ArcaMax

It's fall festival season, haunted house season, trunk-or-treat season. Amid the 50/50 raffles, soft pretzels, paper plate crafts and carnival rides with names like MAWS OF DEATH, we must steel for the greatest horror of all:

Commemorative plastic cups.

I've got more of these cups than an abandoned cabin has Jasons. My kitchen runneth over with baseball cups, Halloween Horror Nights cups, pastoral wine tasting cups, school fundraiser cups. I resent them on a sliding scale from "USF Alumni" to "French Quarter ghost tour."

Last weekend at our local fall festival, the well-meaning bartender rattled off a mathematical proposition. If we bought the plastic souvenir stein, it would save X dollars per X ounce on refills. We'd practically be making money when you thought about it. It might have been the same speech Bernie Madoff gave before, well, you know.

"It's a no-brainer," he said.

Oh, he was right about that. Because at this point, my brain slowly leaked out of my cabeza. How dare you utter riddles in a beer line? I barely made it through Algebra 2!

With a dozen dude-bros behind me itching for IPAs, time dilated into a flurry of ethical, practical and financial considerations:

This is a fundraiser.

Stop being weird.

It's for the children.

You can't say no.

You can say no! You can say no to anything! Being overly pliable in the face of conflict leads to apathy, which leads to global anarchy!

What?

Plastic steins are the worst of all souvenir cups. How am I supposed to wedge these ridged handles into the cabinet with the cups from the sunflower farm in rural Florida and the Britney Spears Piece of Me Las Vegas residency? This presents a geometry problem, and now I'm doing math again.

The reusable cup is better for the environment.

I will save this cup out of obligation for three years before chucking it into a box for charity at which point it will end up discarded and polluting the shores of a developing nation.

What are we supposed to do, drink out of a shared trough?

Buying the cup will save money on the second beer.

I don't even want a second beer. I'm going to chug this giant ale too fast just to get the second giant beer in order to recoup the savings Tyler here has laid out. Then I'm going to wake up in a sweat at 4 a.m. after dreaming of being chased by an army of vengeful collectible cups. I'll fumble for my phone and check my bank balance and google "microplastics reusable cups vs. disposable" before mainlining water from a color-changing souvenir Kona Ice cup and falling back into darkness.

All roads lead there. Into the unyielding dark.

"Yes, we'll take the cups."

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Stephanie Hayes is a columnist at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. Follow her at @stephhayes on X or @stephrhayes on Instagram.

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