The Scary Grease Jar Monster

Over the weekend, out in Jamaica, Queens, the basements of around 300 homes were flooded by sewage water. According to this report, these people woke up to a foul smell and discovered their basements were pools of wet foulness after several interconnected pipes in the neighborhood failed -- all because some schmuck poured cooking grease down a drain.

For shame! Didn't their mothers teach them anything?

Growing up, whenever my mom cooked anything that produced a lot of grease, she was always very careful to pour it out of the pan and into a big jar. She told me, quite clearly, that you never poured grease down a drain because it could clog up the pipes and create plumbing problems. Since then, I have always poured it into a jar. As we saw out in Queens, mama was right.

Mama taught me well!

That said, I can understand why people cheat and pour it down a drain instead of going the jar route. Once you pour the grease into the jar, especially after you pour several different batches of grease into the same jar, the grease takes on a life of its own. This ... thing ... actually starts to tell a story. Used more than once, the grease starts to form into different geologic layers, different shades of foulness. There's the turkey grease! There's the bacon grease! That was for the pork roast! And so on and for forth. The grease jar is the yucky legacy of several tasty and unhealthy meals, several heart attacks avoided. Still, the grease jar is scary! 

You want to avoid it by all means necessary! 

And as a kid, the grease jar in the kitchen gave me nightmares. I was grossed out but also fascinated by this jar of cooking grease nastiness that would sit in our kitchen like some kind dangerous lab animal. As a kid with a wild imagination who had probably watched too many cartoons, I always imagined that the grease would come to life, blast its way out of the jar, and then eat my family alive. After all, the grease was a menace, it was being imprisoned in this jar because of its threat to the plumbing system so imagine what other horrors it could inflict! If this grease was endangering a whole apartment building's pipes, imagine what neat work it could make of one little boy? The grease would just sit there, quietly mocking me, its threat obvious to me if no one else.

So that, in short, is probably why this moron out in Queens poured it down the drain -- like me, this person was probably afraid of The Scary Grease Jar Monster.