Ah, the winter thaw has again revealed a telling reminder of who we really are. We’re talking, of course, about that early-season cousin of the mysterious phenomena known as crop circles, which in Bloomington and other pulsing college towns come in manifestations best described as crap circles.

Always present, often overlooked while literally stepped over, crap circles are most recognizable after snows melt and unveil windrows and rights-of-way full of rotting fast food packages, flattened beer cans, eroding news pages and soggy cigarette packs. Ever-vigilant and on-high from a neighboring tree is the freedom flag of refuse, the plastic grocery sack.

Crap circles border nearly every university, are most prevalent around the dreaded “suitcase” campus and are like skeletal remnants of our throw-away society.

A car door swings open on a windy day and an empty soda cup on the floorboard rolls out on the ground. Students kill beers and chain down cigarettes before pulling into the dorm, so two blocks out becomes a dumping zone. Must hurry, get to class. And so the crushed cigarette pack, the coffee cup top, the snack bar wrapper and cigarette butt all become incoming trash.

And then there are the tweakers who toss trash out of a car like a cat sand wedges out of an old litter box, with every piece of crap in their car jettisoned as recourse for a parking ticket or retaliation over a misplaced CD or anti-depressant bottle.

And so, crap circles are born, usually to be excised by tax dollars and maintenance workers, destined to reconstitute with the arrival of camouflaging winter drifts and winds that turn tree lines, creeks and roadsides into off-season transfer stations.

Indiana University has an amazing crap circle. Aged and well-honed with broken beer bottles and aluminum cans, retaining an edginess from round after round of fresh student newspaper and convenience store baggage, it marks the boundary between impersonal side streets and this-is-my-campus turf.

The crap circle is the wall between what one has to get through, like busy streets, harried parking and spilled coffee, and what one has to get to, like a chair to sleep in or a job to hate. The crap circle is where sinking ships jettison, where apathy stands sentry and where mission has wrested control from moral.

One way to fight the circle is to punish offenders with citations after citation for littering. But another, far beyond supplementary, is to make everybody ante up by recognizing that having someone else put aioli on your bread, carry out your trash or fill your glass with water is a luxury worth paying for. It’s time to ante up, free-baggers, by way of a restaurant tax.

Monroe County and Bloomington need a restaurant tax. Restaurants, drive-through food stops, carry-out delis are everywhere, and their plenty is in direct correlation to the number of humans living in spaces that do not have kitchens. Kitchenless humans and corporate food lockers make for the foundation of one great big crap circle.

Restaurants – be they drive-through, sit-down or carry-out – are high impact retail businesses. Customers drive and park, they use water, electricity, paper products and make trash, then they leave and are replaced by another cycle. No other retail business consistently consumes as much product and generates as much waste. No other retail business type exists in such number – there are about 90 alcohol-selling restaurants alone – in Monroe County and Bloomington.

Cities all over have 1 or 2 percent restaurant taxes, and this county and city are remiss for not generating revenue to minimize the impacts of these businesses. Overflowing dumpsters, grease dumpsters, unloading trucks blocking streets, high trash production, high employee turnover, low compensation packages are all symptoms of a retail model that takes advantage of public benefits.

Counties and cities in Indiana raise millions of dollars annually from food and beverage taxes. Marion County alone raised a record $22 million in 2005, albeit for a ridiculous, nearly billion-dollar dome for boys with balls.

Another $16.5 million was raised across the rest of the state that year from food and beverage levies. In Monroe County and Bloomington not a single dollar was raised specifically from the luxury of having someone else make your meal and your drink for you.

Any day now the local media will probably announce how much money all of the city’s top restaurants grossed in 2006, based mostly on liquor sales receipts and records.

Top grosser for the city-county in 2005 was, based on liquor records, the frozen flesh and wet air (aka light beer) factory known also as Texas Roadhouse. The flesh-house chain grossed over $3.8 million, which in restaurant tax money translates into $38,000 in new revenue for the city and county if a 1 percent food and beverage tax were invoked.

The revenue adds up pretty quick, maybe not as fast as trash in dumpsters or dirty plates in sinks, but quick enough to give city and county officials a new vocabulary when neighborhoods come back again and again asking for more bike lanes, or covered bike racks, or community garden sites, or a downtown trolley.

And maybe, by raising a little revenue from a source where demand will always be high, a miraculous weight might also be raised off the backs of this town’s citizenry. That’s right. The heavy weight to be lifted could well be that of the dreaded crap circle.

Steve Chaplin can be reached at sjchaplin@sbcglobal.net.