floss picks are everywhere!

A few years back, it was the nip bottle. Raspberry Stoli. Fireball Whisky.

And it was on the Cape, in Wellfleet.

My sister Kath and her friend Deb had been the first to begin spotting them while walking in their neighborhood. There, alongside the road, were discarded nip bottles.

Once you knew they were there, it became a thing. They were always there. Mattered not how many you picked up and trashed, there were more the next day.

Were they left by kids? Tossed out the window by joyriders? Secret drinkers? Someone who worked for an airline and had access to the drink cart? Someone who worked in a packie?

After they began turning up in Wellfleet, I started seeing them in Boston.

At first, it was something of a novelty.

See a nip bottle on the sidewalk, take a picture, text Kath, ha-ha.

And then they were ubiquitous.

I couldn’t take a walk without a number of close encounters with nip bottles.

Then things really took off, and I found a couple of half-pints, including one of Bacardi on my front steps.

And then they were (mostly) gone.

Where they’ve gone, I haven’t a clue, as I’m sure there are still kids, joyriders, secret drinkers, and airline and packie employees among us.

I’m not going to say I never see a discarded nip bottle, but it’s not all that often.

Instead, for the past year or so, it’s been these angled flossers. Mostly white. Sometimes green. Occasionally purple. (A really bad plastic purple.)

I have a picture I took just yesterday while strolling through the Boston Common, but the pic is lousy and you can’t really tell what it is.

But that there green thang? They’re all over the place.

I rarely take a walk without finding one or two. But if I didn’t mind picking up an occasional empty nip, I’m 100% loath to pick up one of these suckers. Way too much ewwwww factor.

When I first began telling people about my sightings, they looked at me incredulously. Was I imagining these appearances? Some sort of too-much-walking, too-long-in-the-city dementia?

After all, swigging a tot of whisky while on the move, and then discarding the evidence, is one thing. But who flosses in public and then leaves their flosser behind?

The answer is: plenty of people.

And the floss pick toss is by no means a new phenomenon.

Why, way back in 2014, when I didn’t even know such a thing could exist, Carlo Rotella – a far keener observer of urban mores than I - was writing about it in The Boston Globe.

You see them scattered singly on sidewalks and in gutters, nestled in the grass at the park, dumped in ashtray-like batches of two or three dozen in parking lots. Each time I see one, which is often, some part of me pauses to appreciate the advance they represent in the art of doing one small thing to make the world just a little bit worse for everyone.

I don’t spend much time in parking lots, so I haven’t seen batches of them. But the singletons are bad enough.

And it’s not just Boston.

Just last month, Philly Magazine asked the Big Question: Who is leaving flossers all over Philly sidewalks?

The Baker City (Oregon) Herald found it a worthy topic in 2017.

Beth Terry tries to lead a plastic-free life in Maryland, and she was writing about floss pick litter in 2010!

Then there’s this response to someone asking about them from a bulleting board (MetaFilter) in 2012:

FWIW, a friend of mine saw them so often she started a Facebook photo album and collected pictures of flossers on sidewalks. She was trying to get at least one photo from all fifty states.

If she started in 2012, I’m sure that this FB user has accomplished her goal by now.

But if you’re looking to add Massachusetts to your gallery, feel free to give me a shout.

In the meantime, eww, eww, ewwdie, eww, eww.