On Garbage

The first bag of spring has appeared in my back yard. Its white luminescent skin emerges from the ground in a sickly shine with a yellow bow tied in the top like two dying flower petals. Its scent is of pizza crust and diapers. I expect it to breed soon and duplicate itself. It bulges with refuse, the corners and caps and baggies and boxes all jutting from its plastic shell in taught distress. I wonder how this will go.

Following McGrother and most of Wendell's other writing, I know and you know and on some level most of us know that we're wasters. We waste, squander, trash, fritter, discard, and generally prostitute ourselves to the cult of the disposable. This has so many cultural and generational roots that I’m pretty sure I’ve not sat down and thought it through as carefully as I should but oh well. I’ll shoot from the hip like I usually do.

The levels of waste vary. I waste time. I waste fuel. I waste light. I waste damn fine spring days. I waste nearly every product I buy. But this is mostly hearsay. I can’t really quantify my waste because I don’t deal with it. We’ve developed a system - one I am proudly in support of– called solid waste removal. Or in another idiom it’s called garbage day wherein a garbage man comes in the broad daylight of midmorning and smuggles my garbage from the garbage can and takes it to the garbage dump, a hill on the horizon, from which it never returns. This process involves no words, no money, no handshakes or eye winks. I don’t even have to say thanks and pat the garbage collector on the butt in a sportsman like display of affection. It’s almost magical in its simplicity, like skipping through a licorice forest shooting ferries with a shotgun. That would actually be way more fun but you get my point.  I have no concept of my garbage.

Now don’t misread me. Refuse has to be dealt with. It is, appropriately enough, a part of being human. But this completely sterile separation from our waste is disconcerting. I do nothing but dump it in a can and poof it disappears. This separation makes waste easy. In fact they’ve even gone so far as taking away the dump itself.

I remember growing up and my Dad would have a big load of garbage – construction debris or tree limbs or dead bodies or who knows what – and he would put the wood side walls on the old, yellow Datsun and load that thing till it sat on its axles, knitting rope about it like a spider weaving a web and we would head to the dump. Those were adventurous days at the dump. You’d pull up to the weigh shack and the guy would blow a cloud of smoke in your window from his cigarette and ask, City or county? I always worried that we’d answer the question wrong and he’d come after us with a lead pipe or send us into a no return zone where small pickups disappeared forever. Us city folk I think always felt proud saying City because it was an entitled answer. We were in the know and didn’t have to pay. Then the ex-carney would point up the hill where plastic bags tumbled like weeds in an old west movie and say, put it in A, with a guttural growl. Then we would drive up a hill of garbage, dodging nail spiked boards, massive ruts, and rabid seagulls and back between two small, insignificant orange cones with the letter A stapled to their side while a giant, junk smashing front loader with spiked wheels and man eating jaws crushed garbage mere inches from our frail bodies. Even now the thought of it causes a momentary bladder release. You were lucky to come off that hill alive, at least from the perspective of a ten year old.

Now the shack is air conditioned, the attendant (as he’s now called) shaven, the road paved and you just back up to a giant dumpster and take a dump. You don’t even see the hill or the fire breathing monster or risk bodily harm and flat tires or have anything to do with a landfill. What the hell! I can’t even dump my own garbage anymore. The refuse is refused of me. And so it goes.

We have made of the rivers and oceans and winds niggers to carry away our refuse, which we think we are too good to dispose of decently ourselves.

And big hills I might add. You may remember this quote from my post, The Unsettling of My Soul, or most likely you may not. However, I remembered it and that’s what really matters. It is only one of many times that Wendell names a waster. In my post on McGrother that was one of the man’s first traits. It’s a common thread throughout.

So because I’m impulsive and I have no concept of my own waste (Solid waste not sewer waste, I’m well acquainted with my sewer waste. Don’t ask.), I’ve decided to collect my own garbage for the month of March. It’s an experiment in quantity and kind. The first bag has been placed, pestilence and disease soon to follow. I’ll keep you posted.