Touched down in blooming New England after a month on the road and immediately began to sneeze. I was barking before I was disembarking. It’s that time of year when I want to pluck my burning eyes from their sockets and plunge them into a Par Aide ball-washer on the ninth tee of some golf course. Except that stepping onto a golf course would kill me.

My face is swollen by pollen. (”Swollen” and “pollen” ought to rhyme, and not only because they look alike: They are partners in crime, in the way that “daughter” and “laughter” are.) I no longer find it interesting to sneeze six times in succession, though it still enlivens a drive on the interstate, when you’re left blind for the better part of ten seconds.

I can’t go out. I’m forced to eat in. Ponderosa has yet to engineer the salad-bar Sneeze-Guard that can contain the seltzer-bottle fury of my serial sneezing. So I’m staying at home, making a mental mix tape of songs that remind me of my allergies.

1. “Blinded by the Light,” by Bruce Springsteen or Manfred Mann’s Earth Band. “This very unpleasin’ sneezin’ and wheezin’” plays over and over in my congested head.

2. “Honky Tonk Women” by The Rolling Stones. If only for its evocative phrase, “She blew my nose and then she blew my mind.”

3. “Ask” by The Smiths. Because I know all about “spending warm summer days indoors . . .”

4. “Old Red Eyes Is Back” by The Beautiful South.

5. “Achoo” by Sparks. Though I must say the (Gesund)height of sneezing-inspired art is a book — “Elmo Says Ah-choo!” — in which Elmo’s Vesuvian sneezes blow the haircut off a businessman in a barber shop and knock down a pyramid of soup cans Bert has just meticulously stacked in a grocery store.

6. “I’m Only Happy When It Rains” by Garbage. And in fact it is raining right now and my sneezing has subsided substantially.

7. “The Pop Singer’s Fear of the Pollen Count” by The Divine Comedy.

8. “Walking With Mr. Wheeze” by Madness. It’s an instrumental, but one inspired, I imagine, by George Jefferson: Mr. Weezy.

9. “Five Ten Fiftyfold” by Cocteau Twins. Because it ends the way my life will: “Sneezing and wheezing and sneezing and sneezing and wheezing and sneezing and sneezing and wheezing and sneezing . . .”

Yesterday, on a long train ride into New York, I saw something I seldom see anymore, though perhaps I’m not looking in the right places. Or in the wrong places.

What I saw beside the tracks, for miles on end, was litter — in astonishing quantity and endless variety. There were, for starters, an infinite number of plastic soda and Gatorade bottles, some of which appeared to be the railroading relatives of those urine-filled Trucker Bombs found on the sides of freeways. (In a few short days in 1999, on a 67-mile stretch of I-5 in California, maintenance workers collected 350 gallons of urine, which ought to make you feel better about your job.)

Beside the rail line, heaved over fences protected by coiled razor wire, were mufflers, then tires, then entire car chassises. (I know: That can’t possibly be the plural of “chassis.) It was like some decrepit production line designed to assemble junk autos.

Flanking one mile-long stretch of track in New Rochelle, N.Y. — hometown of the Petrie family on “The Dick Van Dyke Show” — were dozens and dozens of sleeveless LPs, as if Frisbeed toward a passing train by some resourceful Bond villain named K-Tel.

I saw mateless socks and doorless fridges. I saw everything but the kitchen sink until, rolling into the outer boroughs of New York — as if the punchline to a private joke — I saw an actual kitchen sink.

I grew up in the waning moments of the Golden Age of Litter, before Adopt-a-Highway signs, when it was nothing to see — on the interstate, on a holiday weekend — families heaving their spent Burger King bags out the window of their station wagon at 75 miles an hour. That all changed, or began to change, when Cherokee actor Iron Eyes Cody shed a single tear in the Keep America Beautiful commercials. Soon, a guilt-tripping owl was urging our parents to Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute.

And so the litter — and the graffitied semi-trailers and warehouse walls passing out my window — made me strangely nostalgic, and not just because they called to mind the opening credits of “Kotter.”

Twelve hours after arriving there, I left Penn Station, stared out the train window and soon marveled anew at the mountains of litter. Traveling north, I was now looking at the other side of the tracks, but that hardly mattered: The litter was the same. Both sides of the tracks, it seemed, were the wrong side of the tracks.

I have a perverse admiration for businesses that brazenly screw their customers: The children’s zoo, for instance, that charges $8.99 for soda in a “novelty cup.” Unless you’re a child, there is nothing novel about most “novelties,” a word that means “new things” but has come to be synonymous with ancient arts — plastic vomit, joy buzzers and whoopee cushions.

The other day I was at a sweltering park in Florida that blithely charged $2 for bottled tap water and $7.25 for draft beer, and woe unto the palate that tried to tell the two apart. There are certain places we expect to get hosed — at amusement parks, naturally, and in movie theaters: The large popcorn is only 25 cents more because the small popcorn is already $5. While standing in line to buy four AA batteries in an airport, I look at the $20 bill in my trembling hand and wonder if it will be enough.

You have to hand it to hotels, too — and by “it” I mean your wallet. I write this in a hotel, on a wireless internet connection that is costing me $10 a day, though having access to e-mail in most business hotels would seem to be a necessity, like the shower or complimentary in-room rotary shoe buffer. Using the hotel bed does not incur a surcharge — unless it’s a coin-operated Magic Fingers vibrating bed, or you’re Eliot Spitzer, or both — so why should using the internet?

To be fair, many of these charges are Stupidity Taxes, tariffs imposed on those imbeciles who place phone calls through the hotel switchboard or eat cashews from the minibar; who buy golf balls in the pro shop or an umbrella in the rain in New York. They’re getting what they deserve.

There is no steeper Stupidity Tax than the Personal Seat License, a fee some football teams charge their season ticket holders for the right to sit in the seats they have already purchased. But then stadiums and arenas — more than hotels, even, or amusement parks — are the places we most expect to be screwed. Indeed, we demand it, which is why you’ve seen people surrender $14 for two beers and still stuff two singles in the concession-stand tip jar.

A “ballpark price” is a rough estimate, but I associate the phrase with breathtaking expense, as anyone who has ever paid $80 to park near Fenway can attest.

Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s late, and a $17 cheeseburger has just arrived at my door. I see from the receipt that an 18% “service charge” has been added, as well as a 10% “delivery charge.” Fortunately, they’ve also left a place for me to write in a very gratuitous “gratuity.”