Every work day I rode the train to work. This meant making the 20-minute walk to the station.
And while I loved the early morning stroll, Tuesday - the suburb's rubbish day - was my favourite. Castles of glass adorned the kerb. Brown, green, white and the occasional blue empties often constituted the majority of a household's weekly collection.
Despite spending years at university boozing, I was still astounded at the sheer size of these weekly glass pyramids built in honour of the gods of booze.
Albeit unscientific, the phenomenon is a tangible indication of how much this nation drinks.
In Hastings, these Tuesdays are now Wednesdays. Yet the scenario hasn't changed.
Each Wednesday morning, if you listen above the cacophony of mynahs, you can detect the glass section of a suburban orchestra.
I'm guilty of the occasional Wednesday kerbside mountain of my own. Yet I console myself by looking round and observing my mountain is not as mountainous as most. I find it's best not to compare.
When my parents' generation drank, most of the empties went to the kerb in a large brown paper bag. Neighbours were none the wiser.
These days, recycling has outed them all: the bingers, the vino connoisseurs, the beer session yobos, the occasional dabbler, cheap plonk drinkers and the helpless drunk.
The advent of recycling has threatened the alcoholics' long-standing cornerstone of anonymity.
Yet paradoxically, rubbish day is enabling. That is, drinking is fine as long as you recycle the empty vessels. I may booze, but at least I do so with a clear carbon conscience.
And if Wednesdays have made it difficult to be closet drunks, so too has drink-driving. We now have a standardised measure for booze - a Parliament-sanctioned calibration on how much is too much. Drink-driving publicity not only underscores how many drunk motorists we have, it also shows how many drunks we have.
This offence, combined with rubbish day, paints a disturbing picture.
It's why I find the acclaimed Ghost Chips anti-drink-driving TV advertisement a little dangerous.
You know the one: "Grab a chip. Want a chip?"
"You know I can't grab your ghost chips".
Its teen empathy has resonated with a nation. Its brilliance includes a thudding bass soundtrack, alluding to the boom-box of a souped-up car, about to depart.
Yet for all its admirable traits, it also says to teens that it's laudable ("legend") to get rat-faced so long as one doesn't drive.
For some reason the authorities have relinquished the "It's not the drinking, it's how we're drinking" stance, to adopt the fallback position seen in this advertisement.
Last time I looked, drink-driving was simply one of many social ills sparked by boozing. This weekend past (see story inside) Hastings police made 23 arrests in 24 hours for alcohol-related offending.
Now, this columnist is a Kiwi with Irish ancestry. So dare I say it, alcohol's in the blood. And I'll hasten to add that boozing's not a moral failure. Most of my university contemporaries who acted like idiots on the town, were idiots sober.
And though I can speak only for myself, I suspect many drink due to a quarrel with the status quo. A quest for the alternate. That altogether human search for otherness.
You don't have to look far for evidence. Kids in playgrounds, for example, who hang upside down from the monkey-bars for a different look at the world, or others who spin on a merry-go-round to attain dizziness.
Yet while I accept that, we must also teach temperance to those who drink past the point of no return. There's nothing "legend" about that.
With a new brief, I have every faith the marketing geniuses who brought us Ghost Chips can apply a broader stroke to come up with something that attacks the cause, not the symptom.
